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Comment by pavs | Hacker News Reader

Many products took years of development time, only to come out as ill-thought out and dud. Development time period is not really a scale for the quality of a product.

Some poorly thought out products that come into mind, Windows Vista, 8, IE, Android (earlier versions) - just to name a few.

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Much of the problems with Vista weren't actually Microsoft's fault.

A huge portion of the performance and instability issues were due to poor driver support. Vista was a major jump forward from XP, and in many cases the drivers needed to be significantly updated to handle this - and a huge amount of work that needed to happen to handle this, simply didn't occur. Microsoft aggressively pushed for drivers to be updated, and a lot of manufacturer's just didn't listen.

The other half of it was more than half a decade had occurred in between. Resource requirements went up for the OS - this isn't unexpected, and you can see the same between any 5 year jump in most every other OS. Trying to run Vista on a system specced for XP wasn't a great experience, especially when coupled with all of the driver issues.

By the time 7 had come out, Vista was more than fine. The drivers had been updated, people were using machines with more RAM and faster processors. If they had just skipped Vista and released 7, we would have seen the exact same issues - people would still be buying machines with XP specs in mind, hardware manufacturers would have had a shit story on drivers, and we would be talking about how 7 should have been called 8 beta.

I'm a *nix guy so I have plenty of personal bias against Microsoft for a wide variety of reasons and on a wide variety of subjects - but most of the hate for Vista never should have been directed at Microsoft. I've always had a Windows desktop for gaming, even though the vast majority of my time is spend using a Mac laptop or SSH'ed into Solaris or Linux servers, and I've run every version of Windows since 3.1 - Vista, itself, was fine. It was certainly no ME.

My point was the duration of time it takes to develop a product, doesn't necessarily mean it was a well thought out product. Vista was a legendary case - The initial release was a horrible poorly thought out and broken product, that got better over the next few years with each service packs releases.

Driver-compatibility and resources usage should have been taken into account when released. Those two weren't the only major problem with the OS.

How is Microsoft supposed to handle people not doing anything to update drivers? Halt the NT kernel in time so they never have to? Write drivers for everything themselves?

Should they never add new features that will utilize more cycles or more RAM?

I honestly have no idea what you think Microsoft should have done better here.

Windows Vista was just Windows 7 Beta (never should have been called anything else), and Windows 8 was actually a good OS with a single UX flaw. Early versions of Android were pretty much the same, just lacking in features.

I think the same might be the case with Alexa, it's just in its public testing phase.

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