"I have been testing Microsoft operating systems since Windows 95, and this is the buggiest OS I've seen this late in development," says Joe Wilcox, an analyst with Jupiter Research. "Look at the older operating systems, and by Beta 2 there is a stable foundation on which the [independent software vendors] can build. Right now, Vista is like a ship on stormy seas."
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Member since:2006-04-21
The point isn't that the beta of Vista has bugs in it. The point is that Vista has significantly more bugs than any previous release at their second beta, which would suggest that at release Vista could have more bugs than any previous release.
This isn't even provable without MS' tracking info, and as others have said, many of the bugs attributed to Vista are IHV bugs.
How about (dis)proving it by seeing if it's buggy on a larger/smaller proportion of machines than XP?
MS always blames someone else for Windows bugginess. What is more likely, that a significant proportion of the Windows ISV's and hardware vendors (and not necessarily always the same ones) are frigging useless, or that the one company providing the OS is?
Whatever the arguments for or against closed source, MS's big competitive advantage using it is that no-one else outside the company can legally look at it and proclaim "Good God, what is this shite?"
Member since:2005-06-29
Honestly, I think it's more likely Microsoft has their methods straight than your average ISV and hardware vendor.
Many parts of Windows, and other Microsoft are just a nightmare, but many other parts are reportedly extremely well designed and implemented.
But I partially blame Microsoft for the ISV's. I think they cater to developers far too much. .Net for example is great, thanks MS, but maybe that investment was more needed in the OS at the time. But the worst part is the backwards compatibility: Break apps, if ISV's can't fix them they deserve to be out of business.
If you're still selling a binary from 1999 something is wrong!
Member since:
2005-07-06
The point isn't that the beta of Vista has bugs in it. The point is that Vista has significantly more bugs than any previous release at their second beta, which would suggest that at release Vista could have more bugs than any previous release.
This isn't even provable without MS' tracking info, and as others have said, many of the bugs attributed to Vista are IHV bugs. For example, most display drivers released with Beta 2 were of alpha quality, plus Vista stresses more code paths in the drivers than previous versions of Windows. I've had the driver of a certain GPU verdor hang several times in Beta 2 and other builds, requiring the OS to reload the driver. The kernel mode mini driver for that GPU has also had problems which of course in that case requires restarting the system. Vista's weakest link is increased reliance on display drivers, meaning IHVs need to get their code right now more than ever, but it's a necessary dependence to give users a better experience overall. Predicting doom based on months old code is totally naive though.