No one thought the world was flat, and when they got off that ship they stated taking slaves and killing people.

Nice ad though.

Laz81

BS, BS, BS! All I hear is Vista sucks, XP is better, OSX is the bomb. I call BS. I have sold computers for almost 10 years now. XP had its problems at first, and every one said it sucks, don't buy it, blah blah blah. And look at it now, you all love it. (All be it only when compared to Vista, but still)

Sure Vista crashes, but it's caused by other hardware / drivers / and software not under Microsoft's control. (Eg. Adobe / Nvidia) Everyone should get down to the root of the error first, if they what to get on the internet and bad mouth anything. I don't care if you hate BMW's for their bad performance, and you want to tell the world. Just make sure you use the correct type of fuel, and keep up with proper maintenance first.

Every so called "Vista problem" that has come across my work bench are all the cause of other things. (Mostly user errors and bad drivers.) And furthermore, the computers I sell with Vista are far less likely to come in for service than an XP computer. My clients have had great success with Vista, even in a mixed XP/Vista Domain. So all of you that think Vista is at fault of all your problems, please find out where the blame should be placed first then go to that company's forum and bitch that their product is crashing Vista.

--Deamion

Deamion

@atuck: I suppose I was talking more about the mac books. If I'm sitting in a car it is kind of hard for me to have a mouse plugged in. That is what annoys me. I have to use both hands if I want to right click something in that case.

@snitch29: If we all seem to agree that XP was better than Vista, is it correct to say downgrade to XP from Vista? If we consider XP better (which I do) wouldn't you be upgrading from Vista?

Aoi

I hope MS aren't spending much on the advert, 'cos I can't think how it could be worse. Is that supposed to be a drawing of the Nina, the Pinta or the Santa Maria, or a frigate from Nelson's navy, circa 1800?

So in 1492 they believed the world was flat? Columbus didn't falsify his log to reflect a course directed by the pope which was impossible?

He didn't sail to divide up America between Spain and Portugal?

As it says in a glorious US history text book, "When the ancient egyptians climbed to the top of a pyramid and discoved they could see much further than from the ground are we supposed to believe that these magnificent engineers hadn't the faintest idea why that could be?"

Trouble is, I'm so old I can remember life before MS, very fast, but hopelessly incompatible.

drg40

Quote from the MS page:
"Sexier! Sure, Windows Vista gets a lot of compliments on its aesthetics. But its style serves an important purpose: to put everything within a click's reach and make you more productive."

Something about that will keep me laughing all day, and I'm pro-Vista

Enrique

@fluxlasers: Although some Catholics (and probably some non-Catholics as well) may have held a flat earth view, it was NOT a dogma of the church, and it was common knowledge that the earth was round by at least the 2nd century B.C.

If you didn't know, there are even people today that believe in a flat earth (Flat Earth Society) and they are not a Christian organization.

According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of "flat earth darkness" among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology." David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers also write: "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference." ([en.wikipedia.org])

You sir, are just being douche.

Rabid Penguin

At one point people thought parachute pants were cool.

At one point people thought the Earth was the center of the universe.

At one point Microsoft made passably decent products.

VideoVampire

@xint:

"Of course when they arrived at Puerto Rico they thought the were in India... so... they called the natives Indians, and to this day every native in the Americas was called Indian."

I've heard that debunked, as such - CC was Italian, not spanish, and so his spanish was rusty, but in writing he said the people he found were people of/in God, in dios

not sure if it holds water.

"Cristobal Colon (which is his real name... not Christopher Colombus)"

Cristobal Colon is the Spanish rendition of his name... he was Italian and so in Modern Italian it is "Cristoforo Colombo"

nutbastard

As my grandfather would say, "You can paint a horse, but it's still a nag."

sonophy

The funniest part is that Vista doesn't seem to work well with MSFT! My Vista will not install service pak 1 no matter what I do. It also always makes Outlook crash when I exit Outlook. I know that has happened to many people.

Noobs-R-Us

@xint:

Vista is not "buggy". I've been running it since the first release candidates appeared on the torrents, not a single blue screen or issue other than waiting for audio drivers for Vista x64 to appear (which were available by the time of release).

I have Vista on ALL my PC's, lappy, HTPC, 2 home computers, work desktop. Far superior to XP, navigation makes sense and yes I do leave on UAC which has caught a few web-popup installers. VMC kicks major ass - nothing else even comes close.

I installed OSx86 on my desktop - what a steaming pile of crap in a ditch. Granted, it may be because I wanted to install it on my own hardware, but isn't that the point?

astrocramp

I like Vista. It runs great on my PC, and on my iMac.

In fact, every person I personally know who hates Vista hasn't even used it. Their hatred was programmed into them by all the Apple ads saying Vista sucked.

If being a resource hog compared to the last OS was the major objection to upgrading to Vista, then I guess you must all be running DOS from a 360kb floppy, right?

The Vista Kernel on my PC uses 10,500KB of system memory and 0.12% of my CPU, and the window manager uses 122,800KB of system memory and 1.12% of my CPU - total 130.2MB and 1.24%. (this is with 15 tabs open in 5 IE7 windows, a remote connection running, an explorer window open with ~60 2GB files showing in large thumbnail view, WMP11 running Handbrake video encoder running at idle and sidebar running)

The Leopard Kernel_task on my iMac uses 146MB of system memory and 0.7% of my CPU, and WindowServer uses 70.6MB and 0.4% CPU - total 216.6MB and 1.1%. (with 6 tabs in 2 Safari windows, Finder open to applications, iCal open, and iTunes open and idle).

IE7 is currently running 475MB and ~1.5% CPU with 15 tabs open (and a bunch of them are large pages). Safari is running 79.8MB and 17.2% CPU with 6 tabs open mostly on shorter pages with not a lot of content.

Explorer is running 123MB and 0.04% CPU. Finder is running 47.13MB and 0.02% CPU.

