ANTenna Blog -- Hardware & Software

The end of the year lists are coming fast and furious but who would've thought that the much ballyhooed and much maligned Vista would end up on the top of anybody's list? Well PC World is calling it the biggest tech disappointment of the year. That's gotta hurt.

PC World just came out with The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007 and Vista occupies the number one position.

"Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?" asks writer Dan Tynan.

Tynan continues: "It's not that Vista is awful. The integrated security and parental controls are nice, and the Aero interface is as whizzy as it gets. Searching and wireless networking are much faster and easier than under XP. It's just that Vista isn't all that good. Many of the innovations the operating system was supposed to bring--like more efficient file and communications systems--got tossed overboard as Microsoft struggled to get the OS out the door, some three years after it was first promised. Despite its hefty hardware requirements, Vista is slower than XP."

Vista has inspired its share of haters and lovers in a way that only a new operating system can. But with Vista users "upgrading" to XP and XP getting updates that rev up its performance it's hard to remember what all the fuss was about.

Still, Tynan's conclusion says it all:"We have no doubt Vista will come to dominate the PC landscape, if only because it will become increasingly hard to buy a new machine that doesn't have it pre-installed. And that's disappointing in its own right."

Have you switched your company over to Vista? Are you considering "upgrading" to XP? Let us know.

Postscript to all you Apple fanatics: Don't get too smug. Leopard made it to PC World's list at number 8.