Vista: Thinking of you

December 1, 2006 on 6:02 pm | In Uncategorized |

So, Windows Vista is in RTM. I’ve been sort-of working on it now for a little over a week. I’m starting to get a feel for what it’s about.. and some of it I don’t like.

When you are learning to drive a car in a new place, you have to be very careful, and go a little slower. You confuse some small roads with others, and you don’t have the locations of the traffic signals memorized, so you read them each time you pass, carefully analyzing the messages, like ‘Stop!’ and ‘No Parking!’

After a while though, you get used to the surroundings, and you instinctively slow down and coast to a stop without even noticing the stop sign. You know where the crosswalks are that you have to pause and let the pedestrians walk across, all the while giving you dirty looks, like ‘What? You’re driving? Can’t you see I’m WALKING here? You WILL wait for me to cross, and so I’ll walk slow to prove how smug I am…’ Anyway… you start to know where you need to do what, without having to be constantly reminded.

Well, in Vista, unless you hack around a little, you never get that chance. You will always have the stop sign blinding your view of anything else, and you’re forced to interrupt whatever you might be thinking about to click ‘OK, yes I’m an admin.’

Sure the average consumer might need a little cajoling to not install that malicious software, but that really shouldn’t mean that I need to approve any and every attempt to change my clock settings. Not to mention that if I’ve approved the installation of a particular piece of software, I shouldn’t have to also click ‘yes’ on every HKLM registry entry it tries to write. Granted, I know that microsoft is trying to force the hands of the developers, but what about the critical adoption period? I already know a lot of people, especially developers, who run visual studio 2003 who are crying FOUL for other reasons — VS.Net 2003 does NOT run on vista unless you turn off User Account Control (UAC). Period. Doesn’t.

I know they sort of mean well, but taking such a hard line to consumers who are dumb enough to need that sort of smack you in the face lockdown is really going to alienate the base… Users who only use windows because they think it’s easier than learning something else. When you have to approve ten popups, and open new windows, (and think ‘What is a Zone anyway, isn’t it all Internet?’) before you can check your normal old ssl protected web-based email, you may not be so keen on the easy factor.

I don’t claim to know how to fix the problem, but I do know that this probably isn’t it. I expect there to be a rash of ‘utilities’ on CNET that will let you ‘turn off the annoying vista features.’ Not unlike popup-blockers are today.

So ultimately, we have a platform that is technically superior, and configured by default to be more secure, but at times is downright unusable to anyone but a relative expert… I don’t know. Sounds like Linux.

Edit: after thinking about that a while I’ve decided that if I have to run a more secure OS, and I can’t run my precious Visual Studio (even 2k5 doesn’t work — yet — with AUC on full blast, but they’re fixing that,) it might as well BE linux, and I think I’d like that better anyway. In fact, I run a redhat box that only prompts you for admin creds when you do a very few certain things. Now THAT is the right idea.