Cnet: Vista one of Top ten terrible tech products

Cnet, UK division has rated the top ten terrible technology products for the year 2007 and says Windows Vista is one among them. Also in the list is Apple’s puck mouse, Sinclair electric car, Sony rootkit CDs and others.

Cnet cites various reasons for naming Windows Vista as a terrible tech product. They say that any operating system that allows the previous operating system to be reintroduced again should be considered a terrible product.

Many customers of Dell Computers requested them to not to stop selling the XP Operating system, as a result XP is still selling at Dell site. Initially Microsoft had demanded the retailers to sell only Vista based computers to the market, but now it has allowed them to sell until January 2008. There is a high chance it might extend that also.

Cnet said when the new product provides an option to downgrade to a previous one should be considered as a terrible product. In this case, some of the computers with Vista OS had options to downgrade the computer to XP.

The retailers provided free XP Pro disks along with Vista based computers for some of them to downgrade from Vista if they preferred. This option is available only with Vista Business and Vista Ultimate OS editions, both of these require a high graphic and memory needs, so some wanted to switch back to XP. According to the article many retailers are lobbying with Microsoft and want to provide this XP OS option for a longer period than until January, 2008.

Cnet said in the article:

Any operating system that takes six years of development but is instantly hated by hordes of PC professionals and enthusiasts deserves to be classed as terrible technology.

Cnet said another reason for naming Vista a terrible tech product is because of the many of the existing software programs were incompatible with Vista, so many users were forced to upgrade all of their software to work with Vista.

When Vista was introduced late last year, Microsoft also released Zune, but when Zune owners tried to connect them to Vista based computers, the DRM technology in Zune and Vista were incompatible, so they were unable to use Zune with Vista.

I just use XP, so I can’t say for sure whether it is terrible or not. I saw in my friend’s computer, it took him a whole day to install Vista and also saw another friend install Apple’s Leopard OS in his laptop, he was able to install it pretty fast and didn’t have any of the problems mentioned in Cnet article.

They have also criticized other gadgets including Apple’s Puck mouse.

What is your opinion, is Cnet’s assessment true or they are harsh?