The Vista Effect

Continuing on the theme of being honest with your customers, Charles Wiltgen has a smackdown of a post in response to Matt Goyer’s post in defense of MCE Vista’s current state of development and near final feature set. Matt’s article is a nice snapshot of how Vista is affecting the products around it.

Matt is Program Manger for Windows Media Center. In his post the main point appears to be “We worked very hard and did add loads of great features”. Charles takes that defense apart, particularly the claim to have added many new features. Overall, it seems to me that MCE Vista is nothing more than what it says on the tin, MCE wrangled into Vista. Another victim of the Vista juggernaut.

Matt does admit this when he says:

“We paid a very high development cost to become a part of the Windows Vista SKUs”

Which is great, an acknowledgement that Vista is problematic, and that they’ve lost time that could have been spent on features. I’d give him 8 points for saying that straight, as opposed to trying to hide the Vista effect.
However, that sentence didn’t end there, he continues on to say:

“but you’re seeing the result in terms of worldwide distribution, retail availability, etc.”

Which is also great. (And when I say great, I don’t mean like it’s actually great but I mean it like the way Irish people use it which is more meaningful, I think.) We should all be thankful that Microsoft are actually going to sell us MCE, and sell it worldwide no less.

Kudos for actually discussing it, and making half an apology, but Null Point for trying to spin it.

Endnote: I found this article when I went looking for one called
“OMG DRM is r33ly bad!” which John Gruber had linked to. Seemingly, it is a reply to Cory Doctorow’s anti-DRM article in InformationWeek and sounded pretty fun. I may never know for sure though, as the post has mysteriously disappeared.

Update: Got an email from Charles to let me know the post is back, Wordpress did something bold with it. At the time it didn’t quite occur to me to ask him where it went, silly me.