Windows Vista is coming, you better watch out
Microsoft (MSFT) has finally shipped its next OS, named Vista né Longhorn, to its business customers. Vista lacks almost all the features that were promised for Longhorn Lo those many years ago, but it does sport a new OS X-alike look; some purdy graphics; and emphasis on security, sorta; anew version of IE, which is also available for XP; and some really serious problems.
Let’s look at security, which Microsoft swears up and down is now a primary concern. Microsoft dealt with this in typical Microsoft fashion, the system now pops up an authentication dialog ALL THE TIME. Change anything, and the system asks you to authenticate. The dialogs are so frequent that you will quickly be aggravated into turning off this ‘feature’; and since this is Microsoft, it’s all or nothing, so once you turn it off, you will get no protection or notification of nefarious programs trying to do things they shouldn’t. In a brief test with Vista I averaged 8 authentication dialogs an hour, or one ever 7 1/2 minutes.
Here’s an excerpt from David Pogue’s article at the New York Times:
And then there’s that Sidebar, the floating layer of mini-programs. If you close one of the gadgets, you lose its contents forever: your notes in the Post-it Notes gadget, your stock portfolio in the Stocks gadget, and so on. You couldn’t save them if you wanted to. How could Microsoft have missed that one.
What a wonderful example of Microsoft’s foresight on behalf of their customers, don’t you think?
There’s many other Windows XP features that are missing from Vista, but one of the more glaring absences is that Word Pad will no long be able to view Word documents, so people will need to either pony up several hundred dollars to buy office, download OpenOffice, or upload the documents to docs.google.com.
Windows Vista comes in five different versions, ranging from the worthless and crippled “Home Basic” to the Media Center-ish “Ultimate”. Most people will likely end up with the Home Premium version, but this one has some rather serious shortcomings, and many people will find that to do what they want, they will have to go for the $400 “Ultimate”. For example, want to use Remote Desktop to manage your kid’s Widnows machine? Yeah, Premium don’t play that, pony up $400. Premium also doesn’t support encryption, so stolen laptops will still have millions of SSN numbers on them available to the thieves. For the record, Remote Desktop-like features (VNC) and encryption are a part of every OS X install.
That’s not to mention that you need a top-end video card and a very recent processor in order to take advantage of many of Vista’s flashier features. If you’ve bought your machine in the last 6 months, you are probably ok. If not, you likely need to at least spend $200 on a video card, and you quite possibly need a whole new machine.
So, while we’re at it, let’s talk about the new licensing for Vista, which will come as a rude shock to many users in 6 months to a year, as people will be quite surprised to find that when they upgrade their Vista machine’s processor and video card in a year, Microsoft will demand you purchase a whole new version of Vista. That’s right, you can’t transfer your Vista to a ‘new’ machine, and Microsoft is the sole arbiter of what is a ‘new’ machine.
Of course, none of this matters. Unless you hang on to your current Windows machine, you will have no choice about moving to Vista. All new machines will be sold with Vista next year, so unless you buy a Mac (really, buy a Mac, it will even run Windows XP or Vista if you really want), you will be forced into Vista soon enough.