Keep in mind this is just one of many different theories I have on the subject, but this is based on a good deal of observation.

I started using Vista in November of 2006 when it was released to industry. I downloaded it and installed it on my desktop at work almost immediately. Why? Because I’m a technologist. I love technology and it is my job to learn and explore everything that I can. I think that most computer geeks did the same thing, however there was a big difference between my PC and theirs. See, my desktop at work has a Quad core processor, 4GB of RAM, a Quadro FX4600 video card, and a pair of 10K RPM SAS disks in RAID 0. Yes, all that and I’m getting it refreshed to something better in a few months. I would guess that the average geek’s first experience was installing it on their “test” PC – that PC sitting in the corner that isn’t their primary desktop or their gaming rig. That machine probably had a single core processor and a GB of RAM or so along with older, slower video and hard drive. Another possibility is that they installed it on their gaming rig and had to re-install windows XP when they found out that a driver didn’t exist for one of their components or that it negatively impacted their framerate, even if unnoticable to the human eye. Yet another possibility is that they first saw it from mom/dad/friend’s PC that they just bought for $499 from Wal-Mart. Yeah, same problem there. You can probably see where this is going. A bad first impression is very difficult to overcome. My first impression was excellent, and I’ve been able to help many people since then bring their computers up to speed in order to run Vista adequately.

Non-geeks know who to talk to for PC advice and the news was out about Vista and negative buzz around its launch. So the non-geek comes up and asks, “What do you think about Vista?” To which the geek immediately goes into a lengthy tirade about how buggy (cause they don’t have drivers) and slow (cause they don’t have adequate hardware) it is, but they leave off the part about how they didn’t test it right. Then they go into the DRM and activation problems. Yes, Vista does have a much worse license agreement than XP, I will concede that point. After the non-geek friend talks to a few people about this, peer pressure starts to take over. Geeks who haven’t even looked at it themselves start talking negatively about it. The sheeple (sheep people) geeks perpetuate the negative sentiment and then it is difficult to pick out the individuals who have a truly realistic view about the operating system.

A friend at work came to me a few months ago to ask my opinion about Vista. When I didn’t follow the sheep and started giving a balanced opinion he was very surprised that I had some good things to say about it. See, all he had heard up until that point was the negative. We have been hiring IT people pretty regularly this year and each one that comes in I ask their opinion on Vista. It gives me a good idea about their qualities as a person, employee, and most importantly as a geek/technologist. Unfortunately most have just given me the negative buzz on it and leave out anything positive. That tells me that either they have never tried it for themselves and are sheep, or if they have it was either with a bias or with one of the problems described above and they aren’t true geeks/technologists. Unfortunately I do not make decisions on hiring, but even if I did it’s really difficult to find good IT people and I probably would have made the same decisions anyway.

Windows XP had much of the same resistance early on with people vowing to never move away from their Windows 98 boxes. It was able to overcome this because of the huge amount of positive differences between 98 and XP. There is less of an obvious list of differences between 98 and XP. Now there was an operating system inbetween 98 and XP. Windows ME or Millenium Edition is largely forgotten due to many reasons, but most notably because it was not a significant upgrade to 98. The biggest changes were interface changes, and those just mainly added bloat to a very similar underlying kernel. There were serious deficiencies in 98′s security and XP satisfied those. No one has really had a problem with Windows XP though this time around.

So why did Vista fail? It is a combination of XP still meeting people’s needs and Sheeks (sheep geeks? – I like that one).