Vista new user experience not for the faint of heart

I just turned on a new laptop I bought for my father in law - amazingly a 1 Gig Mem, 1.7MHz, 90Mb computer for around $700. Nice.

But one thing: HP just doesn't seem to care about the user experience. Or is it Microsoft for allowing it? Or is it ourselves for forcing Microsoft to make Vista so open that their OEMs are practically forced to go nuts?

I've written in the past that I thought at 60,000 feet, Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X are more or less the same in terms of ease of use. The one huge (and probably crucial) exception to this is the initial user experience. I can only imagine what my 80 year old father in law would do if he saw the screen as it looks 'from the factory.'

Take a gander at what the screen looks like after turning the thing on. Look at all the mysterious icons from third party OEMs:

• Get Vonage?


• Ebay?


• Photosmart Essential?


• Aol Sign up, but also High Speed Services, and also Easy Internet Services


• Oh lets not foget MSN

And then look at those two huge windows:

• HP Total Care advisor, which should be called HP Total Confusion


• Symantec with lots of inscrutable options

And what about that weird sidebar? Yeah the clock is kind of cool and understandable but what the heck is that box with "view headlines" and that funny orange icon? Are you kidding me?

Just study the screen shot and imagine yourself an 80 year old, world war 2, ex-merchant marine who is trying to check his email. Yikes!

Comments

[Andrew]

It's all an outgrowth of the "PC Magazine effect," which convinced people that more was better, feature wise.

It didn't matter how easy something was to use -- did it support 200 obscure file formats? Were there 500 options for doing something, or only a mere 450? (Transitions in video-editing software is a great example; you only need two or three, but software makers tout the dozens they offer.)

So HP and others have loaded all sorts of crap to make it look like it's offering a lot. Oh, and not to mention the money it's getting from those companies to feature their products on the initial desktop.

That's why, if you search for pirated versions of Windows operating systems, you'll find "streamlined" or "performance" versions are incredibly popular. People take the time to strip out the junk (how many desktop backgrounds do you really need?) and deliver a much more usable OS.

[Jered]

This is just one of the reasons why I will only support family members using Macs -- simpler new user experience, fewer ways for them to fundamentally break things, far fewer malware instances, and better built-in remote-support tools. (When Windows ships from the factor with sshd and VNC, I'll reconsider that last one.)

I agree with you that at a 60,000 foot level they're roughly equivalent, but the close-up view matters. Every time I help a Windows user in our office, it's an experience like when you have a small pebble stuck in your shoe. It doesn't prevent you from walking, but it's distracting and annoying.

[Jered]

Oh; the reason for a lot of the desktop crap is because HP gets a few dollars from AOL, eBay, Vonage, etc for each machine that ships with the icons on the desktop. This allows them to sell you the machine for a few dollars less. Sony recently started offering a "fresh start" install as an option -- they initially made it a $50 add-on option. After the backlash to that it's now free, but that's probably a good estimate of how much you save in exchange for the shovelware.