The list of apps with Vista compatibility problems is truly mind-boggling. We’re talking about stuff I use every day. Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, Eclipse, iTunes, Irfanview. Add to that the fact that my Photoshop disc is on the fritz and you’ve got a major productivity roadblock. But perhaps the app that I miss the most is one that works in the background: Diskeeper.

Diskeeper is (or was) probably the best defragmenter available for Windows. It’s got a feature called “Set It and Forget It” which allows you to configure the program to defrag your hard drive in the background whenever it sees the need, and then, as advertised, forget all about the damn thing. But the bastards at the Diskeeper Corporation want me to pay $30 to upgrade to their new Vista version, even though I already bought an upgrade less than six months ago. So I decided to look at alternatives. (Update 3/8/07: Never let it be said this blogging thing is a waste of time. I just received an e-mail from a nice fellow at Diskeeper Corp. apologizing for the upgrade confusion and offering to make it up with a coupla extra licenses. Thanks, Diskeeper!)

I opened up the built-in Windows Vista Disk Defragmenter, and I was astounded to see this:

In case you’re looking at this image and wondering what’s so astounding, the only thing you can configure here is the schedule. No setting priorities, no setting unmovable files, no program menus, no help file, no nothing. I wasn’t expecting a robust interface like Diskeeper’s that allows you granular control over what files get positioned in what place on the hard drive, but I wasn’t quite expecting this either.

Windows Vista is full of these kinds of user interface decisions. Places where the operating system presents you with a limited set of options and tells you, “don’t worry, Windows Vista will handle it.” We’ll defragment your disk for you, we’ll switch color schemes when necessary, we’ll block you from handling the nasty files, we’ll decide when the computer should sleep and when it should wake.

Remind you of anything? It reminds me of a Mac.

Mac OS X doesn’t have a built-in disk defragmenter. Why? Because every Mac comes with a team of Magic Disk Gnomes that scrub your hard drive every night? No, because OS X does all of the disk optimization it needs to do in the background. It defragments as a routine process of the operating system, and just doesn’t tell you about it. (See the article on the Apple website About disk optimization with Mac OS X.)

Macs are famous for making things easy on the user. But along with that usability push comes a configurability hit. As far as I know, there’s no Registry Editor sitting right off the Apple menu that will allow you to muck up your system with a few mouse clicks. There’s no “Run” command that lets you wreak havoc willy-nilly just by tapping random keys. People claim that things “just work” on a Mac, and that’s because the engineers that built OS X have taken out most of the options that don’t. (Update 3/7/07: Oops. See Toby’s and Brian’s comments below. Didn’t realize a command line was so close at hand on OS X.)

The *nix operating systems (i.e. Linux and Unix) lie on the opposite end of the scale. You can do practically anything on a Linux command line, from rebuilding the kernel to deleting crucial files to rolling your own device drivers. (Where disk defragmenting is concerned, however, Linux, like OS X, does its thing in the background. See the article Why doesn’t Linux need defragmenting?)

One of the reasons I’ve always liked Windows is because it occupies the middle ground. You get 60-70% of the Mac GUI experience and 60-70% of the Linux command line experience. The best of both worlds, some might say. But now, with Windows Vista, Microsoft seems to be wising up to the Apple way of thinking. Let the computer do the work for you in the background. After all, who really wants to worry about how fragmented your computer files are? The geeks and the code monkeys do, and they can go buy a third-party utility or just install Ubuntu like they’ve been threatening to do anyway.

The implications of this philosophy go beyond mere disk defragmentation. They go to the heart of the question of what computers are supposed to do for us in the first place.

The whole reason we use computers at all is that they’re supposed to simplify things for us. Many of us seem to have lost sight of that. We get caught up in fetishizing the computer itself and forget that every minute we spend tweaking and configuring a computer is, in essence, a minute wasted. The ideal computer would be a completely invisible computer, one that could anticipate what you’re going to do and then make that task quicker, easier, and more efficient when you decide to do it.

