Sucks or not sucks... That's the question!

Some time ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer lamented on the lack of acceptance and sales of Microsoft's latest flagship, Windows Vista. His current place of blame is Pirates!

Ummm! Pirates? Ok, I'll play along. My current employer has an enterprise class license for the software and as such, I opted to install it on my work computer... big mistake! After 30 days, I was told to verify my copy of Vista. The online validation failed. My support call to Microsoft yielded the same results, my license was used, and I was locked out of my computer... thanks Steve!

Operating System upgrades have traditionally been incremental, but Vista seems to be a huge leap... into the grand canyon. Eye candy, that has been around for years in Linux, now requires at least 1GB of RAM and 256MB of video memory for Windows Vista.

I can only surmise that adoption to Vista will be slow at best, surely Steve could have seen this coming. Even pirates on Digg are commenting that this new OS is a pig and a half on resources, RAM, and Hard Drive space. With regard to legacy support, Vista strongly reminds me of the Navy Marine Corps Intranet complications. Despite having several dozen Microsoft personnel on staff, very little works.

Still Microsoft developers call this "Teddybear Syndrome." The rest of the world calls this migration or evolution. My big question is this, "If my Windows XP, 2000, or NT, works nicely... Why should I migrate to Vista?"

Steve Ballmer seems to have lost touch with computing requirements and advancements. We advance our computers like we buy tools. We buy them not because they look pretty, but they do the job, and they do it better. They solve our problems, they make our jobs easier, they reduce our time spent on issues. Only gamers are interested in mod aesthetics. Well, gamers and artists anyways.

My point is this... I have been to customer sites that still utilize Windows 95. Not because they have limited money, but because it still works for the purpose that it was designed for. Why should I a company drop thousands of dollars for an operating system that neither works with my legacy applications that perform flawlessly at the current moment or supports my drivers for this new OS?

-- "Software will be broken by software... piracy is inevitable. If I can hear it, see it or read it... I can copy it!"