Over a year after the general availability of Windows Vista, drawing the line on the latest Windows client offers a less than Wow conclusion for Microsoft. The video embedded at the bottom of this screen is obviously a parody, but is the "Vista sucks" vote given at the end sad but true? Well, at least for some users it is. At the 2008 International Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates pointed to a Vista install base of over 100 million users as a sample of the operating systems success. At the same time, Vista failed to outsell XP by two to one in the first year, and in this context, while remaining the fastest selling Windows client to date, it did not live up to the expectations set for it ahead of general availability.

The one-year anniversary of Windows Vista worldwide release was marked by Microsoft in a very subtle way with just a press release praising the fact that the platform hit the 100 million mark in licenses. At the same time, Neil Charney, General Manager, Microsoft Windows Client, informed that a study conducted by NDP in U.S., China, France, Germany, Japan, and the UK, revealed that no less than 30% of users were discontent with Windows Vista, saying that it delivered no improvements over its predecessor Windows XP.

In an effort to alleviate the bad sentiments that have built up around Vista, Microsoft turned to Vista SP1 promising to soften all the rough corners of the operating system. But postponing the availability of Vista SP1 over a month and a half past the RTM date, in order to ensure a smooth transition, generated more user frustration. And the prerequisite updates served by Microsoft to Vista users, updates designed to prepare the operating systems for the delivery of the first service pack, managed to send Vista into an infinite reboot loop.

Echostormfury is one Windows Vista user that expressed discontent on the issue of the failed updates and endless reboot loop, but also Microsoft's failure to deal with the problem. "3 hours on the phone with Microsoft Technical Support did not get me anywhere except to a 'professional level technician' that asked me right off the bat to pay $249 for the incident support. After expressing my incredulity at such a ridiculous offer for their own security patch deployment screw up, I asked to talk to her manager and eventually he called back 12 hours later to sympathize with me that he has no idea what is going on from over in Bangladore," Echostormfury wrote on the Vista SP1 TechNet forum.

And the conclusion is the same as the video: "Points Learned - Microsoft Sucks (Relearned). Microsoft Windows Vista Sucks (Relearned). Microsoft Windows Update should BE TURNED OFF from Automatic Updates (Not feasible or practicle, but I'd rather be hacked and whored than risk losing ALL MY FILES again due to stupidity rather than devious ingenuity). RAID with Windows is trouble (sync a backup instead daily, or image weekly). And did I mention, Microsoft Sucks? Microsoft you owe me 14 hrs of my time," Echostormfury stated.