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In the two years since Windows Vista became generally available, it has been a target of critics and users alike. Microsoft has repeatedly tried bolstering its beleaguered operating system, but it has failed to captured the glory of previous releases.

Channel Insider readers had a lot to say about Larry Walsh’s column, “Ode to Broken Windows (Vista),” in which he says Vista may just mark the turning point when Microsoft loses its grip on the desktop.

The following are some of the excerpts from their comments about the column made on Channel Insider’s Web page.

“Microsoft is the past. Google is the present. The future? Something that brews in someone’s garage today.”

“With the intro of Vista, I had reached my toleration for Microsoft operating systems. The list of things that turned me off of Vista is too long bore people with here. Suffice to say, I was looking for alternatives. I had played some with Linux, and had tried to run it as my main OS, but it was not yet ready. It’s great if I wanted to play IT, but I work in IT during the day. Off work hours I just want my computer to work. So I looked at Apple and their Mac’s. One year later, I have 2 (an iMac and Macbook), and I wonder why I hadn’t done this before. I use Parallels to run a licensed copy of XP in a virtual machine, when I absolutely require ‘Windoze,’ but that is not too often these days. Mac OS X isn’t perfect, but as a lifelong windoze user, I have found that Mac OS X is easier to use, and as they say, it just works, which is what I wanted and MS could not provide.”

“Coca Cola was pretty quick to recognize the error and put New Coke to bed. Microsoft, in the past, has listened to their users. Now they are really doing what they have been accused off far too much in the past: attempting to dictate to their users. For those who thought they were doing it before this is what it really looks like. As a convert to Microsoft from the early 90’s this looks very much like when Novell’s arrogance. Microsoft needs to stop trying to convince us of something that is obvious to everyone is not true.”

“I just received my new Dell laptop recently. It’s the beefiest machine that I’ve owned. It has four processors and even has a 64 GB SSD drive and Vista Ultimate. What a pig! Vista consumes 32 GB of my hard drive just for the OS. It runs like a dog and is constantly interrupting me to ask if I really, really want to access that file or visit that Web page. And nothing works on it. Half of the vendors whose software I use have indicated that they have no interest or intent to provide Vista-compatible versions of their software. The other half have, but the functionality is strictly the same 32-bit application that I had with XP.”

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Ode to Broken Windows (Vista) 

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“The pain of switching operating systems is intense for me. It costs me weeks of lost productivity and months to reorganize. But I refuse to pay the Microsoft penalty again. First NT, then XP (bad, but manageable) and now Vista. So I’m off to Red Hat as the base OS with Mac/OS in one virtual machine and Windows XP in another. I’ll keep my XP for as long as it takes for me to transition fully. Then I plan to jettison Microsoft one last time. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty I’m free at last!”

“Herein lies the essential problem with mega-monopolies: they have the power and market share to ignore their customers’ wishes and proceed with their own agendas. When you have to use force to coerce adoption of your products you are no longing fulfilling the mandate of a market leader: you are simply trying to rob people to make your financial projections. Isn’t there anyone left in Redmond with the moral and customer service courage to tell the emperor that he has no clothes? Are you listening Microsoft? Can you hear us now?”

“If Vista is now a failure, it’s a marketing failure. Microsoft should have said explicitly that Vista is designed for new add-ons. I use Vista and it is much better than XP in every respect save one: compatibility. Third-party companies haven’t updated their drivers and software and this is the only issue I or anyone I ever hear complain have.”

“Vista was designed from the ground up to promote new hardware sales. System requirements were made intentionally high, to require users to upgrade their hardware, and drive new computer purchases. They seriously misjudged the marketplace.”

“I have every OS installed and Vista is by far better than any Linux version and just as good as Mac for usability. These editors at [Channel Insider] have gone so far to the left.”

“I work for a business that is working to develop next-generation software-as-a-service applications, so we’re very much excited by the expanded technical power that Vista can give us to deliver exciting products to our customers. Unfortunately, that is also the problem because those customers are staying away from Vista in droves. Of course, given the current economic climate, that is expected because deploying Vista means buying expensive beefier hardware…So, Vista stinks for business use because no business wants to adopt Vista due to the high cost of providing hardware platforms to run Vista.”