Vista Failure Log.

Journal twitter's Journal: Vista Failure Log. 16

Journal by twitter on Saturday July 28, 2007 @10:15PM

Vista has failed [officialy] and M$ may soon go out of business. This is a list of failure and rejection news, written as it happened. Here is what Vista looks like to me. This is what it looks like to xkcd and having seen the single line of blinking text that Vista reduced a friend's computer to, I can agree. Vista is such a flop it can take M$ down, which would put an end to their attacks on free software, free software advocates and reasonable standards. Vista's failure is the predicted, practical result of a business model that tries to keep customers helpless and divided. Renaming Vista 6.1 to Windows 7 won't save it.

Most ammusing failure, 12/08/2008, Stephen Fry just wants one copy of Vista that works:

I hate Vista so much I want to cry. Bought a Vaio. The most useless $4k ever spent. It just will not join a sec-enabled network. ... I have nine macs!!!!!! I don't need another fucking mac. I just want ONE ARSING PC that isn't complete SHIT. ... Too late. It's going out the window. I can't put up with this sort of arse. Listemn I have parallels, I have fusion, I have 2 distros of Linux. I need jsut one, just 1 of cunting Vista so that I can review things. Forgive intemperate language, but every time I buy a PC they're worse, not better than they were before and it make me so angry I could kill. ... I've calmed down now. Vista and PCs are so crap it's funny

Here's a more technical discussion of the same problems.

The six year development was troubled and expensive. There were signs that nothing important had changed. Promissed features evaporated and those that came through were downright creepy.

2002 - Amazing promotion video shows features and performance on mockups.
January 1, 2004 - Jim Allichin sees the future failure, "LH is a pig and I don't see any solution to this problem."
July 9, 2004 - Vista troubles go public, rebuild is promissed but never delivered as is clear from legacy bugs.
March 26, 2006 - M$ Employees Revolt over delays.
April 1, 2006 - "Vista Capable" hardware hits store shelves, billions dollars of equipment that won't work will be sold. No one wants credit for the decision.
November 2006 - Microsoft primes their PR lie machine of analysts and reporters. Garner is taught "not to bash Vista" and how to hype the success of the soon to flop OS. Reporters are called naive and fed stories.
A buggy launch was insured and hardware doomed because XP driver compatibility was intentionally broken just before RTM.
January 30, 2007 - Vista is officially released. Jim Allchin retires.

Then came real use and real problems for users: security problems, devices not working, features dropped, competitors run off and high costs.

Forget dual booting. If you did manage to get it working GNU/Linux working along side Vista, SP1 will break it and perhaps brick your system.
An objective study of the Vista UI shows the changes have made things worse, not better for users who make it past install, broken software and hardware. Users vastly prefer KDE 4.
Basic operations are broken. Expect 30 minute boot time at work. Predictably, power management does not work, so you boot daily as always. File copy takes forever and may fail because it can consume all of your memory and force a reboot. Vista eats hard drives and makes SSD impossible. IPv6 does not work and Vista network problems may take down your wifi access point, a problem shared by XP SP3.
M$ considers network degradation for media protection normal, so network performance is about 10% of what you get from XP or anything else.
Insane anti-piracy harms the innocent. An anti-piracy server accidently disabled the nicer parts and required all XP and Vista users to "reauthenticate". Just a few weeks later, M$ made things even worse with a new BSoD for "pirates". They backpedaled a little and now Vista is nagware instead of deadware. The system remains a booby trap. So much as changing a video card will disable your system without warning. People with cracked coppies laugh but M$ can pull the plug for anyone else anytime for any reason. Events in China show that "pirates" get black screens of death too.
Despite promises, business as usual has not improved security. New problems have been added to the seemingly endless supply of legacy bugs. There are reports of double extension exploits, a cursor exploit, a an auto proxy exploit, boot sector viruses and even their random number generator has serious legacy problems and probably has an NSA backdoor. Microsoft eventually admits their visible "improvement", UAC, is broken. Consultants at NeoSmart prove that UAC is worthless, nothing more than an annoyance to fool the user. But business is worse than usual, M$ locked out and continues to harass other anti-virus makers. While M$ is laughed at for their continued "Vista is the most secure OS ever claims, researchers find a giant hole in IE that renders all enhancements useless. Two years after release old ActiveX exploits are still a problem, and Vista was left broken over Christmas. M$ security is still an afterthought and worse than ever.
Hardware requirements are more wasteful than ever. The voucher program provides this customer a broken PC and infuriating vendor support. Vista Capable was not (they knew it at the time, read their email yourself), and the the 4GB of RAM "sweet spot" obsoletes 95% of existing computers. Even computers that can take that much memory might not be able to use it. Later, disk storage recommendations of 1 TB, obsolete everything.
Hardware drivers have never been worse. Nine months after release we still see general flakiness.
Vista's has insane digital restrictions. HD video and iPod are broken and other media is restricted, leaving the average user better off with gnu/linux. Some of this is intentional sabotage of competitors, the rest reflects the interest of M$'s media pals. The reward for buying restricted media is to lose it all and have to buy it again.
Once again, your favorite toys will be broken. iPod is BSoDs Vista (again on 10/31/08), Palm did not work until a July Beta Test. Vista sabotages Google Desktop and Firefox
The cost of these problems for business user was estimated to be between three and five thousand dollars per seat, and everyone knows that's just the start of TCO. Lost work is expensive even if your time and software cost nothing. Expect a small bonus or a pink slip if your company is dumb enough to go this way.
A study by InfoWorld shows that Vista is a Big Fat Power Hog. Stay away if you care about global warming or value your time.

