To all the Vista haters

Here’s an old, internal memo sent out by none other than the big Bill G. regarding Vista’s less than stellar consumer launch back in Q1 2007:

Team,

The launch of Vista was not our finest hour.  There are several things we could have done better:

– Vista was simply not up to Microsoft’s standards – it clearly needed more time and testing.

– Rather than launch Vista as a monolithic service, we could have launched key consumer features every 30 days as updates for Vista Enterprise, followed by heavy testing phases, and finally releasing Vista as a tested, complete product for mass consumption.

– It was a mistake to launch Vista at the same time as Office 2007 and other major software releases. We all had more than enough to do, and the consumer editions of Vista could have been delayed without consequence.

We are taking many steps to learn from this experience so that we can grow Vista into an operating system that our customers will love.

The Vista launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services.  And learn we will.  The vision of Vista is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it an operating system we are all proud of by the end of this year.

Bill

Funny thing is, this memo was never sent out! This was a rewrite of an internal Apple memo "leaked" to the public, written by Steve Jobs regarding the complete and utter failure of their MobileMe endeavour. MobileMe, their cloud-computing Exchange competitor, looked great on paper, but it ultimately failed miserably when hundreds of thousands of eager iPhone 3G customers jumped on and began syncing their contacts and e-mail messages.

I will be the first to admit that the scale of MobileMe and Vista is nowhere near similar (with Vista being much larger than MobileMe), but if I were only following the hype machine, MobileMe would have been greater than Vista. It was marketed as the next best thing since sliced bread. And after Steve Jobs’ presentation of MobileMe on stage, it might as well have been. It was revolutionary – Apple’s attempt to dethrone Exchange as the premiere synchronization utility.

I posted this little "memo" because if Bill Gates had written something something similar, the Internet would have been in an uproar. Oh wait, he did, and I guess there wasn’t a huge fanboy response. But that’s just the nature of the computing landscape – Apple has built up this seemingly impenetrable PR fortress that protects them from the masses knowing of their major snafus, while Microsoft gets lynched for every last thing they do or say. Ask any person on the street what they think of Vista, and whether or not they used, they will tell you it sucks or it’s slow or it’s just not as good as XP (the reason why Microsoft needs the Mojave Experiment). But ask those same people if they’ve heard of MobileMe, and if they have (and haven’t used it), they’ll probably tell you it’s an amazing feat of engineering. It’s the same with Zune vs. iPod and just about every other Microsoft product.

Neither party should ever be free of consumer hate because they’re going to piss off a demographic sooner or later, but I would just wish the haters would spread their efforts out a little more evenly. Hate with a reason!

Would I still feel the same way if I was going to work for Apple or used Apple products. Yeah, right.