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Vista - A View Out of Focus |
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Sunday, 26 November 2006 |
Joel Spolsky posted an interesting criticism of the Windows Vista on/off switch. He points out there are at least nine, and as many as fifteen, different ways to turn off your computer. Now that the current beta release supports VMWare I figured it was time to fire it up and give it a try for myself. Joel has just hit the tip of the iceberg when it comes to an overabundance of confusing choices in Vista.
When I installed the VMWare tools and Vista tried to establish a network connection for the first time, this is what popped up.
The description of the first two locations is exactly the same except for the words "home" and "workplace". How is picking one different from the other, what settings are different if you choose one or the other? I have no idea what discoverable means.
This looks like the marketing guys trying to make the best of a security choice that shouldn't be there. The operating system should work correctly and safely wherever I go. The implication here is that the settings that go along with home/office are not safe for a public place. Not only are these choices overcomplicated (like the on/off choice), they are choices that I don't want to waste time making.
Even worse, many decisions presented in Vista are most likely to fall into the "just click continue, I don't know why it does that" category after the second time the user sees them. I was bombarded with dialog boxes like this every time I came within 100 pixels of any kind of setting.
I've only spent about an hour poking around Vista and it was more confusing than exciting. I can't say I found one thing made me say, "Wow! That's cool!" or "Oh! That's much better!" It feels like Microsoft didn't focus on making Vista better by taking away problems from XP and adding new and useful features, instead they focused on insulating problems with wizards and making the same old stuff look prettier.
IBM has announced they are going to linux on the desktop because Vista just isn't worth it. Changes in desktop market share move at a glacial pace, so don't expect Microsoft to plummet to a fiery death just yet (for one thing Office 2007 does appear to include real improvements), but I think Vista will mark the beginning of the end of desktop dominance for Microsoft.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 27 November 2006 )
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