I had high hopes for Vista, but there are still serious issues

I had really high hopes for Microsft Vista. But they've been dashed.

Yes, as a devoted mac user, lots of the features Vista looks to have are beautiful and useful. However, when it comes to day-in-day-out use, it's been less reliable than XP with the people I've been dealing with. It's very discouraging, as I even said, "Hey, if it's solid, I'll consider it - there are Windows benefits."

Today I talked to someone who is now the fourth complete reinstall I've had to recommend as course of action - their Microsoft Office 2007 decided that it didn't want to work anymore, save documents, and then crash randomly. Heard another report last week of a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death - a complete failure) - on a new machine!

Microsoft coming up with such a turkey - after the years of development - and all kinds of bugs with office that I'm seeing - critical, show-stopping ones - is without excuse. There are wonderful things like when opening office documents out of Outlook, it can cause damage to Office and lead it to have issues.

Let's not even get started on the fact that Office 2007 documents don't open up on anything but Office 2007 and the newest version of Keynote. I am all for open standards, but it's pretty useless if you have to save in another format so anyone else who works with you can open it.

Unfortunately, I have to say to people don't get XP on a new machine - why? Because Microsoft is going to leave it in the dust. If you have to do Windows, I believe, you have to do Vista with new boxes. With old ones, keep XP and don't upgrade.

Apparently, service pack one for Vista, according to Paul Thurott, isn't anything to write home about save for a roll-up of the software updates already sent - and that's a shame. There are still serious stability issues in the field (especially compared to my mac, which had it's first non-user-error issue in six years).

Of course, the Microsoft way is to create products you need to pay people to support - and so those people then recommend those products to get further business. Smart business, not great for consumers.