| 2007 Predictions: The Vista Prospect |
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| Saturday, 30 December 2006 | |
 While Microsoft seems to be getting a surprising amount of bad Vista press, I see this is pretty meaningless as far as Vista is concerned. OK, so a few security holes have emerged already, but it's only news because it's Vista. (When Apple releases security patches nobody makes a news story out of it.)
The security story is born naturally from the pathetic levels of security that Windows 2000 and Windows XP provided. As far as I can tell Windows Vista is very securable and in time (it'll be a few years yet) this will squash the level virus activity. Another story that broke recently implied that Microsoft had shot itself in the foot with its DRM. The truth here is that Microsoft's DRM is expensive in CPU power and will probably prove annoying to Vista users. This looks like an overblown story to me. Most PC buyers have no conception of the ins and outs of CPU power and many seemed quite happy to have AV software cripple their performance (when it kicked in) so I don't think a few CPU cycles here and there are going to mean much. One thing that Vista does (for premium content) is diminish the quality of playback when DRM-protected content is being played. This will annoy some people, I expect, but I suspect that many people will simply not notice. Vista has, naturally, stolen everything it possibly can from Apple's OS X and added one or two features of its own in a desperate attempt not to look outmoded. That's not too surprising really. Putting a Windows XP interface next to a OS X Tiger interface was like putting Chevy pick up next to a Jaguar XK8. Microsoft had to do something to look relevant and it has. And, surprisingly, given that Microsoft is so dramatically poor at interface design (so bad that Apple has never been forced to compete), Microsoft has introduced one genuinely good (and I believe original) feature in Vista's voice interface. The voice interface is itself very good, but try this as an idea... When using Vista voice recognition and you can tell Vista to “show numbers,” and the window will show (and number) every clickable interface element in the current window. Then you just speak the number and it ‘clicks’ that element. Microsoft has also embedded a whole raft of media capabilities in Vista which will serve media software developers well. Truth be told, the media capabilities of Vista are better than those of OS X, but it doesn't matter much. Nothing is going to stop the onward march of OS X. The question is whether Microsoft has done enough to keep Windows relevant, I believe the answer is “yes”. Will Vista uptake be dramatic? In the corporations they will delay it as long as they can. PC roll-outs cost a fortune and there's nothing in Vista that the corporations have a dramatic need for except security and Vista was so late that most corporations fixed the problems some other way. On the other hand 20% to 30% of home users will buy a new PC this year (they always do) and the majority of them will not be switching to Apple (or Linux). by Robin Bloor |
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