Should Microsoft Throw Away Vista?

Throw Vista away. That's what my colleagues at our fellow IDG publication InfoWorld have now argued that Microsoft should do. Give it a dignified resting place, as a stepping-stone OS, and come up with a replacement that's more sensible for enterprise IT. There is historical precedent in the consumer OS space for such a move; look at Windows ME and how it became a footnote in Microsoft history.

"Microsoft should toss Vista in the trash, as the company did with Windows Millennium eight years ago, then issue a Windows XP Second Edition (as it did with Windows 98 eight years ago) that capitalizes on some of Vista's key benefits. Then the company should focus on Windows 7, rather than keep trying to push Vista down unwilling customers' throats. If that's too radical, how about doing an XP Second Edition while also continuing to rework Vista?" writes InfoWorld executive editor Galen Gruman, who created a petition that 100,000 people have now signed asking Microsoft to save Windows XP.

Bold ideas. But I have a feeling that some of you nodded your heads in agreement as you read them. As CIO has reported previously, many enterprise IT shops are holding out on Vista. CIOs in mid-market companies, in particular, often have aging hardware that would not play nicely with Vista, and can't afford a large-scale hardware refresh just for the OS. Also, they don’t want to deal with or pay for the necessary end-user training for Vista.

Other CIOs simply don’t believe that Vista will bring many useful benefits to their businesses.

Consider this comment, from a CIO who responded to one of my blog posts on Vista: "I'm a CIO. I've been using Vista on my Lenovo T60p since March 2007 and have wanted to be impressed and compelled to roll it out across my enterprise, but I'm neither impressed or compelled."

Or, consider how another reader of that same blog post explained why he was waiting on Vista: "Vista upgrade is not an upgrade, but wholesale replacement. The processor and memory requirements will give every CIO pause (just to keep performance level with existing levels), not to mention researching how many peripherals have to be replaced as well due to incompatibility issues. Vista will force many CIOs to consider Linux and Mac alternatives due to cost and compatibility issues in order to stay in budget...anyone remember Windows ME... it looks downright inviting in comparison."

Microsoft shook up the Vista marketing team recently, for reasons including botched public relations and marketing decisions. In one example, Microsoft is now fighting lawsuits alleging that its handling of the "Vista Capable" labeling program for consumer PCs was inept and unfair to PC buyers.

With all this as a backdrop, the long-awaited first service pack for Vista, SP1, became available yesterday, via Windows Update and the Microsoft site. If you have been using Vista, you'll probably be able to install this service pack, although Microsoft notes that some people won’t be able to do so quite yet, due to ongoing PC driver incompatibility problems. (See the complete details on Microsoft's Vista blog.)

Will this service pack solve some of the performance concerns? We'll see, as people test out the service pack this week. But even improved Vista performance won’t appease enterprise IT leaders concerned with hardware requirements and end user training.

A technology vendor that I met with this week asked me what I thought of the ongoing Microsoft and Yahoo merger talk. Microsoft buying Yahoo doesn't solve the Google Apps problem, I said. And it doesn’t solve

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Wed, Mar 19, 2008 13:42 EDT

No Vista For Me

Posted by: Anonymous
Rating:

I purchased a PC w/ Vista in mid 2007. After struggling to get it to work, I threw the disk in the trash, and downloaded Ubuntu. It was the best move I ever made. I tried linux in the past but it always felt clumsy, but Ubuntu was much more polished than any windows product and was easier to set up and use. I have since installed it on my retired mothers computer and the weekly calls for help disappeared. From what I hear, a lot of people are switching and if M$ does not do something soon, they will loose a good number of customers to linux.

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Sat, Mar 22, 2008 21:36 EDT

Me Too...

Posted by: rmarrs
Rating:

I too purchased a XPS M1710 in 2007. It came pre-installed with Vista. I wanted to love Vista. As a .NET developer, it provides much anticipated capabilities for .NET. A month ago, I installed Ubuntu and have not looked back since. I have used linux off and on for many years, and was always saddened to find it just wasn't quite where I needed it to be, but Vista finally pushed me over the edge. My NVIDIA drivers would crash on a regular basis, and when I say crash, I mean blue screen. I've gone through 2 BIOS updates hoping to resolve my hibernation issues, but no. I pulled down SP1 from MSDN in hopes of resolving some of the issues, and immediately upon installing SP1, my machine blue screened. That was the last straw. I have NEVER had a blue screen on XP without doing something stupid like pulling an IDE cable mid-operation (don't ask).

Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" has been running solid, and after dealing with a few configuration issues (read learning curve), I've got everything up and running I need, and I have installed XP on VMWare server for my Windows development. Christ, my IPOD even works with libgpod setup.

I'm a guy who likes pretty desktops without too much pain of performance. Compiz-Fusion is amazing, and with a few tweaks, my machine actually looks like OSX, but more functional.

As for Vista, I won't go back. I've got the Ubuntu install going on my desktop at home as I type.

Sun, Mar 23, 2008 1:20 EDT

VISTA

Posted by: Xcalibar
Rating:

I have to agree. Windows Vista is a lemon. It is unmanageable as an operating system. You can't find anything quickly and it doesn't perform very well.

Sun, Mar 23, 2008 9:38 EDT

*sigh* You fail at using a user interface.

Posted by: Bryant
Rating:

"I have to agree. Windows Vista is a lemon. It is unmanageable as an operating system. You can't find anything quickly and it doesn't perform very well."

Millions of dollars worth of user experience research went into Vista. Everything, such as which functions in XP to how much time people spend searching for a feature were analyzed. The Vista UI was built off of this research, and further tests with new people using the operating system (people who had trouble with XP as well as people who were new to Windows, such as generational Mac users) found it much easier to pick up on the Vista User Interface than a number of other operating systems, including XP and Mac OS X Tiger.

Nice try at trying to explain something, though. It only performs slowly on a machine with lower specs, and even then it's not that bad. I'm using Vista as my primary operating system on a laptop I purchased in May 2006 and I've never had Vista slow down or crash on me. Everything is fluid and it performs faster than XP on this machine thanks to features like SuperFetch.

Many businesses I work with around the DC metropolitan area also love the OS, especially for the one feature that the author of this piece of commentary has completely neglected:

Network Access Protection

In the last few weeks, many of these businesses have upgraded hardware in areas where this feature could be deployed for the simple reason that they saw security as a top concern, and it's working. So far, they've reported zero breaches of security in key infrastructure areas as opposed to many breaches back when XP was their OS of choice sitting on top of a Server 2003 active directory structure. The reason this feature is rolling out now is because it requires NAP-capable routers, VPN servers, and other "healthy" technologies in order for it to be properly deployed. Server 2008 was only recently released to manufacturing, and the code needed to operate NAP is only present in Server 2008, though these businesses have been testing Server 2008 in non-production environments in order to be fully prepared to take advantage of NAP upon its release.

I wouldn't expect you to understand this, though. You either haven't used Vista at all or you installed it on a machine built back in 2003 hoping that it would run.

Sun, Mar 23, 2008 19:34 EDT

Vista was designed to extract money by force from you.

Yes! If you have unlimited resources Vista is for you. Is it better? Yes, as long as you are using one of the expensive versions. Drivers are a problem? No, if you buy everything new. Do I recomend it to my customers? No,that would be like recomending Lui Vuitton to field salesman to carry their laptop, looks nice, but no return on investment is viable.

Should Microsoft Throw Away Vista?

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