Vista's features are stable as a New Orleans Hurricaine and the embezzling,
money hemorrhaging buying themselves IPODs on public money Homeland Security
clowns that haven't gotten a handle on the next one or terrorism. I have
seen "the UI rocks kind of mentality" from the Beta 'cheerleader PR flacks'
countless times --everything rocks for them. It's as if Vista were just one
purple passion fraternity party from start to finish.
I've seen it on the marketing for public consumption so called "Vista team
blogs" as if the public is so stupid that they think there is one Vista team
kind of likewhat you see shooting layups before an NBA game when there are
actually scores of Vista teams with very non-intuitve names that you'd only
get right if they were ID'd to you or you had the list of them.
Everything "rocks" in that world which has little relevance to what's really
under the hood or the state of Vista right now. There is a similarity in the
US Congress and Redmond MSFT that believes the public is just plain stupid
and will swallow anything they sputter out.
Customers like you are a dream for Redmond. They gush at the site of the
cute little Windows logo no matter what's inside under the hood Lenny.
What is going to be called a Release Candidate is not anwhere near the
quality of a release candidate--it sure as hell won't be of the caliber that
it should be releasable or near relese. And sadly, a signigicant percent
of TBT's are oblivious to the bugs. They don't care. Their mission is to be
using the latest newest so their friends can experience Windoz envy. Many
of them don't actually test for the bugs--they just want a little swag and
the free copy of Vista at the end no matter what kind of crap gets slapped
onto that RTM DVD. You can see them whining like any 3 year old in the car
whose cranky and tired all the time "Can we have another build please
Mommy?"
I have the RC's from Windows XP on CD Lenny, and I loaded them and played
with them again. RC1 and RC2 in XP are both more stable than RC1 is going to
be. Some bugs get resolved, and every build a whole crop of significant new
ones appears.
How many times have you run SFC? Which switches actually work? Do me a
favor and type cmd in run box>sfc /scannow at the cmd prompt or just type
sfc /purgecache in run then sfc /scannow in the run box.
The automatic repair feature is an excellent idea. The problem is that it
doesn't work a high percent of the time.
How are the toolbar icons bouncing around in Win Mail? Do you have to hit
the folder button to switch fromthe list of groups to a group's headings or
do you have an X?
Ever see the explorer shell break?
A lot of us have seen these--they've been bugged and bugged and the bugs
have the congenital stability of a pandemic flu. The bugs have been dealt
with about as well as the US has dealt with pandemic flu. Head in
sand--bureaucratic hack in charge of HHS.
It's closing in on dry cement time at Redmond and a lot of teams are going
nuts trying to meet deadlines and they are literally slapping stuff together
with a compromise in quality.
Vista's code is more complex than XP and it simply needs more time from
these teams to be stabilized and polished than the framework of RTM as early
as October/November. Between Enterprise RTM and unwashed masses RTM there
is not jack that's going to happen to change the finish product. MSFT has
long ago gotten into the mindset "screw the loose non-functioning way beyond
minor bug ends" we'll just push it out and fix it in the next SP. Plenty of
stuff has been deferred as far back as months ago into the next SP. I have
the quotes from the team members my friend. Maybe you need to reread some
chats or some newsgroups.
The only reason that MSFT won't make the bugs public that have been fixed,
will be fixed, won't be fixed, may be fixed is they don't want to reveal
precisely what I'm saying and the links from some very stellar Windows users
have been saying. There can be no other. Steve Jobs is not going to take
those bugs and change anything that has a big cat's name on it. He might
make a commercial out of it when it RTM's though. I sure as hell would.
Did it occur to you that there is a connection between some of the major
deck chair shuffling taking place now by Sinofsky's lieutenants and the
massive amount of work that needs to be done on Vista? Whether his "trains
on time/military rigidity office homies will make Windows better is really
up in the air. A number of good features have never been included in Office
that have been requested by different Office MVPs for years because it was
felt the public would find them too complicated and it had to remain dumbed
down for Sinofsky's perception of the public.
It is exactly as I've said all along and the bloggers I linked are saying.
It is true that many many bugs are being closed as "by design with hardly
(if any) any comprehensive effort to work up the bugs like a medical
problem--taking their history, diagnosing them and fixing them. I believe
the way System Restore is being handled on a dual boot is that kind of a
problem. It could have been fixed so that restore points were not lost when
the user went to the XP boot. The reaction has been a "so what"--that's the
way it is with no real clear explanation from the SR team. And I've read
everything that Colin has written and everything if not more that Colin has
read anywhere on that problem.
Any redeployment of devs (and actually on some days PMs were asked to take
phone calls during some of the virus outbreaks a couple years ago) has
nothing to do with any excuse for Vista or what kind of undertaking Vista is
nor should it ever. I'm looking at all the features in Vista and I know how
many builds there have been. So do all the people who wrote my links.
Drivers are hardly starting to zero in in a lot of categories. Many of the
driver manufacturers are going to drag their ass until after RTM. That's the
way it always is, and that's the way it is here. I don't know what
newsgroups you're monitoring but that's not what any of them reflect--closed
or public. Google for vista forums and you'll see the same thing. Read
some of the better hardware forums. Application compatibility is horrible
in some areas.
The auto restart/recovery feature in Vista doesn't work 50% or greater of
the time.
Win RE is a good concept, but it doesn't work much of the time and I sadly
concluded after testing it scores of times that a repair install in Windows
XP which is really an Uber SFC from the CD is infinitely more reliable than
Win RE.
I questioned the leads on the device team extensively and they really have
no excuse for the sorry state of Device Manager which since Win 95 and
through Vista Device Manager has never been accurate as to driver health
even though it purports to be. I wish I had a nickle for the hundreds ot
times I've seen drivers corrupted when Device Manager proclaims that they
are "working properly." The PMS and leads on the device team admitted this
to me, and they also said when questioned this will not be fixed in
Vista--that they are looking to Blackcomb/Vienna to fix this and there is
simply no excuse for that. This is something that they weren't about to
volunteer until pressed.
That's not "exotic sexy way cool avant garde Vista rocks" technology--that's
a basic staple of Windows that has not worked since Windows 95 and is not
going to be working in Vista. We're talking about 14 years if you consider
the complete Windows 95 development cycle, and however many years 4-6 it
will take for the next OS to crank up.
Bug fixes aren't starting to ramp up. They are just closing bugs as "by
design" with the same frequency if not more frequency. A ton of people have
no idea why their bugs were closed.
Too much is being shoved under the rug; too many things are conveniently put
in the category "will fix by SP1 or SP2 when they have no clue they'll get
this done, and many things are being shoved aside in hopes they might showup
in future server versions.
I believe you should take a close look at some of these links and then take
a look at your box with Vista 5472.5 on it.
Chris was blogging on Beta 2 (5384) and sent these to Jim Allchin after he
interviewed him and Allchin suggested it, but most of these persist in
5472.5.
http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/05/28/65-more-windows-vista-mistakes/
http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/05/24/windows-vista-feedback/
Also check out these--one is from a longtime MSFT employee who was far and
away their most famous blogger and a m,ember of the Channel 9 MSDN team. He
was a VP MVP as well. One is from Ed Bott who is writing one of the
definitive Vista Books for MSFT Press Vista Inside Out which is pushing the
million pre-sales range (not due out until December or later if hopefully
MSFT gets some sense and holds up Vista to fix a number of things properly.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735622701/102-3215667-3228953?n=283155
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=1398
http://news.com.com/2061-11199_3-6100866.html
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/
http://www.longhornblogs.com/
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/07/31/mclaws-is-right-on-windows-vista-ship-date/
CH
