- #1
- 21,911
- 6,338
These much-ballyhooed products, sites, and services, it turned out, left much to be desired.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140583/article.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140583/article.html
Well do people agree with the list. I'm certainly leery of Vista, and so are others I know.#15. Box Unpopuli: Amazon Unbox
#14. Screwed up to the Max: Municipal WiMax
#13. Web 2 Woe: Social Networks
#12. Just Another Oxymoron: Internet Security
#11. Singing an Old Familiar Zune: Microsoft Zune
#10. Is Anyone Listening?: Wireless Carriers
#9. Sorry, We Already Gave: Office 2007
#8. Needs To Change Its Spots: Apple "Leopard" OS 10.5
#7. Cannot be Completed as Dialed: Voice Over IP
#6. Un-Neutral: The Broadband Industry
#5. The Great, The Bad, The Ugly: Apple iPhone
#4. In a Sorry State: Yahoo
#3. The Anti-Social Network: Facebook Beacon
#2. What Is It Good For: The High-Def Format War
#1. No Wow, No How: Windows Vista
Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?
It's not that Vista is awful. The integrated security and parental controls are nice, and the Aero interface is as whizzy as it gets. Searching and wireless networking are much faster and easier than under XP.
It's just that Vista isn't all that good. Many of the innovations the operating system was supposed to bring--like more efficient file and communications systems--got tossed overboard as Microsoft struggled to get the OS out the door, some three years after it was first promised. Despite its hefty hardware requirements, Vista is slower than XP.
When it debuted last January, incompatibilities were rampant--in part because hardware and software makers didn't feel any urgency to revamp their products to work with the new OS. The user account controls that were supposed to make users feel safer just made them feel irritated. And at $399 ($299 upgrade) for Windows Ultimate, we couldn't help feeling more than a little gouged.