After my earlier post on Vista being rather mediocre, Rick Mogstad decided that he wanted to have a RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE with yours truly!  As Rick does not know me too well, he has not learned one of the cardinal rules of Justice Gray: I am pretty much infallible and flawless in my thought process when it comes to *any* subject.  Rick's comment follows:

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First off, way to not get into a huge debate about it.... ;)

The average user may not think they care about the under-the-hood features, but they care about the effects of them, much the same way that I don't care why my car gets better gas mileage than an SUV, only that it does.

If the under-the-hood features were missing, people would complain about them, even indirectly. How many people complain about how insecure Windows is? Do they care why it's insecure? No, but they do care that it is.

It isn't that I don't care about the average user, but I maintain that they are stupid (In the context of properly using their computer/software). The funny thing is that they actually know they're stupid, and want you to protect them from themselves. If you don't, they will complain and ask why it is that you let them do such stupid things and screw things up....("You should have warned me....!"). How many "average" users do you know who would click on the EXE that "you" send them with the subject line "Hey, check this out!"? I would guess more than a few....

I know that these things won't sell an OS to an average user, but the average user looks to their friend/family member/local tech store for advice, and those are the people who need to know what the big deal is about Vista. They are the ones that need to explain to the users that even beyond the UI, Vista really does have a lot of good things for them, even if they wont ever see them.

So, if you are disappointed, I will ask you too. What did you expect? What features are you missing, that you expected to be there (from an average user point of view)? What features in XP (from an average user point of view), warrant the upgrade from Win98/2000? What features do you think *should* be there so that users would find value in upgrading to Vista?

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XP - much easier on the driver installations than before.  
Flashier than win2000 by far, and miles ahead of ME.
More stable than Windows 98.

This last statement in particular looks a bit hypocritical.  After all, how is "better stability" a good reason to upgrade to XP but *not* for Vista?  It's all in the perception.  Let's say that I hire Donald as a programmer for my company.  Donald  is a less than stellar employee who somehow manages to break our build once a day.  On top of this, Donald somehow manages to screw up the build system so badly that we end up having to completely redo the build machine itself every time Donald breaks the build.   After hemorrhaging money for a year or two, we fire Donald and replace him with a bright young fellow named Steven.  In contrast to Donald, Steven only breaks the build maybe once or twice every two weeks, and even then, we don't have to redo the build machine in order to fix Steve's changes.  For us at the company, this is a *massive* improvement.  Steve is promoted and we give him a suitcase full of cocaine and a legion of cheap hookers.  Corporate restructuring leads to Steve being let go from the company.  Cheryl is even better with the builds; build breaks only happen perhaps once a month *if* that at this point.  However, while Cheryl is slightly easier on the eyes than Steve, she's also *much* harder to have a conversation with and she constantly wants to do things her way.   Sure, she's a little bit better at the build than Steve, but it's not like we had a serious problem with Steve the same way we did with Donald.  Many in the company ask why we had to replace Steve in the first place.

I have just described the operating system upgrade experience from Win 98 to Win XP to Win Vista.

WinXP had several things going for it at the time:
* the last home release, ME, was such an unmitigated disaster that everyone was hungry for something new
* Win98 was somewhat finicky re: drivers and crashing
* was not susceptible to the same plague of viruses that Win2K was

Windows XP wasn't exactly revolutionary either, but it was replacing something with serious problems and was a *massive* and *obvious* improvement to the end user.  Does Vista *really* have the same quantum leap of quality over XP that XP has compared to 98/ME?  I just can't see it.  That's my big problem with Vista: the differences are definitely not obvious to an end user at all.  Okay, you get less viruses?  Less spyware infections?  I guess that's great, but you could have pretty much just called it Windows XP Service Pack 3 in that case.

It's good that Rick asked about what features I thought Vista should have to appeal to the end user.  All of the features I would have thought were revolutionary were features that were chopped out of Vista's release.  WinFS and the ability to tag your file system, I feel, would have completely changed the way we do computing.  Being able to tag your files the same way I do a link on deli.cio.us?  *That* would have been astounding and something the end user would have gotten an immediate benefit from.  Admittedly, the PC-to-PC sychronization feature is *amazing* and I think that the users will...oh wait, that got cut as well. 

Where are the features that get people talking to each other about how they need to upgrade?  Where is the excitement and the *passion* that should be generated, not just from software developers, but from the average person on the street?  It's like WinFS and PC-to-PC synchronization - it's just not there yet.

To be fair, my comments about Vista are not part of some religious war between the Mac and Windows; I like OSX, but I don't base my person on the operating system I use.  I do have Vista on my Mac and it's not that bad...it's just not that amazing either.  It's strictly an "Eh" with me - it's not a "Wow" just because Microsoft tells me it is; it needs to be a "Wow" because it's something I feel inside. Yes, I know it's a "Wow" with D'Arcy Lussier, but D'Arcy lives in Winnipeg where the idea of *indoor plumbing* would be considered world-changing.  In that sense, *that* is how Vista is a failure.  It's not a failure as an operating system - it performs that job competently enough.  But Vista fails to excite me, Vista fails to be anything that I can yell and scream about, and thus Vista is a failure as a *revolutionary* operating system.  Honestly, I want to be convinced.  Show me what it is I'm missing!

BTW, Inkball doesn't count.