Vista’s rocky road….
Microsoft hasn’t got a lot of positive free publicity about Vista that I’ve seen. I read about a Gartner Group suggesting that it wouldn’t be available until 2nd quarter 2007. (Which was shortly after Microsoft said they wouldn’t make 4th quarter 2006 if I recall…) I’ve seen a lot of analysts talking about how the really big features they were excited about have been shelved to get it out the door. And, well… of course, I don’t expect a positive, rah-rah Microsoft article from the Register… but they’re reporting on a Yankee Group analysis of the upcoming OS…
I’ve mentioned before that I’m dreading it more than looking forward to it’s release and really have been trying to encourage system upgrades to XP Pro before the end of this year (until news of the latest delay broke…)
An irritating interface could be just one of the factors that hurts uptake of Windows Vista in the enterprise, challenging Microsoft’s ambitious rollout goals.
Yankee Group has said “quite a bit of work” remains to be done to the Windows Vista interface, judging by the currently available beta, and advised customers to wait for up to year after the operating system ships before using Windows Vista.
I guess one of the issues that strikes me is this question. Why should someone WANT to get Vista instead of XP. (Assuming that both were available to choose…) I don’t know at this point what tangible improvements could be counted on from the upgrade. XP was WORLDS better with regards to stability than the 95/98/ME series and upgrading was highly recommended if for no other reason than the stability and modern handling of memory. I could even argue that for certain ease of use issues XP is an improvement over Windows 2000. (Although that’s an open debate among many. I personally prefer the “Classic” Windows 2000 interface for the desktop/menu than the crayola scheme of XP.)
In fact I’m beginning to think that Windows XP is going to be the “Office 97” of the OS line… I know many people that still have and use Office 97 because they have no compelling motivation to upgrade. They may write letters or other text documents from time to time and it works for that, it also works for spreadsheets. In other words, it does what they need, they use about 5-10% of the available features and don’t need extra bells and whistles. (We’ll assume they don’t have Outlook – THAT has seen some compelling to upgrade improvements for general usability….)