I finally worked on a Vista computer with spanking new Vista Office. the verdict…

Hum… they were right; a lot of visual fluff and a lot of reworked interface. It was interesting at best when I had to sit in front a Vista computer to help out a client. It’s completely different than what you’ve come to expect from Microsoft, but not the fun type of different you get from Apple. It was messy.

For starters, I couldn’t find anything easily. It was an entirely new interface to learn. Close sources of mine have reported going through hell installing the beast, especially on laptops. I’ll believe that. The start menu has been completely reworked and finding things takes a little peck and hunting. Overall, once you get used to it, you still have to fight a decade of being use to where things were.

Vista Office was no pleasure cruise either. The interface is completely revamped and finding things was difficult. Gone were the traditional File, Edit, etc, top menus. Instead it is replaced with tabs and everything was rearranged under. Microsoft has never had the most user-friendly menus. It felt like most features were put one after the other with little thinking into conveniency. As time went on, they just added gimmicks but never mustered the guts to sit down and rationalize it all. I think they tried to do that with Vista and it seems like too little, too late. I’m burned, as many others are with Microsoft.

I can understand the need Microsoft has to try to “innovate” but frankly the company hasn’t done that in well over a decade. Even then, they took mostly from others. Vista has some interesting technical features but as far as home users are concerned it is OVERKILL. It is a resource hog and never mind getting the right hardware to get everything running. OSX Leopard is so frugal compared to this Dinosaur.

All in all, as always, I wish Microsoft would bite the bullet and completely overhaul everything, something Apple did 8 years ago with brilliant success. But alas, Microsoft has strangled its own market into a dead end street with backward compatibility issues and a will to smash competition. What is troublesome is the fact that they are moving to drop sales and support of XP. Since Vista has not sold well at all and is forced down user’s throats through the tried and true Microsoft path of forced upgrades, phasing out XP will be the only way they can get users to buy Vista and have computer manufacturers sell more hardware, to their great delight.

Ah, what a situation this industry is in. With a weakening economy, a stranglehold Windows market, Microsoft’s only chance is to conveniently report lower earnings than expected. This will give them reasons to drop XP, force Vista and have Dell and HP happy to sell more… PCs. And if that is not a good enough reason to switch to Apple, I don’t know what will.