fishbrains - Bret Fisher

We all still remember that change is still hard, not a painless event, and sometimes not what we thought it would be right?

I’ve used Windows Vista as my main OS for 6 months 10 hours a day, and testing for over a year in a much smaller capacity. It’s not been an always productive affair, but that’s really the combo of a noob-Vista-user, beta code, non-WHQL drivers, etc.; and not so much about Vista’s changes being for the worse. I’m writing this post on Windows XP and already several times wished I was on Vista, having to take the “long way” in XP… so about once a week I realize how Vista has really improved my productivity. I have found over time that most of the things I didn’t initially like are not as big a deal as I had first thought.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I’ve been reading/watching press for the last year reporting on Vista. Some IT rag “columnists”, and some bloggers that seem to be going too far in their “fair and balanced” view of changes in Vista. Most Vista news over the last year has been misleading, FUD inducing, error prone junk except for Microsoft’s army of internal bloggers and Paul Thurrott’s WinInfo columns and personal blog. I can only assume it’s because of one or both of the following:

1. Writers need to keep their readership up, and all-good-news-most-of-the-time is not “in” unless you want to be labeled a Microsoft fan boy.
2. Writers have short memories, and don’t understand the cycle of the Windows desktop OS.

One example might be David Morgenstern at eweek.com worrying about flash memory usage in Vista. Another was all the rhetoric about the 3D desktop engine requiring a bit more umph then the stock motherboard video card from 4-years ago. None of these were as big a deal on launch as you’d expect by the coverage they received. Similar concerns were raised about Windows XP in its pre-release days with the “candy” interface and RAM requirements. A year from now when the 2^nd generation of PC hardware running Vista is out, those same people will forget all their worries from 2006. Being the juggernaut of business and consumer desktop OS’s, Microsoft is the one driving the change with each OS and change is not usually comfortable. With ReadyDrive and ReadyBoost they have created a whole new branch of the flash market that will help overcome the speed issues that hard drive manufactures haven’t solved yet. I don’t think we’ve seen all the ways hardware companies will creatively use these features to increase performance. Maybe we’ll see a built-in 2GB ReadyBoost chip rather than needing a USB stick (I use a SD Card with the built in SD Reader of a HP nc8430 laptop to keep it flush and always-on). In 3 years when our processors have again doubled twice over and RAM is a third today’s price we’ll be buying plenty more horsepower then Vista needs and wishing they had cranked up the GUI. Microsoft *shouldn’t* be releasing an OS that flies on 2-year old hardware with all the bells turned on, so why would that ever need to be news? Besides, as anyone noticed that the Vista Basic interface is still better then XP?

I’ve realized that Windows is the only desktop OS left that releases a major OS update every 4 years (or at least plans too). Of Windows, Mac, and Linux everyone else but Windows is releasing more often incremental updates rather than large experience-changing versions. If this trend continues, Windows will be the only one worth reporting for an entire year before its next release. Because of that release design, Windows will always be “controversial” and “risky” on a new RTM and “old and busted” the months before the next release. (Unlike Paul has logged over the last few years, I think Vista has plenty enough changes (from a corporate OS perspective) and improvements to keep us busy for 4 years.) Again, people report these pros/cons of a longer release cycle likes its news. I will say that this could change if Microsoft’s R2 strategy turns into an incremental OS change that lessons the learning curve. That wasn’t the case though with Windows 2003 R2, as it didn’t change nearly a thing… just added new optional features (which could have just been free downloads).

In any case, Vista is a welcome upgrade that has improvements in about every area. I enjoy using XP less and less since November 2006.