Vista doesn't seem all that much worse than OSX Leopard to me. And it has the pretty 3D windows that I can resize by grabbing anywhere on 3 sides, and the animations are just as nice and as smooth as OSX. And, of course, there's the cursor thing (When I first got my iMac, I was amazed that the only option for making the cursor bigger than 4mm long was to go into the accessibility settings and magnify it - and it's apparently the ONLY graphic in OSX that doesn't scale smoothly and looks like jagged crap when it's magnified too big).

Baladen

@Hectorvex:
"I'm not going to sit here and defend my wild criticism of a product I used for a short time before replacing it with a hacked copy of XP."

THIS

Here is why I feel a lot of people relate Vista to ME, the "Hacked" versions are always messed up and bug ridden and usually virused. How many people who have a incredibly bad outlook on Vista owned a legit copy and fully updated their PC?????

And for those who are pissed that Microsoft is discontinuing support for a OS to "Force" you to buy a new OS? to those I say how long do you think something should be supported? Should they still make you new releases on VHS cause your too stubborn to upgrade to dvd?

Finally to all of those who say "It's too bloated with eye candy etc" please feel free to install dos 6.22 because every version of windows has been "bloated with eye candy".

wired203

@fluxlasers: "Only the stupid Christians believed this."

Oh, we came so close. Maybe someday...

GadgetPlay

Other historical Bullshit:

Columbus was FIRST! (Despite Egyptian copper mines in Michigan)
No one harnessed electricity before Edison (Despite the Baghdad Battery)
The progression of the planets was first documented by Galileo (despite the Mayan charts)
Los Alamos set off Earths first nuke (despite radioactive glass sheets in Libya)

nutbastard

@aiisahik: Great points!

If these are the things that are supposed to be the reason to switch, then Vista is even more dead in the water than i thought. Every single one of those can be done better with non MS software.

I tried vista on a newish laptop, and while it didn't outright suck i did find the lack of features, freedom and the reduced performance something i couldn't live with.

Yes i switched to Ubuntu, yes i'm very happy with my choice, no i will not try and hawk it to anyone for no reason. Everyone has to figure out what they want for themselves. As for me, the combination of compiz and wine suits me just fine (what can i say, i'm a sucker for eyecandy : ).

Synthaxx

By the time the 15th century rolled around it was already commonly held that the world was spherical.

"Microsoft's "Vista Doesn't Suck" Ad Campaign Thinks Everyone Remembers The 15th Century"

You have to go much further back in time :c)

Rabid Penguin

so i go to microsoft.com and it tells me i should install Silverlight. ok. i download and try to install it. installer tells me i already have a 'newer' version installed. original page still says i should install plugin to 'experience' silverlight.

microsoft fails on all fronts all the time. why cant they get it right? why is that? why?

sluzzuls

@Aoi: I have a mac and use a multi-button Logitech MX Revolution, it's sick.

BB7

Is this the work of Crispin, Porter and Bogusky, the hot shot agency that's supposed to rescue Microsoft/Vista from the pummeling Apple gave it? I surely hope not. It looks like something I would have slapped together 15 minutes before my Advertising 101 class. Grade: D-

Larz2112

Stealing a line from despair inc.

VISTA

"Until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore, you will not know the terror of being forever lost at sea"

TheGeoff

wait, the world isn't flat? dagnabit!

Raz

@dirtybird1977: o.O
1.8ghz.........why???
I used to have vista running on a P4 3.2ghz processor with HT and 512mb it ran ok then i upgraded to 2.5GB ram and it ran super smooth.
Vista needs to be light tho if it was that light without a doubt itd be the best OS out there but then again we're not getting something that light anytime soon. I mean WM6 on a pc with a quad core processor with 4GB ram light.

SneakerFiend

At one point, everyone thought that the world was going to end because of man-made global warming.

Oh... wait...

hakubak

1. At one point, people re-elected George W. Bush.

2. At one point, people thought XP sucked.

3. At one point, everyone bought our products because there was no other choice.

4. At one point, mullets were cool. But this trend is not cyclical ... mullets are not cool and will never be cool again.

broho

People knew the world wasn't flat before Christopher Columbus came around. By 1492, it was accepted fact that the earth was a sphere.

American history books are not a reliable source of information. Most aren't written by historians, but by authors with a stack of other history books to use as reference. Unfortunately, those other history books were also written in the same manner. This has been the case for so long that as a result they are still teaching myths that have been debunked decades ago.

[www.amazon.com] is a nice start.

Ghede

I followed the link and found a list of top 10 things Microsoft wants users to try to "dispel misunderstandings":
[www.microsoft.com]

1. Find that file in a few quick clicks (Instant Search) - Smart people use Google Desktop

2. See everything you have open at a glance (Windows Flip 3D) - Most users disable it to make the interface faster

3. Keep photos organized-and ready to share (Windows Photo Gallery) - Use Flickr, IrfanView, Picasa

4. Create a custom movie without a fine arts degree (Windows Movie Maker) - Use Premiere, iMovie, Vegas, etc

5. Keep track of your music-and play it anywhere (Windows Media Play) - Use VLC, iTunes, Foobar 2000

6. Surf multiple waves of the web at once (IE7) - Use Firefox (DUH)

7. Record and watch TV on your time / 8. Bring your TV and PC together-and take home (Windows Media Center) - This may be the only vista app that's mildly useful

9. Keep the things you need most at your fingertips (Gadgets, Windows Sidebar) - Disable

10. Help your kids stay safer (Parental Controls) - Kids are smarter than their parents are and are gonna get their pr0n no matter what; give it up already.

Maybe there are good reasons why Vista doesn't suck but Microsoft failed to give any here. Instead of core OS features, MS has concentrated on bundling mediocre applications (for which there are always better alternatives) and eye candy (which are always unnecessary). Users know better than to fall for that.

Users fled to OSX not so much because of the eye candy or the bundled apps (the PC is in no shortage of good apps) but because OSX is stable, simple, and less prone to spyware/viruses. It is Microsoft that is misunderstanding users and not vice versa.