The list keeps growing as people report Vista problems and restrictions. See this list of 100 popular reactions to Vista. The most damning evidence of all comes from user videos. See the bugs for yourself in this list of Vista Sucks YouTube videos, I've collected more than 50 but there are more than a thousand of them and people keep adding new ones. On February 2, 2008 a new lowpoint was reached when it could honestly be argued that Vista is not as good as GNU/Linux for gaming. Yes, Vista is not even good for gaming. Understandably late to the list party, David M Williams's 100 reasons GNU/Linux is better than Vista is very amusing. The bottom line is that Vista demands total M$ control of your computer but this is an impossible task and the result is a system that's terminally buggy and slow. Read on now for a chronological listing of failure, rejection and revolt.

There was rejection and the revolt is ongoing.

December 4, 2006 - CRN warns VARs about 25 Shortcomings Of Vista: SMB2 incompatibility, hardware incompatibility, lack of drivers, software incompatibility, bloat, DRM and others we will hear more of.
January 10, 2007 - UK schools told to avoid Vista for a year. Before the year was up, they were advised to use free software instead. One year later, none of the concerns were addressed and the schools were again told to avoid Vista and Office 2007.
February 2, 2007 - BBC calls Vista a threat to internet freedom.
March 2, 2007 - DOT says no to Vista and IE7 due to cost and reliability.
March 2, 2007 - BBC says avoid Vista.
March 3, 2007 - FAA says No to Vista and considers GNU/Linux migration. They have already saved millions leaving other M$ OS behind.
March 10, 2007 - Vendors selling Vista with OSX screen shots.
March 23, 2007 - A M$ blog lables Vista the " biggest software development failure of all time", and reveals a raging internal debate about releasing the not ready code.
April 20, 2007 - Oracle ignores Windows
April 21, 2007 - XP Reintroduced by Dell.
April 23, 2007 - Vista firesale due to poor sales.
May 01, 2007 - Dell Ubuntu Plans Announced
May 16, 2007 - Vista causes a 4% fall in M$ customer satisfaction.
May 20, 2007 - The lack of user enthusiasm is reflected in book sales and search results
June 4, 2007 - DRAM makers lose money, having ramped up for sales that never arrived.
July 3, 2007 - Dell issues Vista refunds. It takes two emails.
July 4, 2007 - 87% of home users are aware of Vista but only 12% of them want it.
July 17, 2007 - Vista gripes are so numerous they make the mainstream news. Given M$'s massive advertising budget and willingness to hold a grudge, the CNN story is remarkable.
July 20, 2007 Vista and Office have almost no impact on M$ bottom line.
July 24, 2007 - Number 4 PC maker Acer revolts and expresses Industry Wide dissatisfaction.
July 26, 2007 - Dell puts pressure on ATI for better GNU/Linux drivers.
July 26, 2007 - Dell is pleased with Ubuntu and plans more of it.
July 27, 2007 - New York Times reports Wall Street's lost faith in M$. Sometimes reason can overcome superstition.
July 30, 2007 - Vista SP1 slips from 2nd half of 2007 to Q1, 2008. This means that they will miss a second Christmas buying season because everyone knows that Vista sucks as it is.
July 31, 2007 - PatchLink Survey shows the vast majority (87%) of Windows business users plan not to migrate to Vista because there's no advantage. Seven months ago, more said they wanted Vista but that was before they knew better. At the same time, Linux migration plans are up from 2% to 8%.
July 31, 2007 - CIO describes Windows as something for "niche business users" only. This has been true for a long time, but a consensus is finally growing around it because Vista has failed to deliver.
August 4, 2007 - Straws in the wind, even M$ boosters are sick of supporting M$ and dread the Vista "upgrade".
August 6, 2007 - Boom, Lenovo Sells Thinkpads with Suse as they said they would. The models hit the market, cheaper than those with Vista, in January of 2008.
August 8, 2007 - Dell goes worldwide with gnu/linux, and their stratagist says Vista is more of the same from M$ and it's pushing business to gnu/linux.
August 9, 2007 - AMD partners with Suse
August 11, 2007 - Oracle continues it's move to gnu/linux.
August 14, 2007 - Forbes predicts GNU/Linux boom.
August 14, 2007 - Big patch Tuesday gives lie to Vista's security improvement
August 14, 2007 - 2008 is not the year of Vista for the 2008 Olympics.
