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My thanks to the mad rush of good people who've stopped by to read Anything but Speechless: 100 Things People Are Really Saying About Windows Vista. 63,000+ reads, 1400+ Diggs, 500+ comments on the related Digg page; that's a modest but nice bit of attention. Friendly visitors from Reddit added to the fun. My only regret is that my taken-aback server was unequipped to handle the peak Digg flood, spluttering wildly for several hours and then dithering nervously for a day or two after that, before returning with relief to its quotidian server duties.

By no means, though, should you assume that many tens of thousands of people visited, sat down, partook of, and digested the full 100-course meal. A quick check of server statistics shows that many visitors checked the first page (of four), without going on to read the rest. Like this, I imagine: "Ah, just like the title says: 100 Vista problems or complaints. Okay, got it. What else is on Digg today?" No surprise there; Vista problems are hardly news, and few people need be concerned with the full range of troubles. (Vista users might want to be concerned – but then again, that's "few people".)

Comments on comments

I can't boast of having read every comment on the Digg page, though I made a good survey of much of it. Many commiserated with the article's Vista naysayers. Others defended Vista. A few of these were noteworthy, such as this one: "So you guys are really going to follow 'news' from a website called "Microsplot" then?" I don't know why the commenter mistook the article for "news", though s/he is certainly correct in inferring the site's non-validity as a news source. (What can I say; it's a snark site, and when a huge techie comes up with a fluffy list like "100 Reasons You'll Be Speechless", that's just begging for a rebuttal.) But the comment may miss a point: the article doesn't blast MS with my opinion of Vista, it rakes the company with the world's responses to the product.

Naturally, there are other direct criticisms of the article. One commenter said that the article's 100 items should all be prefaced with disclaimers along the line of "My sister said...", "Someone I know said...", and so on, apparently implying that the article's collected complaints are all unsubstantiated hearsay. That commenter clearly didn't read the article. Of hundreds of quotes in the article, there are some from unknown bloggers, true – their voices count too! – but most are from Big Names. Like Forbes. Wall Street Journal. Business Week. Computer World. eWEEK. ZD Net. IT Wire. PC Magazine. PC World. CNET. USA Today. BBC. Information Week. And more.

For that reason, other criticisms of the article as "just more mindless Microsoft bashing" or "the same old stuff" don't hold much water. The sources quoted are a step above mindless, and the article gathers hundreds of such quotes together, under 100 distinct headings. It's a nicely thorough resource outlining the negative response to Vista, and – modesty aside for a second – is not "the same old stuff".

As expected, there were plenty of comments along the line of "Vista works fine for me!" These may be valid additions to the discussion, or may not be. "It works for me" comments, for any product/service, come in two general types, which I'll paraphrase here:

Intelligent comment from satisfied Vista user: "There's no question that many people have had problems with Vista or have been disappointed. But it wouldn't be accurate to say everyone has. I've been using Vista for several months, as has my 10-person workplace, and we've all found it to be (list of good attributes)..."

This is a valid counter: a measured response offering an opposing experience, and a helpful data point, for reader consideration.

Not-so-intelligent comment from satisfied (?) Vista user: "Bogus. I've been using Vista for months and I haven't had any of those problems. This is just more bashing."

This is not a valid counter. Translation: "I haven't had problems, so they don't exist. Other people's stories are fake. I'm what matters."

In any case, I think some readers miss the real story. It's not that I, or someone's sister, or some blogger, or even some big-shot tech mag editor, doesn't like Vista. It's that big, wide swaths of Vista tasters, including many reputable names, dislike Vista for many, many reasons – and in some cases, dislike it intensely. Again, that's not exactly news, but seeing the huge range of dislikes (and dislikers) in one list really drives the unhappiness home.

Does it matter?

So a bunch of people dislike something. Is that noteworthy? Yes, when "something" is the long-awaited, massively-funded, hugely-hyped new release (Vista) of the crushingly dominant product (Windows) in a category (operating systems) of incalculable global importance, from one of the world's richest and (arguably) most powerful corporations (Microsoft). A product expected to touch every corner of industry, government, and academia, as well as the consumer household. A product upon which the fate of whole industry sectors (PCs, software development, system integration) hangs. When that "something" slams into a wall of global derision, it matters.

But what if, as many commenters suggest, the dislike is all misguided? What if it's all just "media bashing" and "hatred" and "whining"? Well, if Vista generates unfair bashing worldwide, that's still noteworthy! Why, if there's no real problem with the product or its creator, are so many users and media sources making what must be false claims? If Vista is getting an unfair rap, what missteps did Microsoft take to spur that, and how can the company fix the perception? And so on. If the world reacts unfairly to a product launch of such scale and importance, it matters, and it compels Vista defenders (starting with Microsoft) to survey the reactions, pin down their cause, and take counter-action.

I myself invoke Occam's Razor on this one: when people say a product is lousy, the simplest explanation is that it's lousy. But "Bad Vista or Just Bad Rap?" is a another topic for another article in another place. Here I've only surveyed and posted samples of the negative response to Vista. I leave it to you to fire up your browser and dig up further negative dirt, or the positive response to Vista, or evidence of the global anti-MS conspiracy, or just more Jessica Alba pictures (come on, you know that's the most likely). I've blathered enough here and will come back later with new fun stuff.

Thanks for visiting. Come again!