CNET gives Vista a yawn

With any consumer products, there are two signs that you're really in trouble:

1. You're only being compared to the same product of last generation.
This type of comparative review where you're evaluated mostly against the last generation, perhaps even last generation of your own product, can only happen under two situations. One, if you're the market leader and there are nothing else to compare to. Or two, you are only impressive when compared against last generation or your previous self. If you're not in situation one, you're in trouble.

2. Even major publications that are generally very mutual and stays away from making strong statements and opinions are not giving you a positive, perhaps even just mutual review.
This would be CNET...

It's very clear in CNET's review of Windows Vista Ultimate, they are not impressed by how much Windows Vista had to offer after years of development, and the only comparison that would shine light on Vista's major facelift, would be against its former brethen.

Snippets like this cannot be what Microsoft has planned for five+ years:

Windows Vista is not the Apple Mac OS X 10.4 killer one hoped for (or feared).

Perhaps we're spoiled, but after more than five years of development, there's a definite "Is that all?" feeling about Windows Vista. Like cramming an info-dump into a book report the night before it's due, there certainly are a lot of individual features within the operating system, but the real value lies in their execution--how the user experiences (or doesn't experience) these--and like the info-dump, we came away shaking our heads, disappointed. Compared with Mac OS X 10.4, Windows Vista feels clunky and not very intuitive, almost as though it's still based on DOS (or at least the internal logic that made up DOS).

But is Windows Vista a bad operating system? No. It's just a disappointment for PC users who hoped that Microsoft would deliver something truly exciting to finally leapfrog ahead of Apple. They failed.

Of course, CNET is still putting a positive spin on this being just Vista 1.0, and Microsoft will publish service packs in the future to improve the user experience. Although there are absolutely no historical example of that Microsoft, who up until this point used Service Packs primarily to fix bugs and address security issues.

Even then, they did not recommend current XP users to jump on the Vista bandwagon.

Windows Vista is essentially warmed-over Windows XP. If you're currently happy with Windows XP SP2, we see no compelling reason to upgrade. On the other hand, if you need a new computer right now, Windows Vista is stable enough for everyday use.

The saddest truth about all this though, is that eventually all users will be running Vista, because it'll be on their computer when they buy it. Chances are it'll be the cheap crappy version of Vista anyway, but it'll be Vista nevertheless. Microsoft will still make plenty of money just by the inertia of the computing masses, with a mediocre OS that did nothing to take us forward. At least Windows users can finally say they have a 3D accelerated UI as well, albeit an ugly looking one (insert your "PC case with plexi window + neon light" versus Mac Pro design analogy here).