August 15, 2007 - Two more studies show that Big Business is staying away from Vista
August 17, 2007 - After nine months of suffering, PC Magazine Editor in Chief apologizes for being easy on Vista, slams it and steps down.
August 23, 2007 - The EIC was not the only person at PC Magazine or the industry who thinks Vista is not ready. All sorts of writers, bugs and poor uptake statistics are mentioned.
August 25, 2007 - A study by Valve shows fewer than 8% of gamers are using Vista. The company president calls M$'s Vista push a "terrible mistake".
August 26, 2007 - Airbus and Boeing go with Red Hat for passenger computers.
August 29, 2007 - The Independent recommends gnu/linux over Vista
August 29, 2007 - HP joins the other two big PC makers, Dell and Lenovo, selling desktop gnu/linux.
September 1, 2007 - Universities dread a Vista September
September 6, 2007 - AMD goes "open" with ATI. All of the major chipset makers have their foot in gnu/linux and two of them are free. The last significant platform performance difference is about to evaporate as the makers liberate themselves.
September 10, 2007 - SP1 changes nothing for big IT. Timelines for rollout at ATF might start in three years. Apparently, it's hard to fool people twice.
September 21, 2007 - Less than 2% of UK businesses are using Vista.
September 21, 2007 - M$ allows all vendors to sell XP again, but on a disk, not installed and only as a replacement for the most expensive versions of Vista.
September 27, 2007 - Another mainstream news source calls Vista a failure that could destroy M$.
September 28, 2007 - Steven Vaughn-Nicholas of EWeek says Vista is dead.
October 11, 2007 - Steve Ballmer ambushed by analyst mom who hates Vista. Ha ha, someone send her daughter some real software.
October 18, 2007 - DSG blames Vista for $40 million of retail sales losses.
October 26, 2007 - An ITWeek writer joins the Vista Sucks Chorus.
October 28, 2007 - Vista sales decline, despite back to school and other firesales.
October 31, 2007 - John Dvorak says M$ should abandon Vista and whines that he's going to be a GNU/Linux or Mac user. The sooner the better, John.
November 3, 2007 - Analysts reject hype about "strong" demand for Vista. Demand is not even as good as XP's was.
November 6, 2007 - Vista is used by less than 7% at home and 1% at work.
November 8, 2007 - On it's one year "gold" anniversary Vista is haunted by 6 year old Macrovision bug.
November 14, 2007 - With a patch, M$ admits some of Vista's performance problems.
November 18, 2007 - Back to school sales of Vista and Office 2007 had no effect on M$'s bottom line. Because sales were down, the unchanged bottom line may reflect the entire year instead of the last quarter.
November 19, 2007 - A new survey of IT professionals shows overwhelming rejection, 90%, of Vista, 10% are moving away from M$ and 40% have plans to move away.. Can you hear the sinking ship fog horns?
November 23, 2007 - Vista SP1 fails to deliver, dooming the OS for Christmas, perhaps forever.
November 24, 2007 - HP CEO Hurd says Vista did not make enough money for HP.
November 26, 2007 - InfoWorld joins the Vista Sucks chorus.
November 26, 2007 - Vista makes CNet's worst tech list as number 10. Number 9 is a root kit.
November 28, 2007 - Another businessman joins the Vista Sucks Chorus. He complains the OS performs poorly, is annoying and lacks innovation to such a degree that productivity suffers despite expensive hardware upgrades. This is what everyone says.
December 5, 2007 - Resellers note increasing demand for "Downgrade Rights" which reflects business resistance to Vista and Office 2007.
December 16, 2007 - Damage control gets ugly as users point out how big a downgrad Vista is.
December 17, 2008 - Vista is PC World's #1 most disappointing tech product of 2007
January 7, 2008 - Despite deals that made it virtually impossible to buy a computer without Vista, less than 40% of 2007 computers shipped with it. Makers like Dell broke those deals to stay in business.
January 8, 2008 - A two year study concludes that Vista and Office 2007 should be avoided by UK schools because they expensive, disruptive and no one needs them.
January 15, 2008 - Vista is MIA at CES.
January 24, 2008 - Windows 7 hype leads to rumors of panic attack at M$
January 24, 2008 - The Motley Fool writes M$ off.