I am a Vista user for no other reason than the fact that it came bundled with my PC and MS has stopped supporting XP. That's the most common reason anyone uses Vista and MS doesn't need to advertising here.

aiisahik

There's nothing wrong with vista if you haven't try any other OS, i personally think it sucks and i downgrade my work laptop to XP, but hey if it works for you, good. I got a mac a year ago for my home used and no bull it hasn't crash once, Dude sometimes i think microsoft is on Mcafee & Norton payroll, not that they need it but come on enough is enough, why make a OS so vulnerable???? Sure people claim Mac are not any safer but hey i haven't run in to any problem yet, My company issue laptop, as soon as i get on the net it takes a life of it own, hitting me with pop ups and spam left and right, Sure i can get a pop up blocker but should that be really necessary.

snitch29

@Aoi: Everything you've said is a valid argument, aside from the mouse argument which is so tired and incorrect I almost avoided the temptation to go on a mini-rant about it. Plug in the mouse you use at home to a mac.

Wow. It works. no shit. They always have. Even if you use an apple mouse (which I do not suggest,) they have a right click, scroll wheel and a grip sensor thingie, which technically has more 'buttons' than the Microsoft mouse I have at home because I don't feel like taking my Revolution back from work every day.

But yes, the downfall of Vista may be its emphasis on style instead of functionality, good point.

atuck

And then there's that uncomfortable fact that NO ONE at the time that image is set thought the world was flat.

Crenshaw13

At one point, technerds dated supermodels.

wait a minute........

Der182

@Aoi: I have a Mac and use a $19 trackball with 4 buttons on it.

@Posavoie: I'm not sure about Mac fanboys, but I have heard plenty of complaints about Vista from PC users.

liquidsoapdispenser

My main argument for ignoring Vista is that the developers are ignoring it too. This year fewer than one in ten software developers are writing for Vista, eight percent. While 49% are still writing for XP. THIS YEAR.
Which explains why werk doesn't see the bugs, but the developers see them. They know Vista is just lipstick on a pig. Very shiny reflective lipstick on an old bloated pig.

kahri

At one point, people looked at Tony Romo as their savior...

At one point, English was considered the main language of the USA.

At one point, there was no rift between the PC and Macintosh.

Der182

Hate to nit-pick, actually that's a lie, i love it, but there is no real proof that it was once widely believed the world was flat. there is, however, lots of proof to the contrary. several medieval texts speak of the world as being round and there are, i believe, even some that pre-date those.

So in this context, believing the world to be flat would be akin to believing Vista is a good piece of software, when in actual fact neither of these things has even been widely accepted.

In other words, massive fail.

sirwebster

#1 When Cristobal Colon (which is his real name... not Christopher Colombus) set sail to the west IT WAS VERY WELL KNOWN THAT THE WORLD WAS NOT FLAT... OMG shocking to learn that the history books know nothing about history <-(sarcasm)

The Queen of Spain was an incredibly smart woman who would NEVER give up her precious ships to some goon who felt like sailing. It was known already that the world was round at that time and Cristobal Colon proposed that he could reach India that way, thus creating a new strategy for transport.

Of course when they arrived at Puerto Rico they thought the were in India... so... they called the natives Indians, and to this day every native in the Americas was called Indian.

It took them a few days, and they realized they discovered new land... and the rest is history... which is an understatement in itself.

#2 VISTA is an incredibly buggy OS. There is no way to hide it, no way to play it off... what MS is trying to do, has always done and will (hopefully not) continue to do is try and cover the big pink elephant in the room with a table cloth and hope no one notices it.

MS may be able to bullshit the consumer into buying it's shitty OS, but the technicians out in the field and companies know what is reliable and safe. We'll continue to recommend the best for our clients and it does not include VISTA.

xint

vistas cool after you nuke 30 services...

urbanturban666

$300M for this???

pastrychef

At one point, Gizmodo writers thought that if they threw out a cue they could get creativity back instead of the same ol' back and forth.

92FakeThomasJefferson

@Hectorvex:
What holes in UAC?
Oh, and that isn't an MS site.

werk

@dirtybird1977: The one complaint that I have is that it is very processor hungry and can bring your system to a screeching halt at times.

Other than that, Mrs. Kennedy, how was the parade?

Hat Trick

"At one point everyone thought the world was flat"

This is not true. Only the stupid Christians believed this.

"The first known person to hypothesize that the world was round was the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes (c. 250 B.C.). He compared the noon shadow at midsummer between two cities. Knowing the distance between those two cities and by calculating the angle of the shadows in both locations, Eratosthenes was able to apply geometric theory to determine the size of the earth. He determined the diameter of the earth was 7,850 miles, which is remarkably close to the actual 7,926 miles (at the equator)."

Source www.maps-gps-info.com

Microsoft needs to get their historical facts right if they want people to believe their facts about vista.

fluxlasers

Here's a fact: XP went about its business and i rarely noticed it. In the past fifteen months with Vista rarely a day goes by that it doesn't frustrate the sweet fack out of me.

Case closed. Verdict? Microsoft Vista sucks the bag.

Half off all shafts!

At one point people thought Vista would be good.

Then it shipped.

cbandes

damn you! flawed gizmodo comment box! DAMN YOU!

**shakes fist at the internet gods**

oo0EveryoneElseWasDoingIt0oo

@werk: Well, they've publicly admitted holes in the User Account Control. As mentioned before, it does take an abundant amount of system resources to run. If you want a list of many issues users are having, you can go to Microsoft's own site to read them. I'm not going to sit here and defend my wild criticism of a product I used for a short time before replacing it with a hacked copy of XP.

Hectorvex

I can understand why MS is doing this... Vista is nowhere near as bad as some people (especially Mac fanboys) make it out to be. I haven't had a problem with it and I've been running it for over a year. Having said that, I don't own an NVidia video card (which have caused thousands and thousands of crashes because NVidia can't make a decent driver) and I do find that it's a bit of a resource hog (although my whole OS still uses less memory than iTunes)

Posavoie

@Hectorvex: It's not a good idea for EVERYONE to shit in a ditch. Use your descretion.

