Windows Vista - the Wow starts... now?

The reviews of Windows Vista are rolling in, and I don't think it comes as much of a surprise to anyone that those reviews are lukewarm at best. (Sure, there's the occasional raving from "industry experts" like Paul Thurrott, but honestly -- that guy would praise Bill Gates' latest bowel movement if given the excuse.) Never being one to pass up a good bit of schadenfreude at the expense of Microsoft, here are some of my favorite quotes thus far.

The big guys were iffy but largely played it safe.

If the description so far makes Vista sound a lot like the Macintosh, well, you're right. You get the feeling that Microsoft's managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, ''Copy that.''

. . .

And then there's that Sidebar, the floating layer of mini-programs. If you close one of the gadgets, you lose its contents forever: your notes in the Post-it Notes gadget, your stock portfolio in the Stocks gadget, and so on. You couldn't save them if you wanted to. How could Microsoft have missed that one.

- David Pogue, The New York Times

. . . while Vista has eased some of the burden on users imposed by the Windows security crisis, it will still force you to spend more time managing the computer than I believe people should have to devote.

. . .

Many of the boldest plans for Vista were discarded in that lengthy process. What’s left is a worthy, but largely unexciting, product.

- Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal

From a bit lower down the journalistic food chain come comments like these.

Regardless of widespread skepticism, I was confident that Vista would dazzle me, and I looked forward to saying so in print. Ironically, playing around with Vista for more than a month has done what years of experience and exhortations from Mac-loving friends could not: it has converted me into a Mac fan.

- Erika Jonietz, MIT Technology Review

Perhaps we're spoiled, but after more than five years of development, there's a definite "Is that all?" feeling about Windows Vista. Like cramming an info-dump into a book report the night before it's due, there certainly are a lot of individual features within the operating system, but the real value lies in their execution--how the user experiences (or doesn't experience) these--and like the info-dump, we came away shaking our heads, disappointed.

- Robert Vamosi, CNET

And finally, my favorite of the bunch, Stephen Manes' review in Forbes magazine. The reviews from Mossberg and Pogue left me thinking that no major print publication would come out stridently against the new OS, but Manes proved me wrong.

Windows Vista: more than five years in the making, more than 50 million lines of code. The result? A vista slightly more inspiring than the one over the town dump. The new slogan is: "The 'Wow' Starts Now," and Microsoft touts new features, many filched shamelessly from Apple's Macintosh. But as with every previous version, there's no wow here, not even in ironic quotes. Vista is at best mildly annoying and at worst makes you want to rush to Redmond, Wash. and rip somebody's liver out.

Vista is a fading theme park with a few new rides, lots of patched-up old ones and bored kids in desperate need of adult supervision running things. If I can find plenty of problems in a matter of hours, why can't Microsoft? Most likely answer: It did--and it doesn't care.

Manes goes on for pages, dropping gems like this one along the way:

Should you upgrade your current machine? Are you nuts? Upgrading is almost always a royal pain.

But Forbes isn't done there. A few days later Bruce Schneier wrote on the Forbes site about Vista's built-in digital rights management features.

Windows Vista includes an array of "features" that you don't want. These features will make your computer less reliable and less secure. They'll make your computer less stable and run slower. They will cause technical support problems. They may even require you to upgrade some of your peripheral hardware and existing software. And these features won't do anything useful. In fact, they're working against you. They're digital rights management (DRM) features built into Vista at the behest of the entertainment industry.

Schneier actually goes so far as to recommend "holding out" against Microsoft by not upgrading to Vista for as long as possible.

Reviews like these certainly won't make Microsoft happy, but it sounds like they richly deserve these comments for foisting a steaming turd onto the computing world at large. As for me, I'm hoping I can last for a while on my Windows XP (SP1!) tower and XP (SP2) laptop for long enough for more reasonable version of Vista to appear (Vista SP1?). Not that I plan on using Windows for much, but there are still some things in this world that require a Windows box. Unfortunately.

[thanks to Daring Fireball, Engadget, and FakeSteve for the links]