It’s official Vista is was rushed to market. It’s been reported that playing an MP3 file will throttle network traffic to roughly 10% capacity. The reports vary in which network types are affected but there is no doubt that Microsoft officially throttled network capacity because they noticed that there was some distortion without the throttling. This has been confirmed through further analysis. Microsoft is working on a solutution at present.
What’s amazing is that there aren’t problems with systems other than Vista. Not XP, 98, 95, Mac, Linux etc… If Microsoft was aware enough of the problem to create a hack to work around it…why didn’t they just fix the damn problem? Besides being years behind schedule, and millions over budget, would you rush your flagship product to market with as many bugs and incompatabilities as there are? Were they expecting users to miss, or overlook these glaring mistakes? Now Microsoft has loosed this beast on the market and they are taking a beating over it.
Businesses are hesitant to adopt such an expensive system architecture. Gamers don’t want to sacrifice their framerates and hardware for the sake of a couple nifty rendering effects. Existing users are being warned away because their old hardware isn’t supported. Even pundits are backing away slowly because Microsoft is dragging their feet to resolve these issues some nine months after release. It’s only the new computer buyers that are being forced to upgrade because, with the exception of Dell, all the OEMs were held at gun point encourged financially to sell new systems with Vista only. Microsoft in the meantime is sitting back trying to spin the whole thing with positive sales numbers based on some skewed comparison to the adoption rate of XP. Speculation is that the Vista sales numbers are also including the licenses sold to OEMs as well as end users. Either way they seem to have done a bang up job at screwing up a very promising operating system.