Vista Shmista Quite Contrista

So the word today is that Vista “went gold”. Half of the people out there that even pause to read those headlines understand what it means (the “gold” part, that is). The other half are divided into completely clueless and couldn’t care less, and those that surmise completely unrelated meanings. Regardless, what does it mean for people like me that work in IT?

It means work. If you’re already paid to support a Microsoft environment: more work, or at the very least, planning work. If you’re not paid to do such chores, it’s simply another thing to make you go “hmmm…”

I should paint an honest background (for anyone bored enough to care): I’m considered by many of my peers to be “pro-Microsoft”. I don’t see myself that way at all. In fact, my home network includes Windows, Ubuntu and Fedora Linux distros, and we (my kids, wife and I) are rigged with the American staple of entertainment: iPods. 30gb video slabs, on down to Nano’s, right down to a 1gb shuffle. “Down to” sounds odd to me. Imagine buying a 1GB music playing device that fits inside a matchbox, for under $80, now imagine having that back in 1980. How about 1990? Hah! F-ing insane. If you’re a teenager, consider this: The little grunts that you tease while they play with little kiddie toys now, will be using 1TB video gadgets which project into thin air using holographics, by the time you’re in your first house. Go ahead and laugh. But stop and think about the progression of computer and tech gadgets since 1990 alone.

So back to Vista:

Like a lot of other digit-heads out there, I’ve been using Vista since it was “Longhorn” build 4059 and barely usable. I’m typing this on a cheap Dell trashbox loaded with Vista RC2 (build 5744) and IE7. I can make some valid comments and espouse worthy opinions about it.

Vista is a mixed bag of good and bad. Good, in that there’s a lot of under-the-hood improvements. Lots’ of them. Hundreds or more. The bad, is that the UI got screwed around with for little reason other than making it appear different. I’m not talking about “Aero” or the general theme templates. I’m talking about Explorer.exe, the Network Places and Networking Center, Control Panel applet menus. F-d up. Sorry if that offends anyone. Every IT geek I’ve watched as they fumble through it eventually says the same thing. If the core improvements could have been packaged in an evolutionary upgraded XP UI environment, that would have rocked my world (and that of many others) far better than it will at this point.

If there was ever a time to have rethunk licensing and pricing, this was it (also). Alas, Microsoft wasn’t watching the same channels we were. I am pretty biased on one other point: MS marketing sucks. It sucks. I’ve been waiting to see if they ever recover their zest from the Win95 launch days, but that has evaporated long ago. Now we have dull, drab commercials (print ads and web ads mostly), while Apple runs around making them look handicapped.

Vista has a lot of good to offer home and business users alike. It really does. The problem is that Microsoft will most likely focus their marketing on Aero, media features, and miss the entire boat of meat-and-potatos stuff that grabs IT geeks by the nads and gets them pumping the CIO for upgrade budgets. Read more in my next post.