Yahoo! News reports today “Nearly six months after it launched, gripes over what doesn’t work with Vista continue, eclipsing positive buzz over the program’s improved desktop search, graphics and security.”

“I can’t live in Vista if the software that I use in my life for productivity does not work,” said Pirillo, in the third minute of a 52-minute video he posted on YouTube”…

…”Pirillo is geekier than the average user. He runs a network of technology blogs called Lockergnome, and was one of several “Windows enthusiasts” Microsoft asked for Vista feedback early on.

Still, Vista tested even Pirillo’s savvy. He fixed the hobbled printer and other problems by installing VMware, a program that lets him run XP within Vista. But when his trial copy expired, he decided the solution was too clunky — and too expensive.

He “upgraded,” as he called it, back to XP.”

I copy and pasted a large chunk of the article to make a point. This guy Pirillo was apparently a Vista Beta Tester, and had a large number of applications and hardware that didn’t work with Vista, so his upgrade path was to go back to XP. I’ve been in the computer business for a long time and found out long ago that upgrading to the latest version of the software, especially a major operating system from Microsoft is a bad idea right off the bat. This very same opinion is readily found when talking to any computer professional. The only obvious answer I can think is that Pirillo had to be using Vista as a test machine, but was still using XP on his main-get-the-work-done one. The odds are that he will eventually replace the hardware that doesn’t work with something “Vista Ready!” and end up spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars to upgrade his software too. That is if he every does go to Vista again any time soon.

I believe that Microsoft has been a big driver of unnecessary upgrades of all types in the computer industry. They write new software to take advantage of new technologies and the increased power of newer computers. At the same time they “try” to remain compatible with all the hardware and old software that is out there. But due to the way drivers interact with the Windows Kernal and APIs they end up breaking more then they fix. Vendors then upgrade their own software to take advantage of the newer hardware and force yet another round of upgrades.

For instance my good old HP4 scanner is still a nice work horse, it’s connected to a up to date FreeBSD box. It cost me $1000 back in 1997 or so, but it’s performance was not surprassed until a couple of years ago. But I moved it off of Windows in 2001 because Windows 2000 Pro broke driver support for the Tekram SCSI card I had been using successfully for years.

On the same token Photoshop 10 has little functional differance then Photoshop CS3, and still runs on OSX 10.4.x perfectly fine. Apple and Adobe both highly recommend against it, but it can be done and I’ve seen it many times.

My point with these examples is that upgrades are not usually necessary except for companies bottom line. Things like the Space Shuttle run perfectly fine on scads of older hardware and OSes. Other then the need to patch holes for security reasons, the average user does not have a compelling reason to upgrade hardware or software. Which I believe is amply shown by the numerous stats showing the number of Windows 98 machines still in existence. And the number of older OS’s and hardware that I come across in my daily routines.

I don’t have a solution for this cycle, Microsoft can’t realistically be expected to stop trying to make money. Yet I believe that Vista may be the first ringing of the death bell for their OS division. The company realizes this too as they fail to reinvent themselves. Sales of Zune lag far behind expectations and XBox 360 sales are far less then the overwhelming success Microsoft would have had and expected in the 90′s and early 2000′s.

The saying use to be, “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM,” then changed to “Nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft.” What is it going to be next?

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