How to Fix Vista

I was told by my friends that I was too negative on Vista and I should offer some constructive ideas on how to fix it. Here is an outline of a plan for fixing Vista and creating more enthusiasm for the product. For starters focus more on the consumer segment. This is where the growth is. And do not wait another 7 year to ship an updated OS. Do it within 18 months. Here are some additional ideas:

1- Fix the driver incompatibility issues. I would talk to the engineers and see if they could write a compatibility layer to work with XP/2000 drivers. If not then get the OEM evangelists off their butts and start creating tools that make it dead easy for device manufacturers to create new drivers for some of the old stuff. Give them incentives so they would move their butts. Start a certified with Vista campaign and make it meaningful by making sure that certified drivers really do work better.

2- Get rid of the zillion of Vista SKUs down to 4. Home Basic/Premium and Business Standard/Enterprise. There are so many versions of Vista that it is very confusing for the customer.

3- Add some real value to the Premium editions. For example a very good photo editing, video editing, a good email program, and a good mapping program. Jazz up the media player. Most people now have multiple computers. Leverage the P2P technology and make sharing files, music, photos and videos a breeze. Kill Windows Home Server. Synch bookmarks, contacts and history among the computers. And finally add a good incremental backup solution so that all the data is centrally backed up. Make the PC fun not a drudgery. Also give the Vista Premium people a break on MS Office Home and Student Edition. Like $99 for the whole family. Make it a bundle with Word, Excel and Publisher.

4- It has been almost 2 years and there are still no applications of note that take advantage of the great graphics, p2p and video/audio conferencing capabilities. Looks like the Vista evangelist teams went to sleep. Even MS Office products decided not to take advantage of the cool new technologies. Light a fire underneath that team and get some cool applications that drive the adoption of the Vista PC.

5- Make it easier to tie it up with web 2.0 technologies. MS should be offering the equivalent of Apple MobileMe to the consumers. Online phtoto albums, VOIP calls, video conferencing etc.

6- Reduce the bloat and focus on performance. Compared to Mac OSX Leopard, Vista is a pig on an equivalent hardware. Get rid of all the crappy software that OEMs put on the PCs. It only slows things down and creates incompatibility issues. Slap HP and Dell and tell them to stop putting crap on the consumer PCs. It is only giving MS a bad name.