• About

LIVEdigitally

The Vaio Returneth

Posted on April 22, 2008 by Jeremy Toeman

Here’s the detailed account of Ed’s journey with the Vaio.

The above video should give you a pretty solid understanding, but if not, here’s the background:

  1. Had a Vaio, it was great, it got stolen.
  2. Bought a new Vaio ($2500 with insurance check), it ran Vista, it was terrible.
  3. Bought a MacBook 10 weeks later ($1100), it’s been great.
  4. Mocked the Vaio many many times until Ed Bott approached me, interested in seeing if he could fix its problems
  5. He did, it works great.

My thoughts on the matter, in no particular order:

  • It’s not Vista per se, it’s the PC manufacturers who are failing to deliver consumer-ready products. If you have either an IT department or an Ed Bott, you can do fine. If you don’t, you’re in a heap of problems.
  • PC manufacturers should massively separate the “home/consumer” group from the business groups. Further, there is a huge opportunity for a PC company to make a finely tuned, consumer-ready Vista laptop.
  • Making a great laptop requires a minimal quantity of options. For reference, call Apple. If the MacBook had 44,000 possible combinations, it would be just as bad as any off-the-shelf PC notebook.
  • This is a very classic Innovator’s Dilemma situation – “the market” is telling PC companies they want options, but the reality is they want easy to use, reliable, affordable computers.

Until a PC company follows any of this advice, Apple will continue to gain market share, and here’s why: Virtually all MacBook users today are happily recommending others to try MacBooks, with a predictable, reliable recommendation. PC users cannot as easily do the same. I had a great Vaio, then a terrible one. I’ve used Toshibas before (great – in the 90s), a Gateway (wasn’t bad), and 3 Dells now (one good, one bad, one ugly). But they are all vastly different.

Thanks and hats off to Mr. Ed Bott for putting in so much time with me. I’ve learned a lot from this process, and I sincerely recommend to any PC company who is listening: go spend some time talking to Ed and take his advice. If you really want to stop the slide (and trust me, the slide is happening even if the numbers you look at today seem like rounding errors), you need to get experts like him to better explain the consumer PC needs of today.

Share this:

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Reddit

Related

Posted in General, Product Reviews | 22 Comments
« 22 Predictions About iPhone 2.0
Come to Maker's Faire, Build Gadgets and More! »

22 thoughts on “The Vaio Returneth”

  1. Pingback: The Vaio Returneth | Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise |

  2. Sal Cangeloso says:
    April 22, 2008 at 2:21 pm

    Awesome job Jeremy and Ed! It sounds like it was a pretty painful experience but it was really interesting to see this come to a conclusion. The fact that it was a successful makes it even better.

    Regarding the less is more philosophy, it’s all about tradeoffs- Apple is working in a closed environment (from a hardware standpoint) so you have to trade options/versatility for that sense of knowing exactly what you are getting. While there is certainly lots of appeal to something that just works, it is a limitation that is not for everyone. Ultimately, could the typical home user benefit from it? Probably.

    Reply
  3. Pingback: » One CableCARD problem down, one to go » Ben Drawbaugh

  4. meh says:
    April 22, 2008 at 8:12 pm

    big deal!

    anyone with half a brain knows that dell/sony/hp etc.. etc.. all need to be formatted and a clean install of windows applied.

    i have been doing this for years.. why would you expect vista to be any different coming from those suppliers!

    Reply
  5. Gold says:
    April 22, 2008 at 9:12 pm

    Any interest in working on a low-end Dell?

    Reply
  6. Jim says:
    April 22, 2008 at 10:16 pm

    Was it strange that I noticed the scotch bottle in every shot? Or was it just me…

    Reply
  7. Pingback: BambisMusings - Musings from a little deer? » Ed Bott breaths life back into a $2500 Sony Vaio “brick”

  8. Rob L says:
    April 23, 2008 at 4:52 am

    “Meh” – you completely miss the point. Normal users haven’t a clue about re-installing windows, or uninstalling “free” crapware. “anyone with half a brain” should be “anyone interested in computers”… amazingly not everybody is, and they just want to open the lid and hit the power button.

    Reply
  9. Jeremy Toeman says:
    April 23, 2008 at 7:10 am

    Sal – agreed, my point is that if a Dell or HP or Sony were to create one line with a very limited set of options, and highly tuned drivers, my hunch is they’d do extremely well with it. Leave the mega-customizer for the corporate/IT depts to deal with, but get it away from mom/pop.

    meh – anyone with half a brain can barely walk, let alone install Vista. or were you being figurative?

