Digital Sushi

Michael Gartenberg | December 20, 2007, 10:15 AM

Let's face it. Vista's been really getting slapped around lately. CNET calls it one of the "top ten terrible products". PC World is a little kinder, calling it one of the "fifteen biggest tech disappointments of 2007". I'm starting to think of Vista a little like Sushi. I don't love Sushi. If it's around, if it's prepared well, if it's fresh, I'll eat it. I rarely go out of my way to eat it, but if there's an alternative, I'll usually eat that. If you ask me if I like Sushi, I'll usually say it's not bad.

Vista is a lot like that. If it's on a machine that has proper driver support, if the machine isn't loaded with junk apps to slow it down, if it has a fast enough processor, the Vista experience is OK. It's not something that I would seek out though. This is Microsoft's problem. Very few consumers are looking to purchase new PCs just so they can run Vista. The reasons behind that are complex but are not super difficult to understand. In the long road to bring Vista to market Microsoft forgot one thing, a clear set of benefits to users. I recently asked a Microsoft executive if they could give me three reasons why a consumer should go to Vista. The first answer was more security. The second was something about "experience". We never got to a third. I tried another executive and asked for ten words why consumers needed Vista. Just ten words. Couldn't get them.

That's the issue. Hard as I try, there's just nothing in Vista that bubbles to the surface that shows what Vista brings to the table, that for the most part I couldn't get under XP. And Microsoft's failed to articulate what else might be there. Yes, it's more secure, but really, is security a core selling point at this point? Isn't that something that's just table stakes? There are some compelling features, Vista's photo management is top notch but is also something I can get in XP, courtesy of Microsoft's Live Photo Gallery App. There are no Vista only apps I know of that would drive me to the platform (Office 2k7, which has issues of its own, works just fine under XP.)

I won't go into a Vista/Leopard comparison but one thing that Apple does it clearly point out new experiences enabled by the OS itself as well as new OS features that application developers can take advantage of. For example. I can take any part of any web page and make it my own desktop widget. Couldn't do that in Tiger. Or Time Machine. Now, you might feel these features aren't important enough to upgrade, but that's not the point. The point is that they are articulated, strongly and clearly. The net? I doubt any Apple customers are purchasing new computers for the holidays and asking if they can downgrade to Tiger.

There's an old industry joke that said IBM was so poor at marketing, that if it had invented Sushi, it would have called it cold, dead, raw fish. I'm wondering if that's a little more applicable to Microsoft these days. Operating systems are inherently boring. They need strong, clear feature sets and solid marketing to get users to embrace them. This is the stuff Microsoft needs to be thinking about as they work on whatever comes after Vista and they need to do it now.