January 30, 2008 - Mythbusters pans Vista and most non free software practices. Also, Vista removal business is brisk at small computer shops who are M$'s life support and the book Vista Annoyances documents that Vista really is that bad.
February 6, 2008 - NEC offers XP beyond official EoL because business still overwhelmingly rejects Vista.
February 7, 2008 - George Ou spends the night with SP1 and wakes up sore. Not even hard core advocates can take Vista.
February 12, 2008 - Email from the "Vista Capable" lawsuit shows that Vista makes a $2,100 computer into an "email machine" that leaves the M$ executive who wrote it feeling "burnt".
February 14, 2008 - Increasingly desperate, M$ starts a lottery to advertise Vista. Scratch and sniff the questions, you could win thousands of dollars worth of TV or a shirt. Remember to donate all of the shirts to charity.
February 19 and 29 - M$ dumps disappearing development tools on universities and has a world wide Vista firesale to counter Vista's poor reputation. Stay away from Visual Studio if you are running XP by Parallels on Mac, it sent a friend of mine on a fruitless 11 hour ordeal that wrecked the virtual machine.
March 11, 2008 - The fat lady sings for Vista as the Wintel press hypes Workstation 2008.
March 15, 2008 - Extremetech sings the Vista Sucks Song and says price cuts won't save the "very nasty and very flawed pig."
March 19, 2008 - As predicted, SP1 fails to deliver performance improvement, instead it might just crash and destroy your computer.
April 10, 2008 - The Vista Failure is official as Gartner Claims Windows is Collapsing. Out, out brief monopoly.
April 15, 2008 - Steve Ballmer calls "a work in progress".
April 19, 2008 - Heads roll at M$ over Vista Failure. Everyone's favorite goat is a scape goat.
April 25, 2008 - Party over, time for the channel stuffing headache. M$'s earnings plunge 11% and miss expectations as Vista and Office continue to languish. The NYT predicts worse things if the country drops into a recession.
April 25 2008 - Dell partly defies M$ by offering XP beyond EOL. It would be real defiance if they made free software more visible or offered XP at the usual price instead of tying it to the most expensive versions of Vista.
April 29, 2008 - USA Today notices that techs hate Vista.
May 6, 2008 - The public perceives Vista and Yahoo failure as a loss of clout.
May 14, 2008 Infoworld says Vista failure helps sell Apple.
May 18, 2008 - Fortune 500 companies signal dissatisfaction and consider skipping Vista. Also, more commercial developers are working on GNU/Linux than Vista.
May 19, 2008 - Time Magazine declares Microsoft an Empire in Rapid Decline
June 11, 2008 - Long term (2011) Vista adoption plans drop from 68% to 26% over the year.
June 23, 2008 - Not even Intel wants Vista, and they might dump Windows all together.
July 23, 2008 - SanDisk says Vista is unable to use SSDs and delays new drive releases. Vista's disk thrashing is not something SanDisk controllers will be able to fix.
August 9, 2008 - Almost of the computers HP sells run XP, but they are marked as Vista sales.
August 18, 2008 - At least one third of people forced to buy Vista got rid of it in six months.
August 26, 2008 - Still unable to sell Vista, M$ makes XP more annoying through Windows Update, the first time they have openly degraded an existing OS to sell a new one.
September, 2008 - The last, Ultimate Extra is added to Vista Upsell Edition. The website for these toys becomes a magnet for critics and will soon go dark. There will be no extra toys for the Ultimate Upsell Version because M$ can no longer afford "out of cycle" development.
September 18, 2008 - Midsized Enterprise users overwhelmingly reject Vista and will skip it.
September 20, 2008 - Channel Web says Vista is still broken and unwanted.
October 6, 2008 - ComputerWorld Declares Vista Dead.
October 17, 2008 - Red Hat cites Vista bugs as the "end of Planned Software"
October 20, 2008 - M$ admits that even "Pirates" avoid Vista
October 23, 2008 - A dissappointing start to 2009 shows Vista sales are really over.
October 27, 2008 - Joe Wilcox declares Vista dead.
October 27, 2008 - The Onion jokes that Vista is so bad, the advertisements will crash your TV.
October 31, 2008 - Channel Web joins the Wintel pile on to declare Vista failed and dead.
November 3, 2008 - ActiveX, still a security hole.
November 10, 2008 - Even by M$'s numbers, Vista drivers are still a mess and a poor foundation for Windows 7.