Caption: We got the biggest, slowest, least manueverable ship and put a whole bunch of ornate shit all over it. IT STILL FLOATS, BABY!

We're not lost, we just haven't seen the coastline in a while.

Why is it bad when the clouds get big and fluffy, again?

Complain all you want but not only does our shit not stink, it floats proudly with flags waving- sails wide open.

At one point, the best way to get 10,000 miles was to wait for the wind to blow.

oo0EveryoneElseWasDoingIt0oo

@Aoi:

Yea. Xp isn't pretty, but it makes sense. The only reason I'm switching to a Mac with my next purchase is because I've used both Leopard and Vista, extensively, and prefer Leopard. Plus, I don't want my next notebook purchase to be limited by the availability of XP.

michaelwiggins

I haven't used Vista extensively in a long time, but the bugs I had on it were so minor yet so frequent that they frustrated me to no end and I've lost a lot of reason to go back to it. Plus when I can get better performance out of the same applications while using less system resources I tend to want to stick with XP.

Microsoft royally messed up Vista, and the second they began calling it 'Vista' and dropped 'Longhorn' is when I began to waver.

Understandable that Microsoft wants to push it's own agenda but they completely shifted focus on what that agenda was when it came to Vista. Shinier features for worse all around performance...

Absent Blue

@trekkie:
Yeah, that's about what I expected.

werk

At one point, software companies would sell new Operating Systems that were actually built on new code.

kahri

Do I have to install Silverlight to view it? And what the hell is up with microsoft.com?! My first time on the site but WOW it blows and is impossible to navigate!

waveman216

They need the guys who did the ad cmpaign for "Coke 2", friggin genuises.

shamusjack

I'm as big a pc guy as you will find, but I must say that Microsoft is even starting to piss me off. Dropping support for old software in order to force people to upgrade. You are digging your own grave. Vista looks nice and flashy, but does a business pc really need that? They should have just improved upon XP instead of trying to create a whole new OS. I think Macs are partially to blame. They seem to have convinced people that they need all these flashy interfaces in order to seem cool and make it look like they know what they're doing. Personally the Macs mouse pisses me off more than anything. I need as many buttons as I can get on my mouse. Lets stop trying to make things overly user friendly and get back to creating solid operating systems that have amazing capabilities.

Aoi

@werk:

Bug #1: Vista

trekkie

@Hectorvex:
Please list some of Vista's bugs and gaping holes.

werk

"At one point, people thought that it was a good idea to shit into ditches alongside the city streets."

And that is how Canal Street in New York was named. It was a sick joke, referring to the stream filled with sewage in New Amsterdam which is now Canal Street*. God bless this smelly town.

*Source: The Island At The Center Of The World

OMG! Pirates!

Vista is actually not an entirely bad OS. I've been using it and it functions well and looks great. The one complaint that I have is that it is very processor hungry and can bring your system to a screeching halt at times. I'm running a 1.8 dual core and it brings me to my knees at times.

dirtybird1977

@Hectorvex: If Vista did THAT decently I might consider it.

Heyoooooo!

strider_mt2k

So they're marketing to vampires and highlanders?

GeekyNerdGuy

Oh yeah, computers are cool...
waitaminute

Sorry, what was the question again?

strider_mt2k

You mean it's not a good idea to shit in a ditch?

So wait, because the world isn't flat - Vista doesn't suck? That was a perception, that the world was flat. Is Microsoft saying that Vista sucking is just a perception? No, it's a fact. Vista sucks balls, it's got gaping holes and bugs and so on. I'm a PC guy, but I can still smell crap in the ditch when it's present.

Hectorvex

At one point everyone thought the future would carry a little more hope with it.

At one point everyone didn't need to be saved from themselves.

At one point a man could stand up.

strider_mt2k

Fail!

Goes to show just how "uncool" MSFT is. Even their ads to say they don't suck, suck.

Noobs-R-Us

must...
grasp....
....straw...

emanresu

@aiisahik:Keep track of your music-and play it anywhere (Windows Media Play) - Use VLC

Seconded. While WMP is searching for the codec it needs, VLC is playing my video.

PeterSimpson

@LittleJon:

care to tackle the radioactive glass sheets in Libya, or the Egyptian copper mines in Michigan?

nutbastard

I don't much care for Vista. I don't really feel like UAC is an elegant solution-- it works, but it's the computer equivalent of having a ruler slapped across your fingers whenever you do something ill-advised on your PC. Couldn't they have come up with a less intrusive-- or at least, less annoying-- answer? I hate DWM-- it's such a neat concept, but the implementation is just wonktacular-- and I wish they'd figured out a way to do that kind of seamlessly, instead of making it a giant resource suck-hole. It's not even about having the RAM to run Vista properly-- I do-- but it's about not wasting what you've got. I appreciate that Vista's more secure than XP, by and large, and decidedly so when comparing XP at this point in its lifetime to Vista now-- but give me a copy of XP and a copy of nLite and I'd be much happier. I don't want my OS to be a big drain on my system resources-- I want something snappy and really, really lightweight. It's a consideration I also make when I'm weighing any comparable softwares. I don't really care for bloat. And Vista-- at least, for the foreseeable future until even every cheap Dell box is running a quad-core, 8GB RAM setup-- is just using too much of the system resources for my tastes.

wild homes desires a pudding!

@Deamion:

The end user shouldn't have to worry about drivers any more than an automobile purchaser should have to worry about whether the correct brake fluid is in the car when the car is purchased.

If you want to deal with driver issues, you don't pay a bunch of money to do so, you get Ubuntu.

nutbastard

I hated vista when it first came out. Then I got a new tablet, and had a lot less problems. It's buggy as hell, but it got better. Even my nvidia/itunes video problem (couldn't watch quicktime files) worked itself out. But honestly, I'd probably switch back to xp if I didn't have a tablet.

frankfrankly

Actually, DOS 6.x was pretty f**ked up too...(Remember all the problems with Double-Space trashing hard drives???) DRdos was a much better/more stable product...pity MS drove them out of business

maier_m

@nutbastard: I don't think anyone thinks that Edison was the first to harness electricity. The Edison myth is that he invented the light bulb. Swan in the UK had a commercial lightbulb a year before Edison and people had been working on long-life bulbs for years before that.

