Well, what can I say? I have had Windows Vista & Office 2007 now for about six months. Am I happy with both of them?
Short answer: No. Long Answer: No.
Why? Vista seems to be no major improvement whatsoever in the user experience – and as for much vaunted reliability, I seem to recover a lot from unspecified and insoluble crashes of the operating system. Perhaps this is because I tend to push the machine and have installed a chunk of open source software and such like, but in the main it’s about as vanilla a machine as I have ever had. I have at least one friend who bought a laptop with Vista, found it kept failing and was told to ‘go back to xp’. So he bought more RAM (surely, 1gb of RAM should be enough?) with an OEM of XP (yay for the program!) only to find that the problem was with the graphics card.
Unfortunately for Vista – he found that XP was much more stable, did more than everything he wanted, and was, basically, better! So he’s stuck with XP – he’s not going to bother with the pain involved in reinstalling.
I personally find Vista to be OK – the much vaunted AeroGlass display is interesting and worth a wow or two the first couple of times but after that, you don’t use it. And some of the things it does are, frankly, terrible (I can’t stomach the new ‘start menu’ – it’s find for the advanced user (particularly if you type – yay me) but for the faint-of-heart? Not so good).
I think Vista suffers terribly from bloat and useless, pretty functions. Stand-alone – I can’t see a compelling argument for it yet at home. It’s a great way to slow down a terrifically fast machine. Maybe it’s better when you have a network.
I do think that one thing going in its favour, though, is that I still think that Linux has a way to go with usability and software selection and installation – I know, there’s ‘35000 components of software’ in each standard Linux install – but here’s the thing, if it’s all dross, it doesn’t help me. I did try to get Linux on a stick going from a USB Stick. That’s a day of my life that I won’t get back (it doesn’t help that the magazine I was using had the completely wrong instructions – better instructions were available free, on the web!). Post-script – Linux still doesn’t work for me on a stick.
So Vista – it’s fine, not compelling, I think it’s a pain in the rear end to have to install it and manage it, and I don’t think Linux would make me feel better.
As for MS Office 2007. Where do I begin? My purest vitriol is saved for this one. The ribbon interface is completely non-intuitive; things are in seemingly bizarre places until you think like a six-year-old, and many functions that I use regularly I can only access through the old keystrokes (you have to hunt through help to find where they now live – frankly, I spent fifteen years honing my skills – why did they change it on me? God forbid that somebody else would have to learn something on their own).
I think feature bloat is rampant all over MS Office. It’s bizarre some of the features you get. I think most of what I get would be able to be done with Open Office. And the file format change seems destined to backfire – as XML the new version is basically useless, but the old file format causes Office to complain and advise about lost features and incompatibilities.
Argh.
I used to be a Microsoft fanboy. I think the ‘Live’ series of applications are terrific (please, someone give those guys a promotion – and head them on over to MS Office, please please please!). Visio is great (although damnably expensive, but there you go – if it’s great, you should pay!). And Outlook seems fairly terrific to me as well, all things considered.
So there you go – Captain Cranky returns at his best…