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Ignore Vista Until 2008
Blakey Rat writes "According to Gartner in a research note entitled 'Ten reasons you should and shouldn't care about Microsoft's Windows Vista', businesses should wait until 2008 before installing Windows Vista, or 'pursue a strategy of managed diversity' by only bringing in new machines with Windows Vista and not upgrading existing computers. Although acknowledging the security benefits of upgrading, they explain in the report that most of the security-related benefits that come with Vista are available today through third-party software products."
It is possible that they have, you know, evaluated the beta? Huh?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
The wrong text is linked. That text is the title of the Gartner article that the zdnet.uk article is written about. The Gartner article itself isn't available for public consumption, as far as I can tell.
Comment of the year
While installing Firefox with various plugins may be a simple decision for you as a personal user or small business, it is often a much large decision for a Fortune 500 company. Previous applications, particularly internally built and deployed applications, may rely on IE for functionality. YES -- you'll say that was a stupid decision, but given time/cost constraints and corporate sprawl, can you *really* prevent that from happening in a large organization? OK, with that out of the way, switching browsers is not simple. Many of these applications will break. Business users will be upset and raise hell for IT. IT's best bet will be stick with IE. No one ever gets fired for deploying IE -- because every problem will be in the papers and will be "known issues." Deploy Firefox and, while you may be adding value, you risk your job because you're vouching personally for a product unknown by business folks.
Any old movies will not look perceptably better in HD
WTF? If they do another scan of the film at a higher resolution before compressing it into and HD stream anything that was shot on film will look better in HD. In fact most films are scanned in in resolutions beyond what is needed for HD already, simply because they know HD is coming and it's cheaper to just scan the film stock once.
Now certain movies and TV shows were shot on video and not film, and these will show no improvement. But they are the exception and not the rule.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Or you could just install Firefox, with the foxie plugin, and get completely secure browsing for all sites, and great Triton/IE support for intranet/extranet legacy webapps.
What, this Foxie?
It's not a Firefox plugin at all. It's an IE plugin! It's not related to Firefox in any way except that they are hijacking the brand name. Don't let them get away with it.
Vista's requirements are not that higher than XP, something released years ago, it's just that if you want, you can use more of your system to get a prettier interface. If they didn't do this, slashdoters would be complaining that their system is unused and windows uses ancient technology.
I was also rather disappointed at the lack of a list. TFA even italicizes the name of the research paper, but doesn't link it. Even a Google search comes up with nothing, and everybody around here is too busy making "I've got one good reason" jokes to even realize it.
So...um...anybody got a link to the reasons?
What did you expect, it's a beta version aimed at hardware manufacturers and software developers! I tried it too, and agree that it's buggy as hell (browsing folders locked up my computer), but I'm still going to try the final version.
A big problem with his premise is no companies would be able to purchase a computer from Dell, HP, IBM, etc. until 2008. As soon as Vista is released they will stop offering XP (almost immediately), and start offering only Vista.
Err, I don't know about HP or IBM, but Windows 2000 just dropped out of Dell's product line about a year ago. Three years after XP's release.
I would expcet Dell to offer a similar choice after Vista is released, and for just as long.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Choosing not to buy something that's available and updated regularly is not the same as having no upgrade path available.
And of course you're just wrong too: Mac users have not had to wait more than three months for a update over the last five years. And Apple delivered a whole new version every 12 months for the last 4 years. Based on the upgrade statistics, not may Mac users have been waiting to upgrade.
Preferably, the feature updates come out fast and furious, but remain compatible enough, so that you don't have to upgrade until you chose to do so. So, you can live without Tiger unless you want a some of the latest wizzy apps and features.
Microsoft has given its users no major upgrades since XP in 2001. "XP Server" slipped to 2003. Longhorn/Vista was promised and delayed in 2004, 2005, and 2006. What does ship will be XP with some Tiger features.
In the same timeframe, Apple has shipped four major OS upgrades and over 15 free "service pack" style upgrades that involve significant OS retooling, much faster performance on the same hardware, and lots of significant UI and API improvements. Including, of course, much of what Microsoft had promised in Vista.
During that time, Microsoft has continuously redefined its planned feature set in Longhorn, lopping off promised features and extending the delivery date over half a decade.
I remember reading the same headlines for XP, W2K, and NT.
You've probably heard it about linux, too. When 2.6 came out, I remember hearing lots of people say things like "That's nice, but I'll wait until about 2.6.10 before it's stable enough to try." And that took a full year, at least according to the timestamps at kernel.org.
I'd call XPSP2 an upgrade, not just a bugfix - IE includes popup blocking and security features, the firewall is improved and enabled by default, users are prompted to enable automatic updates, and the security center reminds you about needing antivirus software. These are significant features for most users.
But um, that's basically two new things (IE popup blocking, and the Security Center which does the other things I mentioned - XPSP1 already had a firewall and automatic updates, this just makes them more obvious). So yeah, your point is still valid.
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I saw a preview of Vista at trade show yesterday. (the fFreshly compiled build was made Tuesday.) fFeatures to be seen:
..."
.. on to the next slide."
* They are embracing the Google Personal Toolbar model; All explorer windows will have a "Search" bar embedded in them. Personally, the pervasive Search Toolbars annoy me, so this does not make me happier.
* MS is enforcing driver signing. More devices will require more strictly signed drivers. Supposedly, if it isn't signed, it won't install. The idea is to fForce manufacturers to write better code.
* The "Start/Run..." button will be simply "Start; Begin Typing" A small textbox is built into the bottom of the start menu. So you can simply hit the "start menu" button on your keyboard and type the name of the program you wish to run. This is done to eliminate one extra mouse click. A very small improvement, but possibly my fFavorite so fFar. Makes me wonder if such a hack can be made fFor other versions of windows.
* You no longer have to log in and out of different users to do various tasks (such as set the clock). When the user does an action he is not allowed to do, he is asked fFor the administrative password. So when the actual admin wants to do something, it is really easy to do. I'm wondering how often it will ask the admin password, however; some apps which try to do things like change the registry every 5 minutes will annoy my users greatly.
* The kernel is tied to IE just a little bit more each iteration. In this version, if you try to visit a suspicious website, the web browser's toolbar will glow red if it thinks you are in an insecure website. What constitutes an "insecure website" appears to have a much broader meaning -- the example given was "If you go to www.micr0s0ft.com
* GUI improvements have been made, and talked about all over. Much of which seems rather pointless to me. However they are taking the "preview" mode of icons a couple steps fFarther. When you browse to any directory, it tries to automatically look in each fFile and generate a preview of every document in that directory. This seems like a profoundly bad idea to me, fFor one simple reason: browsing your computer now takes 10 times as long because you have to wait fFor it to cache every document and every preview. The demo machine was insatiably bogged down by this task.
* fFor the fFans of wasting time, traditional solitaire will be saddled up side by side with a number of other games, including what is supposed to be a pretty good chess game.
Lastly a word on the presentation: Insufferable. The number of bugs apparent in the dev version made the whole presentation largely unwatchable. So it was a lot of "well, this is what it will be able to do, and.. uhm