Is Vista Underrated? Depends on Who — and Why — You Ask.

I’m going to comment on a discussion going on over at Scobleizer about Vista and how it might be underrated as far as popular opinion goes.

At the high level, I think Robert is right. For the most part, Vista gets a lot of hate, most of it:

• undeserved given the nearly-violent level at which it’s being voiced, and
• flowing from the tech-elite blogosphere, Mac blogs, or blogs with some anti-MS axe to grind.

I’m an Apple guy, but I’ve used Vista at a cursory level. And it’s nice. Quite nice. It’s a substantial improvement over XP, and it equals OSX in some areas. There are some inconsistencies in its UI design and usability (lots, actually), but most are being ironed out as you read this. Others are still painfully present.

Regardless, Vista has RTMed for corporate use, and the game is on, for better or worse.

There are two aspects about Vista that need to be understood at a basic level. One involves the mainstream market and how it will react to Vista, and the other is why Vista is indeed shackeled by its predecessors’ success and therefore isn’t all that it could be.

Cliffs Notes: Yes, Vista is pretty good and people are being a bit too hard on it, namely bloggers. And yes, Vista still has its share problems and many still consider it a mess, but this is not all its own fault.

ASPECT ONE: Average Joe Doesn’t Care About Operating Systems

Much of the hate Vista has received thus far has been from the blogosphere at large, and that’s fine and well. It’s fun to fight over OSX Tiger/Leopard versus Vista. It’s picking your fighter and rooting him on. For the tech elite and those technically engaged enough to care, the nuances of each system matter, for the gods live in the details. To those people — and I count myself among them — Vista might deserve some of the criticism it’s getting, even though some of it might be purely academic and have little real-world impact. Other critics are scathing but accurate, hoping, in the end, to get MS to make a better product.

The problem with all the shit-talking is that it almost completely ignores the mainstream market. Joe Blow does not have the time nor compunction to care about his operating system. He digs things that look cool, and he just wants to run the Internet, MS Office, Quicken and Picasa. He doesn’t want to get a virus or have his PC vomit on itself because of spyware. He might want a few games to work. He doesn’t care about much else, so all the elegance in the world is lost on him. He knows Windows, and he’s willing to indulge Vista’s learning curve, because it’s not too steep and that’s where all his apps run. To him, computers are a tool, a utility. Not a passion. Right?

Right. So in the end, Vista will own the mainstream market for the foreseeable future because of guys like Joe. Good Enough sometimes is good enough, and it drives people who preach Better is Better crazy.

This is not to say that the Vista curve won’t provide an opportunity gateway for users to consider alternative platforms, but that’s another story. And regardless of who does or does not move to Mac (or Linux), the broader market remains largely unaffected.

All this, of course, ignores the fact that come next year, OEMs will be shoving Vista down their customers’ throats whether they like it or not, but let’s set that aside for the purposes of this discussion.

ASPECT TWO: Vista Suffers Because Of Its Parents’ Success

When Apple had to make the decision to put something of a screw on its legacy customers while it shifted to OSX, it did so with a certain degree of liberation. At the time, Apple wasn’t faring well, and drastic measures were needed if Apple were going to survive. Apple wasn’t tied to a legacy of millions of users and massive corporate penetration, so legacy application support was less of an issue. Apple bit the bullet, created the Classic environment under OSX, and made the move to OSX in earnest. Apple hoped that the attrition rate from such a move would be minimized with Classic running in OSX, but they also hoped for something much, much larger: that in addition to faithful users staying with and learning OSX, they could superimpose another curve of users adopting OSX from other platforms.

They had the chance to start from scratch, to build a modern OS as they saw fit, with minimal user fallout. As it happened, they did pretty well with the execution: Apple grew, and grew big time. But it’s important to note that they probably would have imploded if they tried to pull the same move with a huge, business-centric customer base who demanded seemingly eternal legacy application support.

In stark contrast, Microsoft has no such luxury, and thus will never be able to make the clean break that Apple did. Nevah evah.

Windows, being monolithic in its success and market presence, has millions upon millions of users. It has tremendous corporate/business penetration, and therefore has countless legacy applications to support. It can’t just throw on jeans and a t-shirt and reinvent itself. It’s way too invested in that which earlier versions of Windows created, by no fault of its own.

Vista inherited the sins of its father, and as a result isn’t as elegant or refined as some of the competition, namely OSX.

Question is, will anyone care?

Some will, most won’t. (See ASPECT ONE).