Vista's five worst features

Err, ever heard of Linux?

Gralla's point is that UAC in Windows is horribly designed from the user's point of view. So simple and low-hassle in Linux.

Oh well, stick with Redmond and have fun...

you forgot DRM

So MS tried to copy some of Linux inherent security features. Until they come out with a decently secure file system, I just don't see that happening.

Missing from this article is the #1 worst "feature" DRM

While doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for the consumer, it

Restricts access to hardware outputs rendering some very expensive audio/video hardware unusable or crippled.

Slows down the system by eating up CPU cycles.

Makes Older graphic cards unable to play back video that used to play before DRM due to increased load.

Decreases battery Life in laptops and uses more energy due to this increase in system load.

Increased hardware costs that provide NO benefits to user.

A lot happened in that five years

Keep in mind that during that five years they shipped a major update to XP (SP2) which vastly improved XP's vulnerability to malware. They also shipped Windows Server 2003, XP Tablet PC edition as well as 64 bit editions of those OSs. Then there was the summer 2004 restart incident where the Longhorn team essentially started over on the Windows Server 2003 code base.

Agreed, but...

Yes, MS did release a lot of other things over those five years, but Windows is the foundational product for the whole MS ecosystem. You would think that would be the one product that they would make sure had the priority. How many developers does MS employ? How many does Apple? Why does Apple get so much more value per developer? Because they rewrote their OS on a UNIX/BSD platform without the requirement to support code and dlls from two decades earlier.

You can only support so much complexity before it becomes unmanageable. Lean, modular and compartmentalized, not monolithic, interconnected and all-inclusive. That's the reason both Apple and Linux can release (and therefore evolve) so much more quickly and why those platforms are rightly viewed as more stable.

What I would do if I ran MS would be to take about 1,000 of my best and brightest developers, get them off-site and out of the MS bureaucracy and set up a sort of "Skunk Works" and tell them to rewrite Windows based on a small kernel and modular add-ons. Their only requirements would be that the final code base would be 50% smaller, get rid of the registry in its present form, come up with a workable versioning scheme for dlls and that they be ready to release every 2.5 years. THAT would scare Apple, not Windows 7 (ie Vista 2009).

Microsoft did it so well

Microsoft did it so well that most people don't realize windows has been rewritten from scratch. People just see a new GUI and think that's all there is. Everything in Vista has changed, the bulk of it is under the hood and the changes were very much needed. There are some excellent articles on arstechnica that discuss all this. The Vista code has nothing to do with XP, 98, 95, etc. It's more closely related to Server 2003 which was also rewritten.
People forget that Leopard was delayed several times and all in all Vista only took a year longer since the time they actually start on Vista to release than apple did. And still Leopard was rushed and is buggy and slower than it ought to be(i'm typing this in Leopard) and that's why Apple's next release, Snow Leopard, is a maintenence release. They need to go back and fix the bugs, speed it up, improve security, etc. You complain about development but here's a tidbit for you. Blizzard has now been working on Diablo 3 for FOUR YEARS! And it's not likely to come out until next year at the earliest. So how can a game take as long to make as an OS?

Vista rewritten from scratch?

Updating the GUI is NOT rewritten from scratch. Patching the XP code in Vista is NOT rewritten from scratch. Patching the NT code in Vista is NOT rewritten from scratch. If M$ had really rewrote the OS from scratch, nothing that ran on XP would likely work on Vista. About all MS did was try to add Aqua and Beryl functions to the GUI to pretty it up and some other pseudo security junk that breaks stuff and sucks up even more memory just to manage all the memory leaks that still exist in the code that was reused.

undocumented features

Memory leaks are an undocumented "Feature" of all MS operating systems.