Microsoft released a website recently posting reaction videos of people they had asked to preview a new version of Windows called Mojave. Only this was simply Windows Vista they were actually previewing. The point being to show that people had misconceptions about the operating system.
The problem I have with this website is it doesn't take into consideration reality. The fact is, people who bought Vista when it came out last year most likely had to make a significant hardware upgrade purchase just to get all the features of the operating system (e.g. Aero) Several hardware devices that worked on Windows XP out of the box no longer were supported in Vista (e.g. my NEC Superscript 1800N Laser Printer or my Prolific Serial to USB dongle). A lot of this was due to Microsoft rewriting major portions of the Windows driver sub-systems making several XP compatible drivers inoperable.
Vista Compatible it was not
My Toshiba Laptop came with a "Windows Vista Compatible" sticker on it, but when I upgraded to Vista, to failed and crashed on startup. It wasn't until roughly 6mo after Vista's release that Toshiba made available BIOS updates and drivers for the laptop, and even after installing Vista with the new drivers, the OS was unreliable at best, hard crashing randomly. My Vista reliability chart snapshot (lost during the VPSLand debacle) showed a steady decline in reliability showing markers where system crashes occurred at a steady pace. After a few months it was at a 6.0 reliability rating. Livid, I decided to remove Vista and reinstall XP since I had a need at the time to also use my Serial to USB dongle.
It seems this has been the Windows way for some time. Windows 98 wasn't stable until the "second edition", Millenium was never stable, and XP wasn't really stable-worthy until SP2. I suspect when SP3 comes out for Vista it will begin to bring everyone's failing reliability ratings back up into a passing grade. We can hope?
Slow Business Adoption Rate
Because the operating system requires significant investment in hardware upgrades, and runs unreliably on older unsupported hardware, businesses are not signing up. Other then enhanced security, there's no real business need for them to upgrade their tried-and-true XP machines. The niceties do not justify the costs of the upgrade for most businesses which is why Microsoft is making this marketing push. Sadly, this Mojave experiment should have been made with people like me; people who know operating systems, who deal with code on a daily basis. We could then tell them exactly what we dislike about Vista. Sure it looks great, but it's unreliable. Unless of course you're using that laptop used in their experiment that was probably built specifically for Vista... nuts.
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