Ok unless you have been living in a cave the past 25 years you know who Microsoft is and you know that their flagship product is Windows. Now without going into the great os war discussion I will say for productivity they make an ok product that ships on the majority of PC’s in existence. While OSX, Linux and a couple of other small time players offer very nice alternatives to this behemoth I am not going to compare or cover those products in this rant essentially because you probably already know the pro’s and con’s of it all. Ok now with the disclaimer out of the way…

TAKEN FROM: http://www.efluxmedia.com/

During Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professionals in Seattle, CEO Steve Ballmer had one thing to say about Windows Vista, one year after its release: it’s “a work in progress.” Just one month ago, Microsoft released Service Pack 1, fixing a number of issues that have emerged during the past year through quality improvements, improvements to the administration experience and support for emerging hardware and standards.

As Ballmer said at the conference, there’s still work to be done on Vista: “A very important piece of work, and I think we did a lot of things right, and I think we have a lot of things we need to learn from,” he said. “Vista is bigger than XP. It’s going to stay bigger than XP.”

At the same time, Ballmer said Microsoft has been working on some essential steps for Windows Vista, nevertheless, the most important thing will still remain customer feedback: “Top of mind for me, for Ray [Ozzie], for the senior team here, is making sure that we continue to drive forward and take the good work that we did in Vista, take the chance for improvement and progress and drive forward.”

At the end of March, consumers started complaining of numerous flaws, while at the same time Microsoft offered free support for anyone who has trouble installing SP1, whether they were using a purchased copy of Windows or it came with their Hp Laptop

There are still a lot of customers using Windows XP. and at the same time, there are a lot of customers who opted for Windows Vista. “As long as those are both important options, we will be sensitive and we will listen and we will hear that,” Ballmer said.

Wow no joke? A lot to learn, and very little fixed and even more broken. Bigger than xp but not faster nor anymore reliable… This concerns me. I was a windows 2000 Professional user for a very long time. It was a very powerful platform, and after the last rollup patch kit it is very secure and functional. Upon release of XP I was ready to jump on the bandwagon… BUT at the time xp was having issues. Fastforward: At the end of this month we will see XP SP3 released. During its beta it was touted as being atleast 2x faster than the then current version of Vista. While most all software only gets better with the “public beta” style of refinement I am upset that a copy of xp is still roughly $99 retail. I opted to skip Xp and pickup Vista as it was the new flagship roughly a year ago. And for the same price. I regret this purchase even though at this very moment I am writing this from my Vista install. While this OS is pretty and has some nice options in the end I need speed, reliability and security. And at this point I would not hold my breath on any of those.

All this tied to the fact that Bill Gates has been heard mentioning the next windows OS may be coming down the pipe much sooner than expected. So what am I left with? Vista being my current generation OS? Wow now I know how all those people that I sold WindowsME to while I worked at Office Depot feel like.

I would think with Microsoft having the resources which is does in its OS department it could make atleast one incarnation of Windows which could be had in three different flavors, personal, professinal, and enterprise editions that would offer each niche exactly what it needed. With Vista having entirely to many options, and the most basic versions lacking the ability to even play DVD’s is well asinine. I want an os which is not considered bloated, insecure to the point of laughter, and of course powerful. If I choose to game from my desktop I should not have to uninstall an os in favor of another just because resource handling was built for productivity without any preconceived notion of gaming. Interfaces are important but please do not ever try to sell me an OS based off this alone. Offer up a powerful platform and make it a little more backwards technology friendly. Meaning those of us without 4gb of ram, a dual core processor and a current generation video card can still enjoy ourselves without slamming our faces into the screen.

All this being said it seems I am still a slave to Microsoft even though they are not the best choice. The problem is that the mainstream of products I use really only work from this platform. So untill another OS can say that I suppose I will endure.

Do you think Vista was released to quickly? Do you think Vista is the new WindowsME? Do you think that Bill Gates was being serious about the new OS coming down the pipe much sooner than anticipated? I am curious to see what others think about this.