File this under "faint praise"

I've done my best to stay far, far away from Vista. My work machines still use XP, and I'm fine with that (as opposed to Vista). I've loved the Mojave ads with people saying "hey this doesn't really suck" and then being told that it's Vista. (Oh dear, the Mojave experiment site linked above is bloated and takes forever to load. What's new?) If your ad campaign is "hey look this great product we have actually isn't as bad as you think" something has gone wrong.

Well, today Pogue reviews Windows 7. It's not a new Windows OS, it's basically Vista with some of the inexorably horrid parts stripped. Pretty much the whole article is made up of grafs saying things like "You know that really awful feature of Vista? Well for $150—or a free beta if you download today or tomorrow—you can get rid of it!"

Such as:

Trouble is […] the much-despised, Orwellian-named User Account Control […] was way too suspicious, demanding your name and password even when it was just little old you making innocent changes (like setting your computer’s clock). In Windows 7, you can tone U.A.C. down — eliminating the warnings, for example, when you, the human, are the one making changes.

Oh, yay, a security feature that is probably mostly theater (it works great until someone hacks your password, too) is dumbed down.

Even in the test version, you can feel that a lot of things are faster: starting up (40 seconds on my three test machines), shutting down, reconnecting to wireless networks, copying files and inserting flash drives, for example. It’s no Windows XP

Tremendous. Three years on and it's still slower than its predecessor.

As Microsoft puts it: “If it works in Windows Vista, it will work with Windows 7.” That’s not great, but what else can Microsoft do?

Still not backwards compatible.

And these are the best things he can say about them. The article's title, "Hate Vista? You might like Microsoft's sequel" seems a bit too laudatory.

Part 3: XLSX my tuchus

Someone in the office wants to save excel spreadsheets on a different drive. They right click the files in explorer and choose "save as" and then it only lets they save it as an Excel 2007 file, with an .xlsx extension name. Other people who try to open them with older versions are thus up a creek. But, when you choose save-as from explorer, you can't save it as a good, old .xls file. Why? Who knows. But for a company which spends millions of lines of code making their OS backwards compatible, this is horrid. I used it to make the point that when we next upgrade our computer systems we should have a real upgrade to a real operating system. I'm just glad I'm not using windows. Did you see the bit in the NYT about Microsoft execs inside emails about how Vista was not nearly ready for market?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/business/09digi.html

And this

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0226/050.html

is a great pan of Vista. Which I hope to never have the pleasure to use.

my dad responds

I saw the Times article, well done. The Forbes article sounds like you
could have written it. Our product has to support Vista in our next
release. I cringe at having to support our support of Vista.

That change to file formats in Office 2007 (not just in Excel) is a
real pain. Most people here still haven't upgraded, and I wind up
having two copies of everything. MS was under pressure from the
European Community to move to open formats, but you can't convince me
that anyone is going to adopt their new ones just because they're in
XLS. OS X is so far ahead of Vista that it's like the lead Toyota has
in hybrids.