Has Microsoft Given Up on Vista?
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Sinofsky, himself, confessed that his Brother multi-function printer didn't have drivers at first and even after they were available, it didn't have full functionality.
Next up was the, "massive change in the underpinning for video and audio" which "lead to incompatibilities." Sinofsky cited the example of graphic cards that might be able to run Aero Glass, Microsoft's high-end graphics display, but only had XP drivers, which, of course, could never run Aero.
Last, he mentioned that many XP drivers broke under Vista. "This is across the board for printers, scanners, wan, accessories [fingerprint readers, smartcards, TV tuners] and so on." That's bad. What's worse is that Microsoft wasn't even ready for its own hardware to run under Vista.
Sinofsky wrote: "Microsoft's own hardware was missing a lot of support (fingerprint readers, MCE [Windows Media Center Edition] extenders).
Bad Dogfood
Sad isn't it? Even Microsoft's top brass didn't know just how bad Vista was until they actually had to use it for themselves.
As the New York Times noted though, Joan Kalkman, the general manager of OEM and embedded worldwide marketing, a week after Sinofsky's note, wrote: "There is really nothing we can do in the short term. In the long term, we have worked hard to establish and have committed to an OEM Theme for Win[dows] 7 planning."
This is a smoking gun. Recently, I said that that Microsoft has already given up on Vista and is really planning on Windows 7 to be its real next-generation operating system. It seems to me that this is a tacit admission that, within the first three months of Vista shipping, some people at Microsoft had already realized that Vista was a failure and it was time to look for fast-tracking its replacement.
Certainly, I've found that Vista SP1 is no real improvement over Vista SP nothing. As for me, I'll keep using my Linux desktops and Mac OS X, and when I do need Windows, I'll be running the far superior Windows XP SP3 instead of Vista. After all, if it's not good enough for Microsoft's own, why should I be using it?