It’s only now, however, after 20 or 30 years banging our heads against these things, that computer technology has grown and matured to the point that it can begin to achieve that goal. Your measly Pentium II processor couldn’t spare enough cycles to try and figure out everything you were trying to do ahead of time; all it could really do was respond to your commands and give you a few shortcuts. But now your smokin’ Dual Core chip can churn through a thousand possibilities and contingencies in a millisecond. (Stop snickering, readers from the year 2017.) It can figure out the trivial things you don’t need to figure out, like whether you’re using the latest device drivers or what kind of screen resolution you have.

What this means is that starting now, operating systems won’t have to present you with options that will mess up your system. In fact, they’ll be presenting you with less configurable options rather than more. The computer will anticipate what you’re trying to do and automatically give you the configurations that make the most sense for you. The era of humans trying to figure out how programs work is coming to a close. The era of programs trying to figure out how humans work is now underway.

A seemingly small semantic shift, but one that will change your relationship with technology in the very near future. What this means is that at some point you’ll be able to boot up a computer and it will just instantly know that you’re a left-handed attorney in Taiwan that doesn’t care about the engineering functions on the calculator.

There will be lots of privacy issues to sort out, you betcha. And lots of amusing fuck-ups along the way. (What happens if you’re a left-handed patent attorney in Taiwan that does want to see the engineering functions on the calculator?) But it means that those Disk Defragmenter controls ain’t coming back anytime soon.

(For further thoughts on the topic, see my previous article Look Ma… No Program Menus!)

The new PC is a monster: Dual Core 2.66GHz processor, 3.5GB of memory, a screamin’ video card, and a 360GB hard drive. Not to mention a 24-inch flatscreen monitor big enough for me to view satellite images of entire U.S. states and still be able to make out your house. (Yes, your house. I’m watching you right now, in fact. Does your mother know what you’re doing?)

So the PC is fabulous, but the Windows Vista Ultimate Edition that came pre-installed? Not so fabulous. It’s a shame, because I generally like Microsoft products. Yes, the company’s got its problems — they’ve been guilty of many sins over the years, including bloatware, vaporware, crippleware, and bullying behavior — but overall I believe Microsoft has done about as good a job running 95% of the world’s computer desktops as one can reasonably expect a company to do.

Here are my first impressions of the good stuff and the bad stuff with Windows Vista:

First, the bad stuff:

• User Account Control sucks. Yes, Windows Vista’s new access controls are just as bad as you’ve heard. I don’t mind the concept of clicking through approval dialog boxes when I’m doing something that could potentially disrupt my system. The problem is that Vista gives you multiple dialog boxes, sometimes three or four in a row. You’ll get a dialog box saying that you need to give Windows permission to continue — and then you’ll get another dialog box actually asking for your permission to continue. Wha? It doesn’t help that these dialog boxes are poorly designed so it’s difficult to see at a glance what you’re trying to approve or deny. (See above.)
• The Sidebar sucks. Well, perhaps it’s not the Sidebar itself so much as the gadgets that ship with the Sidebar. Sidebars are great in theory, as Apple users (and Google Desktop users) (and Yahoo! Widget users) can attest. But the built-in gadgets that come with the OS are terrible. You can’t resize them. You can’t cut and paste from them. You can’t sort them. You generally can’t right-click on them. And there are generally only one or two options for customizing them. Why would I want a postage stamp-sized display of four RSS articles that I can’t sort, resize, cut-and-paste, e-mail, or bookmark?
• The new Start menu sucks. I can understand why some people would get irritated with the scrolling menu hell of Windows XP. But with the new Vista Start menu, programs are simply hidden, and you end up using the Search feature all the time. There’s much less visual clutter, but things don’t feel any better organized. Plus… why is it that with a smokin’ nVidia graphics card and over three gigs of RAM, it still takes TEN FUCKING SECONDS for the Control Panel menu to cascade off the Start menu EVERY FUCKING TIME? Honestly, people.
• The new Explorer windows are confusing. Explorer windows really should come in two sizes: one standard size for browsing files in a stand-alone app, and one standard size for browsing files in open/save dialog boxes. But there are so many options now that I’m easily confused. The different configurations appear to be somewhat random — sometimes you’ll get a super-compact save dialog, sometimes you’ll get an extended dialog with all of the folders and favorite places in it. Come on, dudes — I don’t need to compile a C++ program here, I just need to find the file I’m looking for so I can open or save it.
• Aero transparency is confusing. Sure, the new look and feel is very clean. But the transparency effect on all of the toolbars and window edges leaves something to be desired. I often find myself in the situation where the windows underneath the top level are darker than the window that’s on top. I’ll often be staring at a stack of windows and click on the wrong one, because I simply can’t tell which one’s the active window. (See screen shot to the right.) (One good thing about Aero is that the aliasing effect you’d get in earlier versions of Windows where part of a window would remain onscreen for a few seconds even after you moved it is gone.)
• You’re going to get compatibility problems. Some of my standard apps, like the Eclipse software development environment, the Irfanview freeware image viewer, and Virtual PC, won’t install correctly or only run with certain limitations in Vista. For instance, every time I try to open Eclipse, I get a warning message asking me if I know what this piece of software is and if I trust it. If there’s a way to permanently trust a piece of software, I haven’t figured out how yet.
• First Boot Window Explosion Hell. I don’t know if there’s a term for the explosion of crap you get when you boot up a new system for the first time, but there should be. Booting up Vista for the first time, I was bombarded with a gajillion messages and dialog boxes that took me ten minutes to sort through. Anti-Virus isn’t installed! The Roxio software that came with your Dell isn’t working properly! You’ve got important Windows Updates to install! Here’s an introduction to Vista! Blah blah blah. Shut up and let me get to work already.

