GCN Lab Impressions
By John Breeden II, Greg Crowe, Trudy Walsh
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A fond adieu to Vista, the 'New Coke' of operating systems
Last week, Charles Songhurst, Microsoft’s general manager of corporate strategy, is reported to have said that Windows Vista is a “less good” operating system, all but validating what observers had been saying for some time: Windows Vista is Microsoft’s New Coke.
This thought took me back to a summer long, long ago, when I took my first sip of the mysterious new cola in the bright red can. I have to admit, I didn’t hate New Coke the way so many people did. True, it did taste more like Pepsi, but I was OK with that. I know the whole Coke versus Pepsi debate is one of the classic oppositions of our time, perhaps as much as red state versus blue state, Bert versus Ernie, Mac versus PC. But for some reason I was able to create a synthesis for that dialectic as it fizzed in the red can. When New Coke was later taken off the soda machine menu, I secretly mourned it.
Just as I didn’t hate New Coke, I didn’t hate Vista. I have to confess, here in the virtual confessional of gcn.com, that the GCN Lab gave a “best of FOSE” award to Vista in 2007, the year it came out. I remember visiting the Microsoft booth and being impressed with Vista’s Little Mermaid-style aquatic-themed graphics and ribbons.
With a new operating system readying for launch, Microsoft itself is saying Vista is “less good.” So is Vista going to go down in history as just a branch off the main evolutionary tree of Microsoft operating systems, a sort of Neanderthal of operating systems? I understand that Windows 7 is slimmer, sleeker, more nimble, and that Vista was doughy and annoying at times. Yet I can’t help but mourn Vista, as I once mourned New Coke.
Posted by Trudy Walsh on Sep 28, 2009 at 2:59 PM