    Mom – we’ll do what we can

    Jim – yes, good catch!

    Rob – bingo!

    Reply
  10. Gold says:
    April 23, 2008 at 7:32 am

    If I could add another comment to meh…..I have more than half a brain, much more. The computer for me is not a way of life; it’s a way to keep in touch, read some stuff, look up information, etc. I don’t want to spend my time waiting for something to upload? download? and then try to figure something out in a language that I don’t understand in the first place. I didn’t grow up with this but it doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t have easy accessibility to information. Especially after spending quite a few dollars….I at least would like my money’s worth and right now don’t have it.

    Reply
  11. Dave Zatz says:
    April 23, 2008 at 10:48 am

    Jeremy, Gold – I moved my mom off Windows when her Compaq power supply died a few months ago. She’s been very happy on her new Mac Mini and my IT duties are much less these days. Prior to that, I was always futzing around using LogMeIn to resolve some issue or other. I actually thought about putting my Great Uncle on Ubuntu using a Live CD so he couldn’t mess it up but he could web surf and check AOL email (which is all he does).

    Reply
  12. Gennady says:
    April 23, 2008 at 4:50 pm

    OK, let’s say I do have skills and time to install fresh Vista. Question is how do I go about license key?
    Laptops these days do not come with operation system installation media. And even if I happen to find Vista DVD, would OEM License Key from my laptop work? In XP OEM key does not work with random XP installation CD, I suspect Vista is the same. Does this mean having Vista OEM license key from preinstalled Vista I will have to buy another OEM or Retail Vista license?

    Reply
  13. john williams says:
    April 28, 2008 at 6:28 am

    It seems to me that PC manufacturers are suffering from the same dilemma as camera manufacturers. many of us know that the increasing megapixel count on compact cameras is causing unacceptable compromises in other areas and is a waste of time with the average compact lens, but Joe Public looking at two cameras says that camera a must be better ‘cos it’s got 12 megapixels when camera b has only 6, so camera a sells at the expense of camera b.

    Likewise, Jo Public looks at two computers and thinks that computer a must be better because it comes with 600 packages pre-installed, not realising just what this implies in terms of (lack of) performance.

    Reply
  14. cgdams says:
    May 12, 2008 at 11:53 pm

    john williams: You’re right about digital cameras, but that’s not the reason, in this case. Most of the software that comes preinstalled on new machines these days is trialware, meaning that it only runs for a limited time or has a reduced feature set and proposes buying the full featured version.

    The hardware manufacturers take money from the software vendors whose software they preinstall, and that money is calculated into the price of the machines. Look at Apples prices, and you know why they don’t have to do the same.

    Of course, from the customers point of view, that’s a major annoyance. Let’s hope the hardware manufacturers will learn their lesson that earning too much from crapware in long terms means losing more from customer loss…

    Reply
  15. Pingback: Jeremy Toeman’s LIVEdigitally » Blog Archive » MacBooks will take 50% of notebook market share within a year

  16. Nik TJ says:
    May 19, 2008 at 10:04 pm

    I was interested in Meh’s comment about wiping and clean-installing Dell/Sony/HP etc notebooks.

    I have been doing this regularly for some years, but felt myself to be quite unusual for doing so. Out of interest, about one third of those machines got linux while the the other two-thirds got Windows 2000 or (more recently) XP. However, in the past two years that ratio has shifted to about 50-50.

    Cheers!
    Nik

    Reply
  17. cucu says:
    May 20, 2008 at 1:49 am

    1. “PC manufacturers should massively separate the “home/consumer” group from the business groups.”

    They do – Dell Latitude, IBM Thinkpad …

    2. “Making a great laptop requires a minimal quantity of options.”

    Total bullshit – a great laptop needs real choice = options that you can control (which is NOT what you get from Apple, but you are too fresh on that camp to see it, in a few years you will read pages like http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-breaks and ask yourself how could you possibly be so dumb as to not see the signs …

    Reply
  18. Jeremy Toeman says:
    May 20, 2008 at 10:57 am

    cucu – sorry, but you’re just off the mark here (and calling bullshit or telling me I’m dumb just deflect from your argument, by the way). The needs of the notebook user have changed – the average person no longer needs 48,000 combinations of options on a notebook. We’re so far past speeds & feeds.

    This is exactly that “innovator’s dilemma” moment that PC manufacturers *must* recognize to continue sustaining market share. In a few years, those signs will become obvious, even to people who write denigrating messages like yours.

