There, i've said it. Vista does fail, but not from an end-users perspective. It's all about developers, developers developers; and Microsoft don't seem to have them prioritized in their grand plan, which doesn't involve the name Microhoo! anymore.

Let's start by saying that I don't know how to create a Windows application. The mere suggestion seems daunting to me, as I don't even know where to start if I wanted to develop something that is similar to things I use on a daily basis. There aren't any tools included with the OS itself, and I bet I'd have to Google for a while before I came across any relevant tutorials that probably aren't even associated with Microsoft.

I have great admiration for Windows developers, as they basically are responsible for making my everyday tasks easy - and most of the developers out there do what they do for free. But, they are at a severe disadvantage with Vista. Let's go back to XP-- XP didn't have the User Account Control (that annoying little box that pops up when you run something that requires admin permissions) which causes so many problems for backwards compatibility, nor did it have other features that Vista has that breaks stuff that was designed for XP.

You expect extremely old programs not to work on new versions of operating systems - for instance a win9x app on Windows Vista, but the switch from Windows v5 (XP) to Windows v6 (Vista) you do not expect to break anything. Surely the levels of compatibility for legacy apps should improve when new OSs are released, no? That makes more sense than the complete discontinuation of older products - and the programs that run on them. Vista should have spent more time on the drawing board catering to all of the backwards compatibility issues, rather than rushing ahead and calling it a new operating system, when it shouldn't really be called part of the Windows family.

I really hope Microsoft address this very large problem in Windows 7, and make sure that people can actually create software for it. Yeah, you will still get completely idiotic end users who are adamant that it is not their fault that their PCs don't work, but you'll always get that. (I'm not going to start on them yet-- perhaps in another post?) Microsoft need to get their priorities right, and address the very people Steve Balmer so famously chanted the name of over and over again while he was (possibly?) high on crack. Yup, you can always rely on Steve.

Knew I'd get those videos into a post someday. What? They're kind of relevant. Kind of...