PC Magazine has declared that Windows Vista is the most disappointing product of 2007. Quoting: ‘Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?

It’s not that Vista is awful.
The integrated security and parental controls are nice, and the Aero
interface is as whizzy as it gets. Searching and wireless networking
are much faster and easier than under XP.

It’s just that Vista
isn’t all that good. Many of the innovations the operating system was
supposed to bring–like more efficient file and communications
systems–got tossed overboard as Microsoft struggled to get the OS out
the door, some three years after it was first promised. Despite its
hefty hardware requirements, Vista is slower than XP.

When it debuted last January, incompatibilities were rampant–in
part because hardware and software makers didn’t feel any urgency to
revamp their products to work with the new OS. The user account
controls that were supposed to make users feel safer just made them
feel irritated. And at $399 ($299 upgrade) for Windows Ultimate, we
couldn’t help feeling more than a little gouged.

No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there’s something deeply wrong with the universe.

We
have no doubt Vista will come to dominate the PC landscape, if only
because it will become increasingly hard to buy a new machine that
doesn’t have it pre-installed. And that’s disappointing in its own
right.

Via PC World