> To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view, agnostic of history.
Perhaps in a vacuum it might work. But this is the real world were hypothesis are just that.
> A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI
No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people complaining about the UI's usability. Though there were UI complaints which were mostly echos of the same complaints leveled at the glossy "Teletubby" XP theme.
> It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things.
Interesting? It's human nature. We develop habits and routines which take time to memorize and get right. It's work which we personally invested. I'm sure you have routines that if changed by an external force without choice would be upsetting to you.
Memory usage used to be a major complaint (possibly the biggest) even if it was made clear repeatedly that the OS was simply keeping more stuff in RAM instead of dumping it to disk specifically to improve performance. A mechanism that stuck to these days. That memory isn't marked that obviously in the Task Manager now, and memory is is no longer such a luxury so people don't complain anymore. But on my 16GB machine I have 4.1GB in use clearly marked on the graph, and another 7.5GB cached that is not at all made to jump at people. People want the added goodies and expect absolutely no impact on anything else.
When XP was launched we heard the same grumbles. XP was bloated, had higher resource usage than 98/2000, less stable than 2000, not compatible with a lot of hardware, weird GUI. By SP3 people were loving it and by the time Win 7 arrived nobody wanted to let go of XP. Win 7 was bloated, had higher resource usage than XP, less stable than XP, not compatible with a lot of hardware, weird GUI. By SP2 people were loving it and by the time Win 10 came along nobody wanted to let go of Win 7. And no, it's not an issue of OS quality going down. Like you said, people just get used to stuff and can't take change and when you combine it with the lack of understanding you get all kinds complaints.
Reminds me of an anecdote about a certain car made for the low end market, targeting a segment of owners of 20+ year old clunkers. Everyone would buy it and complain that the fuel consumption was huge. Strangely enough this was a modern engine, certainly more efficient than the old ones it was replacing. The problem? The fancy computer was showing instantaneous fuel consumption. When accelerating? 25 liters/100Km. Outrageous! The company just hid the instantaneous counter and left only the very reasonable average. Problem solved. Then there were the "I can't feel the road with this power steering" complaints which worked themselves out, although to this day there are people who swear the old cars were better (they were most definitely not).
Between lack of knowledge, nostalgia goggles, unreasonable expectations ("all of it, for free"), and a few more things these popular opinions of tech of the past aren't all that useful. It says a lot about the commercial success of a product, not its actual qualities.
I am pretty sure Windows 7 was pretty highly praised upon its release and considered vastly superior to Vista, and at least on par with XP as far as usability.
Vista was a blip on the radar and nobody ever really used it as a reference point for anything other than ridicule. XP was running strong even in 2014 when it went out of support so it makes sense this was the bar to pass for Win 7. And the vast majority of users jumped from XP to 7 as the numbers confirm.
In 2009 when Windows 7 was launched, Vista's market share (all desktop OSes) reached the all time peak of 18%. At the same time the (then) 8 year old Windows XP had 72%.
I agree with the general sentiment, but don't agree with the specifics.
The NT series has always distinguished between cached/locked memory, so I don't see that as an explanation.
Also, consider than, on equivalent hardware, XP actually booted _faster_ than 2k, which led many people (incl those who hated the interface) to actually use it.
So this is not simply explainable by the "people just can't take change" argument.
What I meant by "isn't marked that obviously" is that the labels didn't help. XP (and 2000 before it) had Total, Available, System Cache in K. Vista used Total, Cached, Free in M. Vista cached (rule of thumb applicable then) double the memory compared to XP so the "Free" was usually well under 10% of the memory, even single digit MB. XP rarely had less than 20% available. Forums were flooded by complaints that Vista uses up all the memory, they either saw too much cache, or too little free. It's probably not immediately apparent now but seeing a label "Free 8" leaves a far bigger impression than "Available 89615".
As for XP most people upgraded from 98. The resource usage difference was undeniable and so was the driver incompatibility which made most devices not work properly or at all initially. I did not have the experience of XP booting faster than 2000 even on the same hardware but SP1 fixed a lot of issues, maybe also this. For the first couple of years every forum, IRC channel, BBS, or DC hub I read was full of complaints about either performance and compatibility, or stability depending on what people were upgrading from.
> So this is not simply explainable by the "people just can't take change" argument.
Not only. But it's one big part of the explanation. People are usually skeptical about change and compare around transition time so are inherently biased. They're comparing a stable, fine tuned product with the fresh, rough edged one. The Vista name was dropped because it was already toxic. But Windows 7 is more or less Vista SP3. If Vista didn't flop so hard from the start it would have had the same evolution as XP: launch grumbles grumbles grumbles > SP1 grumbles grumbles > SP2 gru... hey, this is pretty ok > SP3 noice!.
Even Win 10, with all its issues, is a far better product today than it was 5 years ago.
> "When XP was launched we heard the same grumbles [...] By SP3 people were loving it"
Well, that's because they fixed most of the issues in SP1 and SP2.
Also is there a specific reason you skipped certain versions such as Windows ME, Windows Vista etc? Maybe it's not only "people just can't take change" and some products are legitimately bad?
> No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people complaining about the UI's usability. Though there were UI complaints which were mostly echos of the same complaints leveled at the glossy "Teletubby" XP theme.
The biggest fault of Windows Vista in my opinion was Microsoft made one too many compromise. There were machines that came with Windows Vista pre-installed that should have never gotten Windows Vista. My roommate in college had a Compaq machine on which the screen completely blanked for over three minutes at a time as it tried to display the user access control overlay. Of course, over three minutes later the screen would turn on as if nothing had gone wrong at all. iirc it was something about the processor/integrated graphics being too weak for Windows Display Driver Model. [1]
I think Microsoft is making a similar mistake today by allowing OEMs to ship Windows 10 on new machines with anything less than a SATA SSD (mechanical hard disks or eMMC).
> No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people complaining about the UI's usability. Though there were UI complaints which were mostly echos of the same complaints leveled at the glossy "Teletubby" XP theme.
People complained about memory usage even tho it was just windows precaching. Something they don’t complain about now.
The issue with vista was drivers. And then when 7 came out everyone is like oh yay everything works. Even tho it was using the Drivers from vista.
Majority of the vista complaints are silly. It was never as bad as everyone made out to be. Just the same old cool fad to hate on MS.
Perhaps in a vacuum it might work. But this is the real world were hypothesis are just that.
> A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI
No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people complaining about the UI's usability. Though there were UI complaints which were mostly echos of the same complaints leveled at the glossy "Teletubby" XP theme.
> It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things.
Interesting? It's human nature. We develop habits and routines which take time to memorize and get right. It's work which we personally invested. I'm sure you have routines that if changed by an external force without choice would be upsetting to you.