Well maybe microsoft is commming to an end ... or maybe not . atleast i hope they fix alot of issues asap:)

I sincerely hope that this giant can withstand all these potential drawbacks especially the ones coming from Windows Vista. This indeed is one place where Microsoft should focus on considering that their primary income comes from the Windows OS suite followed by their other stuff.

Vista will be the WinME of the NT line. Abandoned in the woods to die when Win 7 comes along. Vista is a cash infusion so MS can survive.

"Hard times will make a monkey eat red peppers."
--Jimmie E. Cascade

=St.A

Hey I don't think that you 'get it'.

If there is disagreement at Microsoft-- THAT IS A GOOD THING.

I know first hand that the main thing that MicroSoft does wrong.. is that they fire people with a different of opinion.

Honestly.

If someone comes in and complains about BUG X.. Instead of _FIXING_BUGS_ they just fire people with the audacity to disrespect MS by having a different opinion.

I don't understand how you think that 'having different opinions at MS' is a _BAD_ thing.

It's a good thing.

Yes; there should be a lot more transparency about it.

But having disagreements is _GOOD_ not _BAD_.

-Aaron

I doubt that MS is coming to an end, but it's never (ever) in the long term interest of a company to be driven solely by sales and marketing types. If that's the case MS is in for a long slow and very painful decline. When no-one is able to look past one quarter, the longterm future becomes quite bleak

Vista is Dead...Waste of space and Time.

After one year of using it, I am going back to Windows XP Pro...and may even have to rollback to IBM OS/2, which is where Windows NT, et al, was stolen from to begin with.

Bill Gates was never a programmer, but at least had salesmanship. Steve Balmer is/has neither.

Neese

Of course, Gates was a programmer!

He wrote MS BASIC for the Altair 8800, which is how he came to the notice of IBM in the first place, and the rest is history.

I hope they do have a slow and painful decline. I've been calling them Microsloth for years anyway.

Good Riddance Bill Gates and the rest of them. "Oh they did great for the world, blah, blah, blah..." Yeah, by charging people hundreds of dollars for Office and OS. The SW should not cost more than the PC it runs on. I'd hate to be working at a company like that, slaving away while the few lucky ones that started the cash cow SW rake in billions. All these Billionaires should help the economy by putting most of their money back into the systems they stole from in the first place. Oh goody, BG is great friends with one of those others who steal money from millions - Warren Buffet. Let's just celebrate them all while our infrastructures and countries fall apart. MAybe their heirs can go to another planet and start their own super society while the earth boils away.

Oh - my 12 year old niece could write basic in ML - who cares. Probably the last piece of code he ever wrote or understood. Then he bought DOS from that guy and sold it to IBM and has been buying everything ever since.

From Joe Wilcox's notes: "Microsoft's evolving management structure [now] puts sales and marketing people at the top of the Microsoft organizational pyramid. Several reorganizations pushed aside or put to pasture many high-level, hard-core technology managers and replaced them with sales and marketing folks."

Isn't this what IBM did when it faltered. The stupidity is when you don't learn from similar mistakes, even those of others.

Vista's error reporting capabilities are actually superior than XP. Two examples are: you can check past reports and re-submit them (not possible in XP) and reliable recovery from fatal process terminations that in the past resulted in no dump being saved.

The fact that Vista doesn't record a dump by default is not a big deal -- for high frequency bugs, the Watson servers will ask for a dump. And as you note, the registry can be changed to record all dumps. Even in this case, Vista is better since XP would only keep the *most recent* dump - Vista records all of them.

I've had to go to dual boot now. Some applications that I'm using are not updating XP any longer and only Vista (unfortunately); mainly my audio software drivers and applications. Google explorer hangs + vista 64 and you'll see exactly why I had to dual boot my environment. Russinovich knows about this too. There is a bug that causes some 64 bit users to wait countless minutes with the hour glass until VISTA64 finally "unfreezes" everything to play catch up. My system is 6 months old with 16 GIGS (yes you read it correctly GIGS) of memory (required by my occupation) and VISTA 64 brings it to its knees (no errors in the event viewer either).

