Thom Holwerda get it. In ‘The Windows Vista Era Never Quite Happened’ he takes off on an article about why Windows Vista failed. In his critique, he illustrates how people often see just the surface and forget that most of what is important in computing technology is out of sight.
Vista’s failure can be explained much more easily. Windows Vista was an overhaul of the entire Windows operating system, top to bottom, with every framework being overhauled or completely re-written.
Vista did indeed introduce fancy new desktop eye candy and it was, perhaps, pushed out the door a tad early. I think it a bit hyperbolic to say Vista has failed but that kind of approach often seems to plague anything Microsoft. The source article, Sixteen Reasons the Windows Vista Era Never Quite Happened, mentions this as several of the reasons for a supposed failure. That all boils down to end user perceptions and attitudes rather than the quality of the product. It is a fact, though, that perceptions and attitudes of the market can make or break a product.
Where the ‘push to release’ problem did create hassles was in the nature of drivers. In this case, Microsoft had to lead those writing drivers and hardware access software from the isolated PC paradigm to that of the modern network model. That has been an ongoing process as software has been moved from owning its machine to that of being just another user process. That change is full of nuance.
It is that nuance that Thom gets.
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