November 19, 2008 - If your boss is one of the 2 or 3% dumb enough to use Vista, they might not pay you for it's 30 minute boot time.
November 30, 2008 - Computer World's Glyn Moody says Vista failure destroys the "upgrade inevitability myth" and brings the world that much closer to software freedom.
December 4, 2008 - IBM rolls out "Microsoft Free" thin clients with Ubuntu, which should save big business hundreds of dollars per user per year. This was first announced in January.
December 8, 2008 - Stephen Fry joins the Vista sucks chorus.
December 9, 2008 - ComputerWorld says to avoid SP2.
December 11, 2008 - Vista is still not "out of the box" ready thanks to broken DHCP and other annoyances.
December 15, 2008 - DRAM makers line up for government bail out after betting on Vista success.
December 27, 2008 - A personal note. A relatives' Dell now fails to boot. Over three weeks of M$ "support" lead to the removal of SP1 and a text error message of death on boot.
January 12, 2009 - Vista failure convinces the entire industry to ignore Windows 7 as a sales maker.
January 22, 2009 - Vista failure leads to 8% decline in client revenues and 5,000 person job cut at M$. Net income drop is 11% for the 2nd quarter. People speculate about the end of the Wintel duopoly because Windows 7 won't require a hardware replacement.
January 30, 2009 - No one cares about SP2
February 2, 2009 - Vista still stuck at less than 10% use according to M$ friendly Forrester Research. That makes it the least popular Windows OS ever. Use is probably a lot less than 10% and GNU/Linux may have a larger share of the business market. People are not as dumb as M$ needs them to be.
February 22, 2009 - Qimonda North America Corp, a $1B DRAM maker, follows Qimonda AG into bankruptcy due to Vista sales that never arrived, "weak seasonal demand, coupled with computer manufacturers stockpiling inventory in anticipation of the release of Microsoft Corp's Windows Vista operating system."
March 1, 2009 - Vista wins first place at the Fiasco Awards with 5,222 of 6,403 people voting for it.
March 9, 2009 - As he contemplated in November of 2009, John Dvorak has become a GNU/Linux user. Welcome to freedom, John.
March 24, 2009 - The French National Police cite Vista training costs as a reason to migrate to GNU/Linux which has saved them 70% of their IT budget. Way to go!
May 15, 2009 - M$ Officially encourages IT departments to drop their Vista migration tests and concentrate on Windows 7 instead. Vista is officially dead/renamed and this log is complete.
June 14, 2009 - I thought this list was over but M$ managed to produce a unique on time failure by neglecting the DTV transition for Windows Media Center. Because of Vista's innumerable other media problems is it unlikely that this particular failure made a practical difference to many people.
August 6, 2009 - Peter Su, chairman of Taiwanese memory company Transcend, repeats the claim that Vista failure ruined RAM prices. Ignore the reporter's dismissal, memory makers ramped up production based on M$ sales estimates which never materialized. Vista failed long before the credit crunch and is still a failure because it sucks.
September 7, 2009 - SMB2 has a completely new remote BSoD problem, incredible.
May 27, 2010 - Three and a half years after release, unsurprisingly, Vista still does not work and people no longer trust Microsoft's promises of fixes by "upgrade".

Vista has failed and has become a synonym for tech disaster as M$ also fails. For nearly three years, Vista has been rejected by home users, business users, the mainstream and wintel press and is predictably far from their two year, 200,000,000 user goal, even after they lied about sales. SP1 was full of bugs and offered little improvement so people are still having experiences like this (8/4/2008) and this (12/09/2008). M$ would like to tell you it's all in your head, and is desperately trying to distract defectors with Windows 7. People are not just skipping Vista, they are getting out of the Windows world. Investors questioned M$'s place in the world and worth before the 24% decline in revenue. Because people are listening, I'll mark the next few stories. The real story is now the rise of GNU/Linux on the desktop.

Software Freedom is the only way to prevent abuses like M$ has pulled over the years. Faith in source code that can't be seen, modified and shared is misplaced.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.