14 DAY TRIAL // Windows Vista makes users lose faith. The failed Wow was cataloged as a rank disaster, and produced the conclusion that Windows Vista is an operating system inferior to Windows 98. Alec Saunders is a former Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Canada, and yes, he is the one losing faith, and labeling Vista as worse off than Windows 98. But unlike general consumers, Saunders has access to the top Microsoft executives, and he failed to hesitate to give them a piece of his mind. The last drops for Saunders were a whole night of struggle with Windows Vista, and a report detailing that one out of every six laptops sold in the U.S. is a Mac from Apple. Fortunately enough, Saunders has the emails of Microsoft Chief Executive Office Steve Ballmer, Jeff Raikes, President, Microsoft Business Division and Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group.
"Steve, Jeff and Steve?" Saunders began his email. "I am writing you both because I know you from my days at Microsoft from 1992 to 2001. And to put what I'm about to say in context, I have been a Windows PC user since Windows version 1.02, and my home is stuffed full of PCs, networks and servers? all running Windows - XP, Vista, Home Server. I worked on the launches of MS-DOS 6, MS-DOS 6.2, Windows 3.1, WFW, NT 3.1, NT 3.51, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows CE, Windows 98 SE, and Windows ME before leaving the company. "
Who else could be more suitable in passing judgment on Windows Vista, than a man intimately involved in the building of over 11 operating systems from Microsoft. Simply put, Saunders believes that Vista is the absolute low as far as product quality goes. "Now that you have the context for who I am, I want to tell you that I am seriously losing faith. My experience with Windows Vista has been a rank disaster. At this point, I believe it to be worse than Windows 98, which many consider to be the worst quality Windows product that Microsoft ever released," he stated.
Saunders complained about driver quality, about software compatibility and support and about the actual quality of Windows Vista. The platform subsystems apparently stop working for no reason, the printers connected to Vista act up and need manual restart in order to regain functionality. And on top of it all, even Microsoft software does not integrate seamlessly with Windows Vista. Saunders immediately got replies from Raikes and Sinofsky, both promising that the user experience in relation to the quality of the operating system will improve substantially. This of course will not happen any sooner than Windows Vista Service Pack 1, in the first quarter of 2008, with all indications at this time pointing to an availability date after February of next year.