Pathetic.

Quoting MNeese: After one year of using it, I am going back to Windows XP Pro...and may even have to rollback to IBM OS/2, which is where Windows NT, et al, was stolen from to begin with.

Utter nonsense. NT was not "stolen" from OS/2, it was based heavily around DECs excellent VMS operating system for Vax & Alpha machines. At least one VMS project manager sculpted NT from the ground up, and insisted that MS keep it true to its roots.

Vista is a far more serious problem for MS than WinME ever was. ME was just the last gasp of non-NT Windows 4, it wasn't an entirely new NT line the way Vista (Windows NT v6) is. MS aren't doing themselves any favours by openly being the butt of everyone's jokes, including those of their own staff. Not good company practice.

Having said that, I actually got around to playing with Vista Ultimate the other day and couldn't help but wondering what all the fuss is about? Granted, releasing an OS with flaws as significant as slower file copying than its predecessor is inexcusable, and as a coder myself I know I would never get away with that. Having said that, the UAC security system is exactly what NT has needed for a long time now. Ditto the graphics driver quarantine. 3D accelerated front end, although eye-candy, is long overdue also.

If MS ever getting around to truly fixing it, say in SP2 (which SP1 should have already taken care of but didn't), then I think we could be looking at a truly great OS. Unfortunately, as with a lot of MS software lately, the design is great in principle but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps this is another indication of marketing men pulling all the strings instead of technical managers?

MSFT did with Vistaster what it has done with most of its recent products: not give a damn about the user experience, shovel in many superfluous "features" and waste $billions. This is the same story as SPOT, Xbox, WinMobile (ever wonder why there is no WinMobile "Killer"), Zune, Live Search, etc.

All of them are dazzlingly mediocre. All offer nothing special.

In the final analysis, MSFT's efforts over the past five years have been thudding failures.

This explains, in large part, why the MSFT stock price is lower than five years ago. Simply put, Gates, Ballmer, Turner, Bach and Ozzie are failures when it comes to shareholder value. All of them should be replaced; all have squandered $billions with nothing to show for it. It is long past due to clean out this boatload of failures.

The biggest reason everybody is upset with Vista is cause they've gotten so used to XP. XP was a great operating system, but when it first came out, I remember it having all kinds of incompatibility issues that weren't fixed until SP2. I personally hated how everything was uber "user friendly". I used 98 until 2003 just because I could run it like a king. When I finally switched over (cause half the programs wouldn't run on 98) they had all the bugs fixed (for the most part) and I've been happy with it. I skipped right over Win2000 and many people will prob do the same with Vista. But I've put Vista Ultamite on a p4 1.2ghz box with only 512mb and an Geforce 4 (MX) and had no problems running anything. (I didn't get Aero, big whoop there) and the only driver I had to go find was for the ethernet card. With XP I had to go FIND all the drivers. It only ran a little slower on applications that took more than 128megs (which was most) but all my games ran at the same fps.
Microsoft has made more millionaires than any other company in the us. They spend ridiculous amounts of money on research that doesn't have a direct payback for them. The Gates foundation is the biggest charity in the US and often gives money to help low profile issues that many other charities overlook. Microsoft is a bloated company, and their coding teams often suck pretty bad. But so what, they are an icon in the industry. They've done more to shape the computer industry than maybe any other company. I don't love Microsoft. But too many people just like to have something to hate. Hate the government, hate big business, hate capitolism, hate school system, hate wal-mart, hate china, hate america, blah-blah-blah. We'd be living in the dark ages. Stupid!

While the author makes certain assertions in this article that Microsoft is full of social fractures, the evidence given doesn't support the notion.
There may well be deep fractures between the Microsoft strata, but hearing a couple of tech groups snipe one another and some quips by a tech guru internal to Microsoft aren't enough to come to such a conclusion.

At all companies I've worked for, there are always people within a given group willing to badmouth another group for one of many possible reasons. In most cases, these voices are rendered powerless by either the overall corporate culture or the cowardice of those complaining, which means bitch sessions become masturbatory exercises and are of little or no help to any but the one complaining.

