Todd Haselton at Ars Technica's 1 Microsoft Way journal is reporting that the majority of Support.com's customers are confused by some of Vista's significant new changes. After opening their doors for service in June, a tally of that month's support calls revealed that a whopping 77 percent were to get help with Vista, with a surprising 30 percent of those calls simply asking for help on how to navigate Vista's controversial new Aero interface.Considering that Support.com is a commercial service, we're going to agree with 1 Microsoft Way that their greater constituency is probably more on the newbie side than your typical Flash drive-slinging, Google-searching computer nut. That said, Support.com's report of confusion among the mainstream ranks can be taken in a number of ways, depending on whether you're a fan of the significant changes - some arguably for the sake of change alone - that Microsoft made with Vista. The findings become even more significant when you consider the fact that Windows users - people who have already been using the product for months, years or perhaps decades - are getting lost when they sit down and try to navigate through the new translucent black jungle Microsoft introduced.
Still, Support.com is but a drop in the bucket of the mainstream Vista reaction, so it would be interesting to see support request results from larger players like Dell and Best Buy's Geek Squad for a much larger gulp of the big picture.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-23-2007 @ 8:27PM
PRC. said...
I'm by no means a newbie, but there are still things that MS did with Vista that leave me shaking my head. Shutting down your computer? Not exactly the most intuitive task.
Reply
7-24-2007 @ 3:20PM
h0mi said...
How about a search function that's easy to use and makes sense... the new search function is vile.
ARC was intended to tell people "Oh, so you want us to protect the system so people won't run in superuser mode and to stop virii and worms? we'll show you!"
Reply