Found this via Digg today. Apparently its hit Slashdot as well. Its actually a really good read that discusses just how disappointed the author (a long time writer covering MS) is by Windows Vista. He doesn’t hate Vista, he definitely doesn’t hate MS. He’s just grossly disappointed by the platform that will become the next version of Windows.

[...] As I excitedly wrote at the time, “my goodness. [Windows Vista] is going to rock … The transparent window effects–called glass windows, appropriately enough–are beautiful. The ability to embed video and any other kind of media into documents, apps, and anything else you can think off–even small previews you see when you mouse-over a scrollbar–are just incredible, surpassing anything on any system available today (yes, including Mac OS X Panther). The visuals in [Windows Vista] are just going to blow you away.”

Let those words hang in your mind for a bit. Two and a half years later, Microsoft has yet to ship Windows Vista, and it won’t actually ship this system in volume until 2007. Since the euphoria of PDC 2003, Microsoft’s handling of Windows Vista has been abysmal. Promises have been made and dismissed, again and again. Features have come and gone. Heck, the entire project was literally restarted from scratch after it became obvious that the initial code base was a teetering, technological house of cards. Windows Vista, in other words, has been an utter disaster. And it’s not even out yet. What the heck went wrong?

Windows Vista February 2006 CTP (Build 5308/5342) Review, Part 5: Where Vista Fails

There are a few things that he points out in regards to usability. Things such as it being difficult to tell which window has focus, the completely disjointed redesign of Media Center (horizontal instead of vertical navigation) and so on. He also talks about things like WinFS getting canned.

Its an interesting read. From my perspective its more and more looking like, while you’ll have no choice but to get Vista, its no where near the big upgrade from WinXP that Win95 was from Win3.1. In fact, in parts he says its an extremely major leap backwards (such as the exceptionally annoying User Account Protection implementation.)

Of course, you could always go and check out the latest version of Ubuntu. I’ve now been using the current pre-releases of Ubuntu 6.06 on my laptop for about 2 weeks now and I’m loving it. The new look, the increased speed, the available apps… Screw Windows Vista. My games run on XP, I’ll do my real work on Linux thank you very much.

Heres a review of the Alpha versions of Ubuntu “Dapper Drake” 6.06. The first ‘stable’ Beta is now available for mass consumption and in my view, its by far the best Linux distro I’ve used yet. Including beating previous version of Ubuntu.

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