Overall, the actions of MS and Intel don’t surprise me. I’ve been in the corporate system and privy to decisions based on whim and fantasy, just completely disregarding all good advice. My first experience was really disheartening. I thought corporate decisions were carefully thought out and fact based. Who knew.

The biggest problems I have with Vista to this day, are “nitch market” and “Internal Business” products.

Often the “Nitch market” products are developed by a 1 or 2 man shop. The developer is doing it on his spare time from his “real job”, and basically ignored Vista till it came out. Its bad enough, for instance, that they ignored things like “.HLP” have be depreciated since what, 1995? They have NOT followed the “secure computing” guidelines because “Oh, that’s a lot of work and I don’t need to” – and they didn’t (and at their day programming job, the company turned off the security stuff in XP SP2). Many Many of the applications are still in VB6

As for “Internal Business” applications, the situation can be even worse, if you can believe it. I know of more than one company that still has VB 3.0 applications running around, because they felt VB 4.0 was unstable, so they never ported to the 32 bit world, and they are cursing themselves even now. Managers say “Oh, we’ll turn off features in Vista to make our apps run, and THEN upgrade our applications”, instead of having their developers spend a little time to make the application run on either Vista or XP

To quote Steve Balmer “Developers, developers, developers, developers”

Microsoft did very little (and is still doing very little) to win the SMALL developer to the “Microsoft Way”. Once upon a time, a copy of the “MSDN Professional” (and at that time it included everything) cost a couple Hundred bucks, and if you played your cards right, could be cheaper. Today, what does a copy cost you? 3K plus?

Now, I understand what happened. Microsoft decided to spend a LOT more of their effort on large corp development, and went away from the small shop. I can understand why (I can remember Mike Rissie saying ‘YOUR job is to make your customers happy, MY job is to sell more of these boxes’ (while holding a VB box), but there is a problem. The small developer mindset has moved to the FOSS comunity. The small “I do my work at night” developer is between a rock and a hard spot. He’s either got to bootleg his software (Hey, I have it on my work PC, I’ll put it on my home machine), or he has to pay, what, Three, four thousand a YEAR for the combination of Microsoft products, plus a few 3rd party tools. In the mean time, he’s lucky to sell 100-200 of his product a year, with a $100 street price, or a $50 upgrade price. It doesn’t pay

So all those programs that have been written over the years, all that cool stuff that runs under XP, just doesn’t work RIGHT under Vista. Microsoft need to spend a BUNCH of time helping these small developers moving their applications to Vista. I’m not talking reporting tools here. I’m talking REAL porting tools, or maybe dropping the price on some developer SKUs, and having Developer Support helping these people port products – and publicise this help. Yeah, it’s going to hurt Microsoft Consulting, and it’ll hurt the bottom line in say, developer sales, but you guys are in danger of losing mindset to the FOSS community. A LOT of people I know are saying “If I have to find new software that works, and I have to learn a new OS, why should I stick with Microsoft?” (and that scares me, as a developer who makes his living writing software for Microsoft OS platforms)