The big battery myth is that Benjamin Franklin invented the battery. He didn't. He merely wrote an article about somebody else's work on capacitors. He probably never carried out his kite experiment either. He never mentioned it until writings just before his death (when he was trying to secure his legacy). And even if he did conduct this experiment, so what? Apart from the lightning conductor realizing that lightning was electricity has hardly changed the world.

The flat Earth myth comes from that great purveyor a American historical BS Irving Washington. To quote Wikipedia:

"Jeffrey Russell states that the modern view that people of the Middle Ages believed that the Earth was flat is said to have entered the popular imagination in the 19th century, thanks largely to the publication of Washington Irving's fantasy The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1828."

LittleJon

Your name explains a lot of your problems and no no one else has had issues with outlook crashing. Unless you got a hacked one that is.

But than MS should make sure all the torrents of Vista and its other software are fully updated with the latest drivers. It's their fault that people who use them get screwed. Next time your read about beta software available (i.e. sp1) don't install it and wait for the official version.

Lorenc

Yeah, that's gonna convince people.

Totorototoro

@shenanigans61:

I must agree. I'm a bit of an Apple fanboy myself but I just really hate those ads. They're getting really old now, I wish they'd come up with a new campaign already.

chrstphr

Vista is great and should be bug free as advertised *IF* every software you own and currently installed in your PC is post-Vista. Hell, even their own Visual Studio 2005 has had plenty of stories to tell with Vista (and I think this is the source of most complaints).

If you're planning to run an application that is pre-Vista on a Vista machine, you're better off running it under Virtual PC.

ripfire

Apple makes good products, but one thing that annoys the hell out of me is the childish immaturity of a company that drives them have an ad campaign that focuses on their competitors faults. The fact that I've seen "Hi. I'm a mac..." commercials for the past few months of my life makes me never want to buy or recommend anything from a company with such little maturity as Apple ever again. Notice Microsoft doesn't make ads pointing out how the general population of Mac users is a typical IN-YOUR-FACE-YOU-POOP-MOUTH-MICROSOFT-USER stuck-up yuppie who has an obsession with pointing out every single fault in a Microsoft product possible, all while avoiding ever discussing their own.
If you can't make a reasonable ad showing off the capabilities of your product without having to try to PROVE OVER AND OVER that the competitor's is worth nothing but cat crap, I don't want to see it.
Once again, Apple makes good products, but I cannot support a company who can't make a product without immaturely overadvertising it.
Fuck you, Apple.

shenanigans61

"It took a bold voyage to the New World by one Christopher Columbus to change everyone's mind on the first one"

Isn't he the one who was lost and thought America is India and hence native Americans are Indians. By that analogy I'm sure we do know Vista/Microsoft now.

FireBALL

@Aoi:

It's too bad that not everyone knows this (even some Mac users) but you can set your trackpad to use two fingers for a right click (as well as scrolling).

chrstphr

LOL, this is great. All the Vista haters come out!

Fact of the matter is that Vista DOESN'T suck. It's rock solid (I use Ultimate x64 on all my rigs) and makes XP look like ME. It is faster, more secure, and makes me more productive.

pabster

Right, because you guys at Gizmodo had NOTHING to do with propagating that perception. Please.

To all those people who are so "upset" with vista that they decided to switch to "insert OS here". If you thought Vista was buggy as far as support for accessories etc was, can't wait to hear the wonderful and inspiring story of you tracking down those drivers for those OSes.

Lorenc

@broho: LOL ! very good point!!

Ariel_Wollinger

Microsoft = FAIL

Hi, I'm a Mac
And I'm Christopher Columbus
WTF?

MrYuk

@PeterSimpson: I'm a big VLC fan myself. I have my gripes with it: You can't fast forward FLVs, the interface for reencoding a file is lame and you often have to resort to doing it command-line, which is annoying in my opinion, and a few other things. Overall it's a really good player though. But I also find myself using Windows Media Player and Winamp a lot as well...

Rabid Penguin

Isn't this a bit late? Shouldn't MS have launched this campaign back when Apple started their Vista-bashing? They knew that the retired "wow" campaign didn't work well enough. They knew the numbers were not as big as they would have liked.

Zlevee

@nutbastard: Presumably, in a flat world, the ship disappears as a whole as it sails away. In a round world, the curvature of the Earth increasingly blocks the line of sight from the bottom up with respect to a watcher at a fixed point. After all, on a round world, the surface of the ocean is curved, so the ship sailing away appears to be sinking as it sails "down" the side of the curve.

frigg

@nutbastard: America's indigenous people were far more technologically advanced than we give them credit for. In a world where evidence could go either way, I'm tempted to credit 1,000s of years of indigenous ingenuity.

I'm not familiar with the Libyan radioactive glass, but I am curious what you think of Zheng He and the 1421 Hypothesis.

92FakeThomasJefferson

@dedalus987: then he should spit the piece of the apple out :D

dedalus987

i only wished they kept dx9 libraries, and stopped asking for my permission to copy files from certain locations, or to run certain programs. they shouldve waited till last January to release it instead of ultra-prematurely.

they should just have a commercial with a really angry "pc-dressed" "nerd guy" taking the most aggressive and hateful bite out of an apple. that would make me happy.

dedalus987

@frigg:

how does that differ from what one would see in a flat world?

nutbastard

At one point, everyone thought there was a god.

Oh! Wait! Shit!

waterdrop

@dirtybird1977: "Vista is actually not an entirely bad OS ... the one complaint that I have is that it is very processor hungry and can bring your system to a screeching halt at times."

No dude, that seriously sounds pretty bad.

mcjake

@fluxlasers:

It was an interesting topic on the UK program "QI" which is hosted by Stephen Fry and basically he debunked the whole thing as an urban myth, albeit a really long one. Apparently there was no text or any other kind of information that mentioned that anyone thought the world was flat.

