I am no expert in operating systems and I would not attempt to review Windows Vista. If you are really interested in Vista, there is a whole blog dedicated to it. There is really only one reason why I regret using it (not that I had any choice, it came with my new laptop…): it is slow.

You see, products have jobs to do and each product has a “job zero”, the one job that it has to do well no matter what. Only when you finish perfecting this angle of your product can you go on and work on the others. Job zero of an operating system is allowing all applications to run fast. As fast as possible. My Vista, on a new and strong Thinkpad X61, is slowing me down on every task. Instead of gaining productivity, I am losing productivity, waiting for the giant to wake up.

Lesson learned: if you design a product, make sure you define its job zero and make it perfect. If you are out to upgrade your customers, make sure that job zero in the new product is at least as good as it used to be in the previous version (oh, how I miss XP…) because no matter how many jobs you have added, they will never forgive you if you mess up with job zero.

Update 11/26/2007- Thanks to Zoli, my gut feeling about Vista speed is now proven… XP is twice as fast than Vista. Ouch