Summary: Vista 7 has uncanny parallels in hype; iPlayer incompatible with Vista 7, to name just one show-stopper issue

WINDOWS VISTA came to our world with great compliments and congratulatory reception. For many months we were told that it would take over the world and replace Windows XP everywhere. We were also told that it was "the last nail on Linux' coffin. When the marketing budgets ran out and actual users became louder than marketing people (and by extension -- the media), only then people began to realise that they they had been deceived. We are seeing a lot of the same symptoms in Vista 7. It's no exaggeration to say that it was hyped up a lot less than Windows Vista, so the road ahead will tell its story, in due time. In term of adoption, it's doomed to fail.

If the word from 2006/2007 is to be believed (watch articles from that time), Vista was a wonderful award-winning product; well, it ended up winning the "great fiasco award", among many other such honours in 2008. Jack Wallen has just published an article about "the 10 biggest failures in IT history" and Vista is #1 on the list.

1: Windows Vista

What a disaster! Could Microsoft have assembled a bigger failure if it tried? Well, possibly. But Microsoft wasn’t trying to make a failure — it was trying to make the best of the best. The result was the worst of the best.

People absolutely must remember what type of coverage Vista was enjoying when it was new and just before it was released. It was mostly wonderful, but if one looked closely enough at individuals' blogs, the picture painted was very different, with the exception of people who were fans of Windows to begin with (many of them ended up using Vista on a permanent basis).

“Wine is a better Windows than Vista”

--David Gerard

The marketing offensive is too obvious to see and we have documented a sheer number of examples. Here is another new example. We pointed this out before, but as Osama Khalid puts it, "Microsoft is adding Windows 7 ads to Hotmail messages."

“People absolutely must remember what type of coverage Vista was enjoying when it was new and just before it was released.”That's a lot of incoming messages with Vista 7 advertisements in them. Those adverts purport to be coming from people's peers, friends, colleagues, and family. E-mail advertisements are seen as personalised, or just personal. It's easy to see why people can fall for the illusion that Vista 7 is inevitable.

If back in 2006 you said that Vista would be as disastrous as it is today, people would label you "zealot" or "crazy". Well, it's not crazy to be a realist; it is only ignorant and irresponsible not to learn from history and actually believe marketing. I personally received a lot of abuse when I showed the reality of Vista/Longhorn in 2005-2007. By 2008 I almost stopped receiving abuse (mostly comprising insults to one's intelligence and sanity) because Microsoft had given up on pretending. E-mails from inside Microsoft (revealed due to subpoenas) showed that they too realised that Vista was bad; they knew it all along, but nonetheless they pretended and lied to the public for years.

One reader sent us this link yesterday, showing that even the BBC does not support Vista 7 users. This lack of support is very much reminiscent of what happened with Vista and it is a huge barrier to adoption that acts as a deterrent to those even considering Vista 7. The iPlayer page states: "Please be advised that currently BBC iPlayer is not compatible with Windows 7. We do intend on making the service compatible with all platforms. However at present it is not possible for us to confirm an exact date this will be released. We'll announce these versions as soon as they're ready..."

The funny thing is that the iPlayer is compatible with Vista. So somehow Vista 7 managed to 'break' even backward compatibility with Vista. "It's a Flash app isn't [it]," says our reader, "apart from the DRM 'stuff'. So now the BBC has to rewrite the app. Yet another case of the never-ending Microsoft upgrade bandwagon." ⬆

“[Vista DRM] seems a bit like breaking the legs of Olympic athletes and then rating them based on how fast they can hobble on crutches.“

--Peter Gutmann