If this can be proved beyond doubt (how much actual research do you think they guys from the ad company did?) than this can only heap more embarrassment on the rather dodgy reputation Vista has had from day one!

media_lush

@PeterSimpson: One feature I miss is frame by frame advance on VLC...

Ariel_Wollinger

@shenanigans61:

I think the perception of the ad campaign varies from person to person. Obviously you've projected an "immature" sense of the company onto the ads, whereas others simply take them as light-hearted jokes. They may be beating the dead horse by sticking to the same ad campaign for so long, but they do so because it's successful and humorous.

Apple computers have their flaws, as do Windows PCs, and they'll be debated to no end, but as it stands now Vista has much more room for improvement than OS X does.

Tastic7

Early proof of a round world: as a ship sails off into the distance, it disappears bottom first, the top of its mast the last thing to disappear.

frigg

Should be a Pirate ship! Arrrgh!
Better yet, change that picture to the Titanic!

SigmundTheSeaMonster

@frigg:

yeah but would not "the top of its mast the last thing to disappear" still apply?

nutbastard

Everyone's a MSFT hater, until you mention the Xbox...

berribrand

I tried using it for about a month and I hated it. QED

saych

This campaign will backfire terribly for MS. The word on Vista is out and no campaign will change that, it will only make people think more about Vista's shortcomings.

sos10

@nutbastard: "the top of its mast the last thing to disappear" would only apply if the world were round. Otherwise, it's just one object moving away on a plane, uniformly disappearing, and then gone as a whole. That the ship appears to sink, with the bottom half disappearing first not because it's too far away to see (since the mast is still visible) but because a round world obstructs your view from the bottom up, proves the world is round.

By way of the google:

[demonstrations.wolfram.com]

frigg

or maybe this one, lol

+ Watch video

snitch29

Oh my god. Microsoft needs to form a real marketing division and hire a real ad agency, this stuff is just pathetic. It's even worse than the "Wow" and "Social" ads.

fpn1010

@Tastic7: Ok, here.
Call somebody a "dummy" one day. Unless they have excessive rage, it's just a "light-hearted joke".
Now, call them a "dummy" the next day, and every day after that for the next 6 months. Not only is it annoying to that person, GodDAMN it's annoying to hear you walk in every damn day and call that guy a "dummy", even when I'm indifferent. So now, what's my perspective on you? Sorry, but I'm cheering for "dummy" to beat your ass.

shenanigans61

They should use this instead

+ Watch video

snitch29

@frigg: The world isn't flat?

johnnyabnormal

Vista DOESN'T SUCK, as long as you're sensible and get it on a new dual or quad core PC with plenty of RAM and HDD space (which are reasonably priced these days), and you turn off a few of the more annoying security features.

Vista DID SUCK when it first came out, lacked drivers, had bugs, and brought then mainstream PC's to their knees. M$ deserves to be spanked in the press for that. But if you are buying a new PC but avoiding Vista now, you are cheating yourself of a great user experience.

Every new OS demands more horsepower. I'm a firm believer in never upgrading an existing PC's OS unless you are sure you have the HP for that.

redman042

I guess that I bought into all the doom and gloom spiel about Vista. In fact, I was so convinced that Vista was no good that I didn't purchase a much-needed upgrade desktop for the home for over a year. Three weeks ago, I finally decided to bite the bullet and purchased a mini Acer PC for $459 running Vista. I was actually amazed of how well and FAST it ran. I haven't had ANY trouble with the exception that I couldn't install two old 16-bit legacy software. Indeed, with anti-virus software running, it boots in about 1 minute, shut downs in under a minute, goes to sleep and wakes up within a few seconds, and runs really smooth all day long. I didn't even have to fine-tune the machine when I first got it (with the exception of removing the preloaded crapware). My wife too has been so impressed that she keeps telling me (even though she's not too informed about operating systems), "I really love our new computer. It's so fast and pretty." Hey, if the wifey is happy, then everyone is happy!

So, now that I have seen Vista in action, I will soon update my aging XP laptop this Fall. Quite frankly, I'm looking forward to it! Yes, at one point people believed that the earth was flat, but some tested the waters and realized that it wasn't so. After testing the Vista waters, I'm one happy customer!

funtasticguy

@fluxlasers: But before him...?

Metkis

Vista: Hey buddy it looks like you're trying to do something there, can I ask you if you know what you're doing?

ME: F@$% off and leave me alone!

(5 minutes later)

Vista: Hey again, it looks like you're trying to do something can I get you to confirm that?

ME: F%#^ off you POS!

feckineejit

They should instead take the Mac Vs. PC ads and run with them, hiring the PC guy making big bucks and riding dirty with some hoes while the mac guy struggles to fund his IRA.

pevans34

@Larz2112: "Is this the work of Crispin, Porter and Bogusky, the hot shot agency that's supposed to rescue Microsoft/Vista from the pummeling Apple gave it?"

An ad agency's output is only as good as its client. Microsoft hired them thinking they'd put a refreshing new spin on their image but unless they were really given the freedom to push boundaries they'll end up with milquetoast stuff like this. The agency might be showing them world-beating ideas but given what I've heard about MS's beauracracy I don't have any difficulty imagining a long, gradual watering-down process that ends up like this.

James D

If ms had taken a hard line and only releae x64 versions of vista they might have had something worth upgrading too. The only reason I'm considering vista at all is that the x64 version of it seems better supported than x64 XP.

1roll20s

"I have a dream that one day, down in Cupertino, with its vicious fanboys, with its CEO having his lips dripping with the words of "intuitiveness" and "imperviousness" -- one day right there in Cupertino little PC users will be able to join hands with little Mac users as brothers."

christopherborne

Nothing says cutting edge like going after the Old Spice / H. Salt demographic !

lucky_you

@johnnyabnormal: It used to be, and then it changed its mind. Stupid world!

frigg

There was a point where everyone thought the world was flat, and the 15th century wasn't that time. Columbus being the only one to think the world was round is a complete and utter myth; everyone knew it already. What was doubted was a quicker trade route to Asia, and they were damn right -- the Americas were in the way.

