Vlad,

you are both right and wrong - look at the other stats on the site - 89% of people who have bought Vista were satisfied or very satisfied and .  What you are talking about are some problems that were mainly fixed by SP1 or hardware manufacturers.  The Vista experience is better than with XP when it launched.

I'm not saying that mistakes were made, but with 140M copies sold and people still buying it, seeing is enough for many people.  This is not the "big" advertising campaign - it is exactly what it claims - an experiment - that showed that when most people actually Vista it changes their perception.

While Vista might not be for you (as XP was not for some for a long time), UAC is solving the security awareness problems and the fact is that other than admining my system I never see UAC prompts.

VARs refusing to sell Vista - I still know some who refuse to sell XP - their choice, but otherwise there is a vicious circle here "people don't want Vista, so I won't sell it.  I'll tell people the reason is because people don't want Vista."  Many don't get a choice from these vendors, but simply only "hear" that Vista is bad.

As you know, good hardware, less crapware, 2GB of memory and Vista is a great experience.

It is time for Microsoft to show that rather than being told what is good or bad, finding out is a much better place to be.  Watch the videos - and the guys were not shown a 10 minute video!!

ttfn

David

Paulie,

I know this will sound strange, but this is normal - no OS takes over, overnight - I wrote about this a while back how if you look at the press XP got a year or two on, it was the same.

In answer to your question of do we know about downgrades, I believe the answer is yes in the main.

Vista at launch was definately choosy what hardware worked well and most of the A/V vendors (IMHO) sucked on Vista, but that is largely a thing of the past (some vendors still suck, but that is both XP & Vista - again IMHO).  With SP1 and the other updates, most people who are shown Vista, or who get Vista, like it.

Some orgs downgrade to XP so they only have to manage one OS, other people because they prefer XP, but I'm sure you still have people who only run Classic mode or Windows 2000 today too. This experiment was simply about finding out how much of the issue was reality and how much perception.  It shows there is a HUGE chunk of perception problems and (IMHO) a smaller chunk of "real" problems.  Those real problems we are continuing to chip away at.

thanks for the feedback - conversations like this are much, much better than throwing mud ;-)

David