Actually, I like the name. “Vista.” Beautiful. Euphonious. What I hate is that Windows Vista has a name at all.
Answer me this: how many of you spent the last five years pining away for a new operating system? Okay, put your hand down, you in the back. Now: how many of you have been waiting for an improved version of your old operating system? Hmmm… just as I thought. What most of us really wanted was “Windows XP 2.0″ — not “WholeNewOS 1.0,” with a whole new set of 1.0 teething problems, a whole new set of (1001) annoyances, and a whole new learning curve.
The transition from Windows 2000 to Windows XP was close to ideal: smooth, gentle, logical. Every tweak an obvious improvement, and no changes made for no reason. Of course, earlier transitions were more disruptive: Win9x to WinNT, for example. But there was more that needed fixing back then. We needed to make the leap to a true 32-bit protected-mode OS, and that step was going to be a big one no matter what. (Ask former Mac OS 9 users, who are probably still updating some of their apps for OS X.) But going further back, the shift from Win 3.x to Win98 was again a reasonable one.
Not so with Windows Vista. WinXP is a very good OS, yet Vista changes stuff that didn’t need changing, in drastic ways, and mostly for no good reason. (Or not good enough, anyway.) It’s like Microsoft decided on the Vista name, fell in love with it, then felt it had to create a product that could justify the dramatic new moniker. Almost like the marketing department got to trump the programming department. Could it be…?