OmegaVader

Of course, the flaw is obvious. In real life, the world is not flat, and Vista does suck.

Brian

@snrub: replace "round" with "spherical"

snrub

Back in the 15th century, people didn't think that the world was flat. It had been accepted that it was round for centuries.

Washington Irving put the idea out in the 19th century that people thought the world was flat in the middle ages

snrub

The ship in the picture is certainly not from the fifteenth century. More like three hundred or so years later.....

/pedantry

meropealcyone

Costermonger

So what they're saying is common knowledge and practices are for many years quite often wrong, until the better alternative is found.

So in the future everyone will use Linux or OSX

flick152

i installed Vista on my MacPro 6GB/150 raptordrive using final version of 10.5/bootcamp (10.5.3 i think).

Installed VLC on it.

Tried to playback an h.264 video with VLC, wouldn't play. Changed settings in VLC, started to play - blue screen of death.

formatted bootcamp partition and installed XP for compatibility testing.

sold copy of Vista to pc-using friend.

Vista might suck, but i couldn't honestly care less... i don't care what Windows users think or feel or deal with, because its not my problem.

theotherstevejobs

I like Vista. The Media Center is great -- I just wish it had Blu-Ray support.

Of course, I still do all my actual work on an XP machine, but that's only because my office probably won't upgrade for years and years.

GeekyNerdGuy

Great analogy, Microsoft. ::pulls out Windows Vista Bible and drops on ground (seriously, not even kidding, I bought the ebooks version of the Vista bible, because I had NO CLUE about how to work it)::

tiffanyrules

I work on computers all the time and Vista is great. It is easy to use,has a lot of little features that make it nice and has never given me problems.

Everybody just hates anything Microsoft does because they are Microsoft. If it gave you a hand job while making you eggs every morning you would all bitch that it wasn't a blow job and there was no bacon with the eggs.

CSUSam

@Larz2112: I expected more from Crispin too, and I still do. Traditional advertising is not really their strong point. I'm waiting to see what else they do to go along with the campaign. I think cool things are coming, but this is pretty meh.

Digo

@CSUSam: Why would you make eggs without bacon? That doesn't even make sense.

Rabid Penguin

@Costermonger: Hahaha!

johnnyabnormal

@johnnyabnormal: "@frigg: The world isn't flat?"

Apparently not. Who knew?

@CSUSam: "If it gave you a hand job while making you eggs every morning you would all bitch that it wasn't a blow job and there was no bacon with the eggs."

You got that right. I gotta have bacon.

GadgetPlay

@snrub: my earth is flat AND round. I think of it like a sombrero that got run over.

pfft... spheres. leave it alone. what? do you want them to call the earth planar as well?

Before Columbus, everyone thought the physical reprsentation of the Earth's mass was planar as opposed to spherical- an incorrect assumption.

oo0EveryoneElseWasDoingIt0oo

[i33.tinypic.com]

drexamine

Fixed the original ad with a quick trip to the photoshop.

[i33.tinypic.com]

There, that's better.

drexamine

I hate these fanboy arguments. I use Vista, XP, and OSX at home and at work. They are all good operating systems. The main problem with vista is that people were running it on shitty hardware. End of story.

Joseph_Shaw_520

Not this again...

Columbus DID NOT change anyone's mind. At his time the common knowledge among sailors was that the world was round. The argument was how big around it was.

Columbus was dead wrong on how large the earth is. By his calculations Asia would be where America is so he thought he could get there be going west. Everyone else was saying that Asia is where it is and that a voyage from Europe west to Asia would take too long: food and water would run out long before you'd get there.

He was out of food and water when he happened upon Cuba, or some such island. Saved his bacon.

So, MS is trying to change what they consider to be a misconception with another widely-held misconception. Figures.

Next thing you know they will be saying that oil comes from dead dinosaurs and prehistoric plants...

SB-Surfer

@Deamion: So true. I remember when XP first came out. Everyone was whining and complaining, and yet now everyone is embracing it. And I don't understand why. I had hundreds more problems with XP than with Vista. XP was/is a maze. I've spent countless hours cleaning up my XP and yet in a few weeks it has repopulated my hard drive with more crap. Compared to Vista, XP is junk imho. *prepares Taser and riot shield to fend off droves of crazed XP lovers* Granted, I probably just have had a bad experience with XP, and I'm thinking of trying it again just for the heck of it, but there is no killer reason to "upgrade" to XP. Like Deamion said, a lot of Vista's problems come from a lack of software support from other companies. People just aren't willing, or just too lazy, to fix their software to work on a new OS. And don't get me started about Apple and their damned Macs and OSX. Not to say I don't like Macs, I just find they are over hyped.

Duckspwn

I find the landing page laughable. See the big quote:

"Windows Vista is beautiful," The New York Times raved.

Because (1) being purty is the most important thing and (2) The NYT is a top authority on Operating systems.

That's kind like a review in architectural digest referencing the author's girlfriend saying "It's really TALL".

unklegwa

@Aoi

Actually, you kind of missed the boat on this one:

"Dropping support for old software in order to force people to upgrade."

In reality this is exactly what Microsoft needs to do.

Apple did this when they switched to OS X. It pissed a lot of people off, but it meant they didn't have to look back and support their old, archaic System 9.

If Microsoft would drop their 32-bit support and focus on a new 64-bit shell, they'd be able to put their legacy OS's in the rear view mirror and plow forward. They're saddled with the idea that they need to support as much as possible largely because of the business sector. Maybe the answer in Windows 7 is an extremely stripped down OS (graphically) with excellent networking functionality (think Windows NT) for businesses and a much more rich, full OS experience for the home sector.

