I like to think Vista is to computing as electronic ignition, fuel injection, traction control, and/or side-impact airbags is to automotive industry (stay with me on this!). It may not make your car rabbit off the light faster or improve the note out the tailpipe of your high-flow exhaust, but it is a smarter long-term strategy. Folks who roll their ’73 Pintos into the shop and say, “Trick me out with Vista!” are in for a surprise; it’s just not a good use of pimp-my-ride effort. Similarly, there are other folks who covet the latest and greatest model but stand over the engine bay and slander the electronic fuel injection because it’s not carbureted.
Bottom-line, most of us compute to get something done. We get in the car to go somewhere; we don’t take drives in the country for the sake of it. Truly, those days of novelty computing are over, but we can still commute or run errands in style. Indeed, the new body style (Aero) is a matter of taste, but we in the shop (IT) look past the body panels. And although Vista relocated the radio knobs, glove box, fuses, most of our folks like the redesign but still want to glue on cheap tailfins, fuzzy dice, and curb feelers (free stuff off the Internet). I like to think of Vista as one of those shiny new pickup trucks that look like a Rolls on the inside but can still haul 15 bales of hay and a trailer full of hogs.
Unfortunately, I have heard not just yahoos on the Internet and drunks at the local ice house refer to Vista with their finest derogatory names, but a couple well-respected industry leaders shun Vista as well. One even said to a room full of knowledge management experts, “Vista is Microsoft’s gift to Apple.” Like those commentators, I feel Microsoft probably did too much too fast and underestimated the short-term market impact. I have been in the IT business for over 20 years now and have seen (and used intimately) a dozen or so OSes come and go. The tech/IT commerce highway is littered with good ideas and technology that ran out of (financial) gas, were run off the road by Mad Max (aggressive marketing), or were simply abandoned due to a lack qualified drivers (ahead of its time).
I direct a global IT organization spread across several languages/cultures, and I see Microsoft, with its deep pockets and thick resources (financial, marketing, technical expertise), as the best - or what we affectionately term “sucks less” - overall global choice. The “sucks less” metric is measured in utility per money: will it meet our requirements (not wants) over the long-term for a reasonable TCO (total cost of ownership) without running out of gas, getting run off the road and is drivable without sending the army of drivers back to school. Vista does just that and more, especially if you’re managing a couple thousand PCs across the globe with GPOs and other IT management systems. Furthermore, Vista tends to provide me more horsepower for the same amount of fuel (I can go faster more quickly and reliably on the same battery life).
Re. device drivers and ISV relations, it took some time to for the parts and accessory manufacturers to get their ducks in a row for Vista, esp. VPN, anti-virus/end-point protection and the more esoteric utility vendors. I happened to know and experienced that Microsoft did not develop Vista in a vacuum, rather they engaged ISVs in a fairly typical-for-Microsoft (gorilla-like but oozing with resources) manner. The ISVs who played the game well did well. A few ISVs whined about losing control of parts of the architecture, but it was for the long-term betterment of customers in the end. And our mechanics (IT techs and developers) have picked it up quickly, thanks to the copious and free resources from Microsoft, and we’ll be that much more ready for Windows 7 for the long haul. When it’s all mixed together, we see Vista as the most compelling, sucks-less, multi-cultural, shiny pickup, enabling all of our users to do better, faster, longer and more securely.