I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that Vista is all bad. There are some good features that will make my life easier:

• 3D Flip is cool. The 3D flip thing is a lot more useful than it sounds. It’s very helpful to be able to scroll through your running applications by seeing 3D thumbnails of them. Plus it’s remarkably quick. (At least it is on my system. I’d hate to see how it runs on my home desktop.) If you’re not up for 3D flip, the old-fashioned Alt-Tab flipping is much improved as well — and even running your mouse over the items in the taskbar gives you live thumbnails of your running apps.
• The RSS store is cool. All of the RSS feeds you subscribe to through Internet Explorer 7 don’t get stored in the browser, but rather sit in a common RSS feed store that other applications can access. So the feeds you subscribe to IE7 will automatically appear in Outlook 2007 and your Sidebar gadgets. Unfortunately, there aren’t many apps that can tap into this right now, but eventually it’ll be a good thing. This RSS store will also propagate with you if you have, say, a roaming profile, which means you’ll be able to take your RSS feeds with you to any Windows desktop. In theory.
• The Network and Sharing Center is cool. Networking has always been extremely cryptic in Windows. It’s amazing how much hassle you need to go through just to get a wireless network up and working in XP. I haven’t tested the wireless capabilities of Vista yet, but the general networking controls are much simpler and more intuitive. Vista will actually draw out a cool little network diagram for you, including the routers and hubs, that can help you figure out the lay of the land.
• Help has improved. It’s been a long time since I’ve spent any time in the Windows Help files. Now with Vista, I find myself running to the system help every few minutes trying to find out how to do something in the new UI that I was used to doing in the old UI. Microsoft’s obviously spent some time cleaning up the Help system and making it more comprehensible, and I seem to be finding answers much quicker now.
• Better folder organization. No more “Documents and Settings” folder — now all of your personal settings are stored in the much more intuitive “Users” folder. Under that are clearly labeled folders like “Documents,” “Desktop,” “Contacts,” “Favorites,” and “Mail.” And yes, if you use the built-in Windows apps, contacts and e-mails are actually stored in individual files, as they should be, rather than in an easily corruptible database. (If you’re using Outlook 2007, however, you’re SOL.)

So overall, I’d say that Windows Vista is… okay. Perhaps a B-minus or a C-plus. I expect that as I learn the ins and outs, I’ll get used to it and my opinion will improve. Let’s hope so. I spend too much of my day in front of computers to dislike my operating system.

