Microsoft Vista costs consumers billions in lost productivity

13 June 12008

In one of the most inept acts in the history of software engineering, the buggy Microsoft Vista has caused a giant uproar in the business community as they struggle to un-install Vista.

Hardware manufactures are also suffering unfair returns, as Vista makes their PC's run far slower than it's predecessor.

There are also complaints about slipshod errors that indicate that Vista did not undergo even the most basic of testing before it was forced upon consumers/

Apple Software is capitalizing on this embarrassing FUBAR by spending millions of dollars reminding consumers that a Mac will actually work when you take it home.

Vista has cost American consumers thousands of man years in lost productivity. The Raleigh News & Observer notes that smart corporations have stayed away from Vista:

"Forrester Research noted that by the end of last year, only 6.3 percent of 50,000 corporate users surveyed were using Vista, with the market share of Windows XP hardly dented in the process (the defections came from users of the older Windows 2000)."

The report says that the Gartner Group has labeled Microsoft as "Collapsing", great news for the victims of Vista:

"With Microsoft making $15 billion a year on Windows, consumer and business software profits are key to future success.

Thus when Gartner analysts recently described Windows as "collapsing" and the victim of an increasingly unadaptable code base, the alternatives before the company seemed stark."

But it's not just Microsoft Vista that is profoundly buggy.

Please read this report how massive SQL injection attacks hit over ten thousand web sites running Microsoft SQL Server.

It's incredible to many professionals that Microsoft can make billions of dollars via their stranglehold on the free market, while providing software that cannot be safely used for the purpose for which it was intended.

The Mac user community is having a great laugh about this, but it's not funny when consumers loose billions of dollars:

In my opinion.. . . .

I'm always open to new technology (it's my job), and I was livid at the poor quality of Vista. Vista shamelessly grabs billions of bytes of RAM at startup time, and I experienced memory leaks within minutes. In addition to wasting a huge amount of server resources, Vista also requires that you buy new printers, scanners and other peripherals.

Me, I just got done spending over $250 to a PC technician to wipe my brand new laptop clean and install Windows XP, the lesser of the two evils. For reasons that are not completely clear, Vista would eat-up four billion bytes of RAM with the simple acts of web browsing and e-mail. Want to send an e-mail on Vista. You must first shut-down IE7 . . .

According on the PC Guy, consumers everywhere are fed-up and frustrated with Vista hanging, memory leaks, and sloppy programming and are demanding a PC that they can actually use to do their jobs.

He also noted that major PC manufactures like Dell are suffering from high returns, as unhappy consumers return their PC's for poor performance.

Whenever a large corporation creates barriers to entry and enjoys a monopoly, they have a responsibility to society not to cause unnecessary harm to their consumers. I lost several days of productivity due to Vista, and if my experience is similar to others, then entire lifetimes have been lost, all while Microsoft wades through billions of dollars in undeserved profits.

On the other side of the coin, it's easy to gripe about Vista, but what else do we have. Like millions of others consumers in business, I'm forced to use Microsoft Office (word processing and spreadsheets) and the alternatives are no prettier than Vista.

��