If Mr. Hickins is going to try to identify "problems" within the Microsoft fold (which I'm sure exist), then maybe support beyond anecdote and a fellow eWeek reporter are in order.

Dig deeper to find out why Steve Balmer is such an utter failure as a leader, which may lead to more support to the claim that severe internal fractures exist.

Despite my post, I do enjoy this column quite often. I just feel journalists become self-serving pundits if sources, or the existence of sources, are not cited, and opinion is posing as fact.

MS should offer a "Vista-Fix Tool" which optimzies somes of Vistas bad behavoires, as with the dump files or stopping some services to poll for anything.

I really cant believe that Vista is so lame. Yesterday I had the first BSODs on Vista64. :-(

Microsoft is history - hooray! the guard will change. Can't wait till Google falls down too. It will be cool to see some new companies takeover. I think everyone is underestimating Apple. The iPhone 3 will kill the laptop - which will spell death for Vista Windows and portable DVD's. I hate Apple, I am a diehard SQL server guy. But I am forcing myself to change as well.

Zeke has a great point. When XP first came out, I distinctly remember everyone whinging about the bugs too, but because it had a radically new look and feel, everyone kinda warmed to it. Vista will (hopefully) be similarly refined over time.

Having said that, I've been having some serious performance issues on my laptop (that came shipped with Vista Home Premium) and I'm dual-booting with Ubuntu as a remedy.

Also, the comments about Microsoft possibly not being creative or cutting edge enough are interesting - whilst this is definately true of Vista in some regards, Office 2007 was/is incredibly innovative and an overall great office sweet. I think they're on the money there.

Very nice, informative article. Kudos! I got the impression that Mark Russinovich had sold out to MS when he left SysInternals, but apparently that is far from the case. He's not only a technical guru where Winblows is concerned, but a rebel. :-)

Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.
Are you just trying to drive traffic to your site with this misinformation?

I'm by no means a Vista apologist, but this article is misleading. I was at the very same session at Tech-Ed, and it went similar to most of his other sessions at previous TechEd's. He makes them light and humorous, which is why he is a good presenter, as well as technical expert. If he were to sit up there and rave about Vista, people would balk. We all know it has warts (or rather open wounds), and he loses credibility if he denies it.

> "But with Vista, the crash file is dumped unless the Watson servers request the OS to save the data, Russinovich remarked a little tartly."

He also remarked about the crash dump dialog box in XP and how you have to click 2 buttons to get to "the useless information". His point being that hardly anyone ever looks at these crash dumps. C'mon, as an IT admin, when is the last time you popped open a crash dump? Vista, by default, makes it harder to get at these dumps that "no one looks at". Or, you can configure (you called it a workaround, when it is in fact a simple configuration change) Vista to write crash dumps (as you mentioned).

> "IT pros may now have a way around this particular issue, but that's cold comfort to customers wondering how closely to wed their fortunes to Microsoft in the post-Gates era that is about to begin."

What?!? Did I read that right? Did you just use the fact that obtaining crash dumps is more tedious by default as evidence of customer's concern over Vista in a post-Gates era? These 2 things are not related.

You know, Google Desktop crashed on my home pc the other day, could this be a sign that investor's are losing faith in Google's future potential earnings? By the author's logic, absolutely.

Frankly, this post is poorly researched, and makes numerous assertions without facts. You are basing your assertions on pure conjecture. In fact, as evidence you referenced an 18-month old article from another blogger whose only cited source is a market researcher.

I'm sorry, I'm just not buying any of your assertions, because you failed to provide any actual evidence.

Concept9903--I have to tell you--you didn't "read that right." What I said is that the strains within the Microsoft corporate fabric are an issue that customers should consider, especially as Bill Gates rides off into the sunset.
To take the Google example you tried to use against me, let me say that if Google's apps caused your PC to crash on a regular basis, Google's shareholders might have something to worry about.
The fact is that Google's apps don't make PCs crash, but Mark Russinovich's jabs at Vista are symptomatic of a bigger problem. And I say that from the perspective of having visited Microsoft's campus and having met with dozens of Microsoft executives (and some former executives as well).

Give me leopard :)