In all that time, I’ve never been hit by a computer virus, worm, or malicious piece of spyware. Once, not too long ago, I actually double-clicked on a virus-infected e-mail attachment without thinking, but my computer security package quickly caught it and disabled it.

That’s not to say that I’ve never received a virus over e-mail, or suffered an attack on my firewall. These things happen all the time. I’ve been to web pages that could conceivably have launched various bits of nastiness onto my machine had I not been running Firefox with a pop-up blocker and lots of Javascript restrictions. I’ve just never suffered the effects.

And why have I never suffered from a virus outbreak? Because, despite what you see and hear all over the Internet and the media, the security problems of Windows are vastly overblown. Windows is and has always been a fairly secure operating system, if you know what you’re doing.

True, I’m what they call a computer professional, meaning that I make my living on these things. I can program PHP and ColdFusion. But when it comes to the operating system, I’m not some technical uber-wizard that can pinpoint obscure DLL failures using the command line. I know how to edit the Windows Registry, I know how to start and stop Windows Services, I know how to use the Event Viewer. These are all fairly basic computer troubleshooting skills, and yet these skills and some readily available off-the-shelf security software are all it’s taken for me to keep my computer safe for nearly 20 years.

(And no, this is not an invitation for someone out there to try and craft something that will infest my computer. I’m sure you can. But the point is that you haven’t bothered to try yet.)

The security problem, therefore, does not lie with Windows software. The problem is with Windows usability.

Most of you reading this blog may be astounded to realize this, but Microsoft’s most pressing problem is not the encroachment of free and open source Linux. It’s not the growing popularity of the Firefox browser, or the lagging performance of its online properties in relation to Google’s and Yahoo’s, or the activities of a small population of malicious hackers and crackers. The thing that keeps the Microsoft brass up at night, believe it or not, is that most people feel like Windows is too darned hard to use.

To us in the tech world, it seems like every Joe and Jane you pass in the street reads Slashdot and has contemplated switching to Ubuntu. But the vast majority of people aren’t nearly that technically savvy. I found a study from 1997 that gives the number of IT jobs in the United States at 2,063,000. Even if we’re charitable and say that, despite the IT bubble burst, the number of tech jobs has doubled since then — or even tripled — we’re still only talking about roughly 2% of the U.S. population. We’re a lot more computer-literate than we were a decade ago, but I’m willing to bet at least 70% of the Windows users in the United States have never even heard of the Registry.

And so these are the people that your standard Russian underground hacker types devote their energy to attacking. After all, if you’re a burglar, why bother carrying around lockpicks when two-thirds of the houses in the neighborhood leave the back door unlocked? When you read about zombie PCs that are unknowingly sending out tens of thousands of spam e-mails every hour, you never hear that the victim was a sysadmin for Smith Barney. It’s the people with the usability problems. It’s the guy who downloads porn screen savers from untrusted sources. It’s the guy who believes that Chase Bank really did just send an e-mail requesting that he go to www.chase-banc.com and reset his password. These people don’t know how to secure their computers.

So it strikes me that Microsoft has, on the whole, emphasized the right things in the development of their new Windows Vista operating system. They’ve concentrated on security, usability, and reliability. They’ve added in long-needed User Account Control, which will pop up a big, flashy warning message when your 73-year-old grandmother tries to add a worm to her Startup folder. They’ve built in anti-spyware, a stronger firewall, phishing protection, desktop search, and parental controls. Similarly, their workover of their Office software package has focused on cleaning up the user interface and bringing little-used features that have skulked backstage in sub-menus up to the spotlight.

Now whether Microsoft has actually done a good job is another question altogether. All of the early indicators say that Windows Vista is a less user-friendly operating system than XP was. They also point out that, since Microsoft spent so much time rewriting things from the ground up, there are bound to be a rash of new security holes in the first few months. (And I’m not even going to get into the whole Windows-vs.-Mac-vs.-Linux thing here.)