    Reply
  19. Ed Bott says:
    June 6, 2008 at 11:15 am

    Gennady, with Vista, you can install from any retail media using no product key. Borrow a copy, download from Technet or MSDN, or use a copy from another machine. Then, after installation, us the activation option and enter the key from the sticker on your PC. You will not be able to activate automatically over the internet but you will be able to do so when you use the phone option. Takes six minutes, and that’s exactly what I did with Jeremy’s notebook in this case.

    Reply
  20. Jeff Dickey says:
    June 12, 2008 at 5:32 pm

    Jeremy,

    Completely agree about the Innovator’s Dilemma. I’ve been an omnivorous Windows/Linux guy for a *very* long time; had Macs (first a 128K Thin Mac, then a PowerTower Pro 225 and then…that was it for over a decade, until I got tired of all the mental masturbation required to make *either* Windows or Linux happy and working the way I wanted on my Acer and Lenovo laptops. We’ve known for years that to use Windows heavily on a daily basis essentially requires corporate-level technical support, plus a big hit out of the work week for maintenance. Linux has always had the advantage that the pain was all on the front end; once you got everything set, it (mostly) just kept working. That is, until the next time you do a major software upgrade. I run Ubuntu Gutsy on both laptops; when Hardy came out, I downloaded and burned the DVD, started updating my migration plan (I always do clean installs, not in-place upgrades), and then something funny happened. I got sick, then I got busy on a project that needed 110% attention for a couple of weeks, and then I noticed something. I wasn’t really excited about the possibility of taking myself offline for a day or two to install, restore, tweak and test both systems. I also was tired of small screens; staring into a monitor 16/7/365 for 25+ years is why I have -8.0-dioptre correction in the first place. So I bought a 24″ iMac. I haven’t been this jazzed about a computer since… somewhere between the PowerTower and Windows 95; either way, a long, LONG time ago.

    Count me as part of your “rounding error”. The Rule of Tens strikes with a vengeance!

    Reply
  21. Saucy says:
    August 11, 2008 at 2:10 pm

    ‘Same here, only with an Acer laptop. They come *loaded* with crapware. So I downloaded the necessary drivers from the website and burned them to disc. Then I used a *generic* Vista disc. Generic Vista caught almost all the devices save a couple or so, so most of the driver downloading wasn’t necessary. I installed them and it all works.

    Afterwards, I realized I should install a more up-to-date ATI video driver as there was a minor glitch in the one that comes with Vista. No big deal.

    But overall it was so easy .. and the difference! Wow. From slow slow slow to decent. And then I decided to install more RAM [‘went from 1 to 2 GB] and the thing now pretty much rocks.

    Reply
  22. Pingback: » Open Letter to Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates, and Sony Corp: I Am Not A PC - By ¡Para Justicia y Libertad!

Leave a comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

About

Jeremy Toeman is a seasoned Product leader with over 20 years experience in the convergence of digital media, mobile entertainment, social entertainment, smart TV and consumer technology. Prior ventures and projects include CNET, Viggle/Dijit/Nextguide, Sling Media, VUDU, Clicker, DivX, Rovi, Mediabolic, Boxee, and many other consumer technology companies. This blog represents his personal opinion and outlook on things.

Recent Posts

  • Back on the wagon/horse?
  • 11 Tips for Startups Pitching Big Companies
  • CES 2016: A New Role
  • Everything I Learned (So Far) Working For a Huge Company
  • And I’m Back…

Archives

Pages

  • About

Archives

  • January 2019
  • April 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • May 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • June 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • March 2006
  • February 2006
  • January 2006
  • December 2005
  • November 2005
  • October 2005
  • September 2005
  • August 2005
  • July 2005
  • June 2005
  • May 2005
  • April 2005
  • March 2005
  • February 2005
  • January 2005
  • December 2004
  • November 2004
  • October 2004
  • September 2004

Categories

  • Convergence (81)
  • Gadgets (144)
  • Gaming (19)
  • General (999)
  • Guides (35)
  • LD Approved (72)
  • Marketing (23)
  • Mobile Technology (111)
  • Networking (22)
  • No/Low-tech (64)
  • Product Announcements (85)
  • Product Reviews (109)
  • That's Janky (93)
  • Travel (29)
  • Video/Music/Media (115)
  • Web/Internet (103)

WordPress

  • Log in
  • WordPress

CyberChimps WordPress Themes

© LIVEdigitally
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.