Nightskyre

Vista is a great OS. I have been using Vista for a year and a half. I have seen some silly bugs first hand when the OS was introduced. After SP1 has been deployed there is really no reason why people don't have a reason to switch. I fought through the nightmare hoping that it would eventually get better. And it has. Most of my friends that haven't switched to Vista or generally people that complain about its uses DON"T USE IT. I have been begging my boss at work to let me install the OS on our machines at work and he finally agreed. It was the single best thing we have done for ourselves. Vista IMO is alot more user friendly and because I have been using Vista so long I cannot stand XP and its ridiculousness. I mean my Cruzer usb flash drive on XP makes no since to me. Why do I have to install all this other crap to use the same thing on Vista without extra hardware and I get the benifits of READYBOOST. There is also updates often so I'm sure that these updates are helping someone's speed and reliability. OWW YEAH and DX10 is the best thing since boobs. I do have to admit my computer at home is a newer built gaming machine. But Vista isn't that demanding.

I understand that my grandmother's computer wont run it, but then again it has WINDOWS 2000 on it. LOL! Really give it chance and if you don't like it then I will send you a brownie. A special brownie.

Al1enware

Completing the tone-deaf quality of the whole campaign is the ship in the illustration -- a design in use about 400 years AFTER Columbus, when round-the-world voyages were routine. Fire the agency.

StutiAss

Vista is a great OS. I have been using Vista for a year and a half. I have seen some silly bugs first hand when the OS was introduced. After SP1 has been deployed there is really no reason why people don't have a reason to switch. I fought through the nightmare hoping that it would eventually get better. And it has. Most of my friends that haven't switched to Vista or generally people that complain about its uses DON"T USE IT. I have been begging my boss at work to let me install the OS on our machines at work and he finally agreed. It was the single best thing we have done for ourselves. Vista IMO is alot more user friendly and because I have been using Vista so long I cannot stand XP and its ridiculousness. I mean my Cruzer usb flash drive on XP makes no since to me. Why do I have to install all this other crap to use the same thing on Vista without extra hardware and I get the benifits of READYBOOST. There is also updates often so I'm sure that these updates are helping someone's speed and reliability. OWW YEAH and DX10 is the best thing since boobs. I do have to admit my computer at home is a newer built gaming machine. But Vista isn't that demanding. I understand that my grandmother's computer wont run it, but then again it has WINDOWS 2000 on it. LOL! Really give it chance and if you don't like it then I will send you a brownie. A special brownie.

PaolaHackle

"It took a bold voyage to the New World by one Christopher Columbus to change everyone's mind on the first one..."

HISTORY FAIL.

From Wikipedia: "The Myth of the Flat Earth or Flat Earth mythology refers to the modern belief that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages saw the Earth as flat, instead of spherical. During the early Middle Ages, many scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. By the 14th century, belief in a flat earth among the educated was essentially dead."

[en.wikipedia.org]

GoodIsh

I can hear it now, the subliminal messages in the ads: "Please stop selling out stock!"

michaelleung

Everyone knows that Vista and the internet are flat!

fluf

I thought it was Ferdinand Magellan who proved the Earth wasn't flat.

dlozarie

All those people who say, that people who don't like vista don't use it are quite full of it. I've used vista for the last year at work and it's trash.

I suspect all the vista lovers love vista ultimate, which is quite different from the "mainstream" version that most computer buyers have.

Try networking a shared drive to vista home basic and see how much you love it.

(on topic) awful ad campaign, If microsoft is going to throw away $300 million, why don't they give it to me?

Nobody-Really

@dlozarie: No, he was just the first to circumnavigate it.

LittleJon

@SB-Surfer: It was "Hispaniola" ("La Española" in Spanish), now the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Other than that your 100% correct.

Colombus was an idiot, but he got lucky (unlucky for the ~50 million people already living in the Americas).

LittleJon

That picture makes me think NOTHING of computers but rather a man riding through Boston yelling about the British.

Good job Microsoft. You're 'advertisements' work worse than your OS.

ttech10

@Aoi:
So then you also agree that DOS should continue to live? You have to cut the cord somewhere. If you go back a few years you will find a HUGE mess that was 16bit versus 32bit. The whole change over was long and drug out. It pissed off many people. So now that MS did something about it, now you have many people that are pissed off?

Isn't this a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation?

After all, once you elect a new president by popular vote don't you automatically piss off a few million people? Don't those few million people need to "get over it?"

Microsoft is attempting to create a smooth path between 32bit and 64bit. Whether they succeed or not doesn't really matter as they failed the last time anyway. Apple also failed with their changeovers.

They are also addressing the fact that hardware is moving at a much faster pace then when XP was born. How does anyone expect an OS from that time to keep up? It cant! Thus the reason MS is moving towards a more modular path. In order to do that you need to make major changes.

The hilarious part is that Apple is making the same exact mistakes MS made back then. They're slapping on layer after layer after layer to keep up with the hardware.

So what's next? OSX 10.6 will be released for Intel only and all the PPC users will be crying like babies and wondering why Apple didn't just build upon 10.5. What an ugly cycle!!!

On top of all that, of all my Vista business machines, none of them are flashy or have eye candy. That is not a requirement to run Vista. I think this will be one of the misconceptions MS hopes to clear up.

JEmlay

At one point, everyone thought 1024 Megabytes of RAM were enough.

jeffimix

HISTORY LESSON MICROSOFT, columbus didnt prove the world was flat, it was a fictional tale popularised by washington irving. It was well proven that the world was round by the ancient greeks who then calculated the circumference fairly accuratly.

Its no wonder they screwed up on this ad, it was probably made using vista

amanda-hugnkiss

@Aoi: "I suppose I was talking more about the mac books. If I'm sitting in a car it is kind of hard for me to have a mouse plugged in. That is what annoys me. I have to use both hands if I want to right click something in that case."
It is not my intention to sound like a jerk, but if you go under System Preferences - Keyboard & Mouse, you can activate a two-finger-touch "right-click". I love doing that to people that make that only one button mouse thing at school. I find it much better to use than an actual button, and I'm hoping to see a Windows laptop with similar functionality.

@Larz2112: You know. I was wondering if it was Crispin Porter and Bogusky as well. If it is. Damn. That's quite bad.

MrHaroHaro