More Vista Thudding
I said awhile back that I thought the various legal assaults on Microsoft were pointless - give them enough time, and - like IBM in the 80's - they'll stupid themselves out of their influential position in the industry. It seems that they are ahead of schedule on that front - Joe Wilcox is on the "whither Vista" beat again. He raises a number of anecdotal stories about resistance to Vista, and then makes this observation:
Many IT organizations are intolerant to change that disrupts the workflow. Windows Vista is a disruptive force. Pick a reason: Application incompatibility, hardware incompatibility, UAC popups or user resistance, among others. XP is familiar and, for many, feels safer.
Microsoft should be hugely concerned about the stability of the Windows XP ecosystem and the operating system's customer familiarity. Windows shouldn't become another WordPerfect.
Clean breaks are possible - Apple made one from OS 9 to OS X. However, any clean break has to offer substantial benefits over the old stuff, and OS X did, in terms of stability. The problem for Vista is that XP is "good enough", and the persistent horror stories about drivers and UAC lead people to ask "why should I bother?".
Technorati Tags: Vista
Comments
but Apple did it a bit differently
[ Troy Brumley] October 5, 2007 7:54:32.959
Comment by Troy Brumley
Microsoft's insistence on an smooth upgrade for many programs, at least in tolerance mode, is what holds Vista back. With OS X, Mac OS "classic" ran as almost a "virtual machine" inside of OS X. Microsoft should provide backwards capability in a similar method and put everything into Vista that would make it worth the upgrade hassle.
Too Expensive
[Big Buttons] October 5, 2007 14:10:25.812
Its simply too expensive -- with a minimum hardware requirement of 256MB VRAM and 1GB or system RAM to get Vista to work correct (Aero interface, etc), I need a whole new system. And there's just nothing there besides a pretty UI, anyway. Simply not worth the money.