We've talked quite a bit about love affairs in the last little while, including EDMUG's with Jean Paul Boodhoo, Steve Rockarts' with communism, mine with my wife, or Hasbro with marketing incompetency.  But for the end of Valentine's week, I wanted to briefly touch on the misplaced affection that some software developers seem to have with Windows Vista.

This all began with some other posts by Robert May where he made the statement that Vista was hardly revolutionary to the average user.  He brought up what I thought were *excellent* points, including:

"The users don’t give a rat’s rear end about what they can’t see.  They just want it to work."

"You should have a more user centric view of the world.  In general, software isn’t for the developers, it’s for the users.  Calling the users stupid serves little purpose other than demonstrating your lack of concern for your customer."

As you can imagine, many developers lined up for an impassioned defense of their lover, best friend, and dominatrix, Windows Vista.  Jason Olson commented:

"Seriously, you don't think there are revolutionary features in Windows Vista? How about Transactional NTFS? First fully ACID transactionally-aware OS in a major operating system. Then you add in the stability that this can bring when developers leverage it (and even the fact that our internal teams like Windows Update are using it), that's a big one. How about IIS7, more specifically Windows Activation Service and what that provides for WCF Services? I digress though as I'm starting to delve more into server features."

I then replied,
"Not that I want to get into a huge debate about it, but how much of what you have talked about is relevant from an end-user perspective (one who does no programming or server maintenance)? That's where I think Vista falls down. "

The heroic Rick Mogstad then leapt to Vista's defense:

"Unless an end-user decides not to use any software except for the OS, it has everything to do with the end-user."

Rick seems to be under the impression that people like my mother phone me excitedly to tell me about how transactional NTFS and IIS7 are going to *change the way* they surf the net for Food Network recipes *forever*.   Those sorts of people are much like the user-centric improvements in Windows Vista; they exist in fairy tales and imaginary thoughts.  


I continued to read Rick's other comments and then his own follow-up post.  If there's one thing that I was convinced about after reading his thoughts, it's that Rick must be a terrible amount of fun at parties.  If there is a second thing I am convinced of, it would be that Rick is *very* excited and passionate about all the wonderful under-the-hood features that Vista has.  Myself, I'd be thinking that the average user probably doesn't care about these things.  Fortunately, Rick counters that because he doesn't actually care about the average user.  In response to Robert's "The users don’t give a rat’s rear end about what they can’t see.  They just want it to work." Rick declares (actual quote) "That's because they are stupid.  Are you stupid too?"  I sincerely hope Rick doesn't have to try the "if you don't care about what's underneath, you're retarded" argument when he's out on dates.  

Rick does point out in his post that he is also excited about the fact Vista guards against retarded users screwing things up.  Sure, I agree that having more security is a good thing; I just don't think it should be the prime selling point of your "revolutionary" operating system.  I can see it now: "Windows Vista - now protecting you from your own stupidity".  This message makes about as much sense as the concept of robots that transform into rocks, and would probably sell just as well if it were not coming pre-installed on new computers.

Vista is not terrible by any stretch of the imagination, and I like using it - it just comes across as ho-hum.  Sure, there are some cool things in there.  That 3D enhanced Solitare?  *Amazing*.  And let's not forget Inkball, the World of Warcraft killer!   In fact, I will bet good money that the most users know more about those two games above than either transactional NTFS *or* IIS7.  

For a non-technical home user, I don't know of a compelling reason to upgrade to Vista unless you really like 3D window flipping.  Heck, Microsoft's own marketing department doesn't seem to know either, if you read Jay Kimble's dissection.  Okay, now 30 year old men can view animated thumbnails of their Dora the Explorer movie collections.  But doesn't Microsoft want to sell their OS to more than just D'Arcy Lussier?