IT HAS BEEN a year since Vista was released, and I said I could not in good conscience go there. Since then, Vista has gotten a thorough airing, has been debated more than anything in recent memory, and for the vast majority, the chrome has worn off the turd.

For those betting, it has been a year since the last of the dribbled out Vista releases, and the OS has lived up to it's MeII moniker. A year ago, I had several XP boxes, no Linux boxes in daily use, and had two pre-release Vista boxes.

A year later, I have far fewer XP boxes, this is being typed on my main laptop running Ubuntu 8.04Alpha3, and the two Vista boxes are long gone. I have recieved several machines that had Vista preinstalled, and they never got to the EULA, live CDs, or in rare cases XP discs made sure of that. I have half a dozen Vista licenses sitting around that have never, and will never be registered, but MS proudly counts those as sales victories, and they did get the money for them. It is a pity they make it impossible to get a refund, but that is a monopoly for you.

As of this writing, I have never installed a release version of Vista, and my Linux skills, paltry though they may be, are growing by leaps and bounds. MS has more or less lost me, and it is quickly losing the 1500 or so desktops I control for my 'day job'. With it, they have lost all the lock-ins, upgrades and attendant software, if you can only run Office on Windows, you can not run Office if you don't have Windows.

Why did this happen? Well if you remember, Vista was released in two big chunks and several lesser ones. The two big ones were the 'corporate' release on November 30, 2006, and the 'release' release on January 30, 2007, a year ago today. I lamented the fact that MS was forcing me to use Linux against my will, but Vista was unacceptable to me on far too many grounds.

To be honest, MS did try to engage me after I wrote that, but the sad thing is it was through bribery. I don't use that word lightly, but there is nothing else I can call it. I think I explained my differences of opinion quite clearly in that article, and the response I got from MS was as follows, names removed to protect the sender.

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Hi Charlie,

I'm really sorry to hear of your bad impression of Windows Vista, I would be very interested in having a chat with you to dispell some of your worries, and to provide you with your first contact at Microsoft!

I've got a copy of Windows Vista here for you as well if you want to have a go with the real deal RTM build!

(signature)

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Please note that in the original complaint, I never once asked for a copy of the software, I had several versions here, and my complaints were about activation, DRM and other problems. A copy with all those problems is still as unacceptable as the ones I owned. In the following half dozen emails, my concerns were not placated, if anything they were confirmed.

There were several half-baked workarounds offered, but in the end, I came to a startling conclusion, why did I have to jump through hoop after hoop to use a properly paid for and licensed piece of software? Am I insane, or does my want to control my own software seem as irrational to you as it does to MS?

I told them to get stuffed and that they did not want the software under the unacceptable license terms they were offering me. To this day, over a year later, those impediments are still in place, and if anything, given MS's behavior, are even less palatable.

What are those problems again? The two biggest ones are activation and phoning home, both of which are showstoppers to me, and should be to you. Lets look at these dead horses once more.

Activation is where you need to get MS's approval to run your paid for software. If you buy a full retail price copy of Ultimate at $399, if MS decides for whatever arbitrary reason not to give you the thumbs up, you have a doorstop with no recourse. Really, $399 pissed away.

There are three ways to activate, normal, VLA and SLP, all of which are evil and unavoidable if you want to remain legal. Normal is just that, you click on the activation button, and it whirs away and gives you the thumbs up or down. If it is up, you are done for a bit, if it is down, you are in hell. The last time I had this inflicted on me with XP it took 32 minutes of frustration, and from what I am told but have never encountered is that Vista is only more suffering. I do not relish typing in 25+ digit numbers multiple times before I am given over to someone with a barely comprehensible accent so I can beg for the use of what I legally own.

VLA is like that, but it only applies to volume licensees, something that I do not qualify for. You have a server that acts like a local activation machine, and it phones home every so often so you don't have to have your entire organization submit directly to the MS malware, much less give them direct internet access.

SLP is the last one, it is a pre-activated and BIOS locked version of the above, and does not require initial activation if it sees the correct strings in the BIOS. If you are cheeky enough to change your hardware, you are back to the phone hell inflicted on the mundanes.

In any case, all of the above need to periodically check in to MS, and if you don't want your information sent, Vista will turn itself off for your safety or some other polite sounding way of saying 'submit or pay us again'. None of them are activation free, and all are completely crackable. Reliable sources have told me that the 'Vista Automatic Activator' crack works like a charm, but since I have never installed the OS itself, I have never needed to crack it. On the flip side, I have never needed to activate Ubuntu, or crack it for that matter, and in return, it never turns itself off of it's own volition.

The other problem is of much greater concern to me, there have been over 30 processes identified that report information back to MS without user intervention, knowledge or consent. The fact that these exist, what they report, and what is done with that information is simply not information that MS deems that we need to know, so we are not told. This is also unacceptable.

A year later, my two biggest concerns, that MS can shut me down on a whim, and that they can take any or all of my data without me knowing or being able to stop it are still unacceptable. I can't see how any CxO in good conscience can run this software, much less put anything even remotely considered mission critical on it. Do they just not get the risks, are they abjectly stupid, or were they bought off?

Judging from the absurdly low adoption and, for MS, scary high downgrade numbers, the majority seem to agree with me. People understand what MS is trying to force on them, and they are refusing to play ball. Look at Mac marketshare on the desktop and Linux on the server, and you will see the masses are moving faster than anyone could have imagined a year ago.

So here I sit, typing on a Ubuntu Linux box, Vista nowhere on my network. My girlfriend sits beside me browsing on a Mac. Of the 2 dozen boxes here, over half are not Windows now, and none of the remaining are Vista. Ironically, a year ago, computing was a dull fight with malware, upgrades and patches that I really did not want to bother with. Now things are fun again, re-learning what control means, and being able to do all those things that I used to do in the bad old days is truly liberating. Ironically, I have MS to thank for making computing fun again, but not for the reasons they wanted, and in that time, my PC has never once said no to my wishes.

If MS wants to win me back, there are two things that they must do, but I know they never will. First, they must totally remove activation, no lessening of the thumbscrews, no half baked baby steps, it must go completely. There is no compromise here, all or nothing.

The second is that I must have complete notification and control every time ANY data is collected and sent to MS. I must be, at my choosing, informed of what is collected, where it is being sent, and what will be done with that data. I must also be allowed to say no to the sending of that data, and I will live with whatever negative consequences that entails should I chose to say no. There is no compromise here either, when others do the same, it is called malware, when MS does it, people bend over and smile.

So, 12 months to the day after release, Vista is still a chrome plated turd, but due to direct abuses of the customer, much of that chrome has worn off. Activation servers that could never go down did for days.

Inviolate promises of user control over patching was shown to be far less important than MS needs to control your box, and hosts of other egregious violations show how much MS really cares about the people giving them money.

Until MS does a complete 180 on the anti-user aspects of Vista, it remains unsuitable for use to any rational person. In the three years (optimistically) between it's release and Windows 7, Ubuntu will have gone through 6 major revisions, and it does not actively threaten the user like Vista.

In the end, I guess I do have a very favorable impression of Vista, it forced me on to Linux again. Now things are cheaper, more secure, less annoying, and my computer never says no to me. The fun I am having and the knowledge I am gaining makes the initial pain of Vista well worth it. MS, call me when you change radically, but forgive me if I don't hold my breath until then, I am having too much fun to do so. µ