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to judge Vista first-hand until I either a) get the free reviewers’ copy that Microsoft is supposed to be sending me, or b) bite the bullet and buy that new laptop I’ve been talking about buying for months now. And if option a) comes first, I won’t be able to give a full review, because neither my desktop nor my laptop have strong enough video cards to handle the new Aero interface.

But our opinions aren’t necessarily the ones that matter in the grand scheme of things. No matter how convoluted the new user interface is, us relatively knowledgeable folks will get used to it pretty quickly. If Microsoft can help that 70% of people who’ve never heard of the Windows Registry to take better care of their computers — and maybe throw in a few goodies for the rest of us — they’ll have achieved what they set out to do.

It starts by making it easier for people to lock their back doors.

By program menus, I mean that narrow bar at the top of every program in MS Windows which usually starts with “File” and ends with “Help.” These menus have been a part of day-to-day computing experience since the first Macs in the ’80s, and have a history that extends back to Xerox PARC in the early ’70s. And now Microsoft is putting them out to pasture.

I’ve got several of the new breed of Vista-related betas installed on my desktop — Internet Explorer 7, Windows Media Player 11, Windows Defender, and Windows Live OneCare — and the menus are tucked away in places where the ordinary user isn’t likely to encounter them. In IE7, you need to click on the Tools icon and select “Show Menu Bar” in order to see them. Windows Media Player makes things even more difficult; unless you want to dig through the multi-tabbled Preferences window, you need to right-click on a blank patch in the top or bottom of the screen and select “Show Classic Menus.” Defender and OneCare lack menus altogether. Look ma… no program menus!

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I can see what Microsoft is trying to accomplish, and in theory it’s a laudable goal. Microsoft is trying to change the standard paradigm of users commanding their software; instead they’re creating software that pre-emptively responds to users. Instead of hunting for the command to Burn a CD in the menus, the software should anticipate that you might want to burn a CD and present the option in a big shiny button that’s hard to miss.

Software is growing more complex every year, and the day is rapidly approaching when it will be ridiculously unwieldy to try to wedge every little bell and whistle for Microsoft Word into seven or eight menus. Already you need sub-menus and sometimes sub-menus scrolling off of those sub-menus. Clearly the software needs to grow more intelligent about what the user wants.

But here’s the problem: the software doesn’t always anticipate what you want. Then what?

Windows Media Player is a good example. It’s a relatively chunky piece of software that lets you rip music from CDs, burn music to CDs, sync music to mobile devices, organize your music, etc. Most of the basic features are pretty intuitive, to Microsoft’s credit, and although the program isn’t particularly speedy, it’s plenty stable.

But there are a number of annoying little things that I just can’t figure out how to do. For the longest time, I would select a group of songs in an album, right-click and select “Play,” expecting them to play in order. But no — the songs would inexplicably shuffle into a random order. There’s nothing in the right-click menu that indicates these songs should be shuffling. So I learned to select “Add to Now Playing” instead of “Play.” Which worked fine most of the time, except sometimes the list in the right-hand side wouldn’t change over to show the Now Playing list for some reason, and I’d have to switch views to edit it.

The point is, without an orderly system of menus, we’re back to trying to figure out the logic of each program one at a time. We no longer have the simple mnemonics of “File/Print” or “Tools/Options” to guide us. And I bet that this lack of uniformity will hurt user productivity more than the menu clutter did in the first place.

I applaud the effort for software to anticipate what we want to do, and I look forward to seeing how good software can get at this. In fifty years, I’m betting that we won’t need program menus. But in the meantime, software programs should have an easily accessible index of commands. Maybe this could be a standard button that appears in the top right of every program, next to the question mark for help. And you’d be able to click on this button and get an alphabetized list of commands. I can’t think of any program offhand that has a feature like this, but it’s sorely missed.

Oh, and the shuffling thing? It turns out that there’s a button on the bottom of Windows Media Player with three parallel lines that turns shuffling on and off. The button isn’t labeled, and I don’t ever remember turning it on. Isn’t that intuitive?

Sigh. And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.