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."

Comments

Amazing

[shmlco]

Amazing how many things stay the same. I remember reading the same headlines for XP, W2K, and NT.

Though this article is pretty lame. First time I've read, "Ten reasons you should and shouldn't care about Microsoft's Windows Vista client," in a summary and the linked article doesn't even bother to list them.

This is news?

Summary: Too Little, Too Late

[rsborg]

Seems as if Gartner, the analyst who was deeply in love with Microsoft in the nineties, has turned sour on them lately.

The majority of improvements in Vista will be security-related and most of this functionality "is available via third-party products today"

Ouch.

"Search is slow in Windows XP and files, email and calendar objects cannot be found with a single search." While Microsoft has tried to remedy this in Vista, "competent third-party desktop tools are already available" from companies like Google, Gartner pointed out.

I'd hate to be furniture in Ballmer's office.

My main problem with the article was the lack of options specified:

The analysts acknowledged that companies who use IE7 and Vista will have fewer points of weakness.

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.

By that time...

[Spy der Mann]

...I'll already have ReactOS installed in my PC. Oh, btw, this week ReactOS reached version 0.2.8.

Of course, ReactOS will be installed in a dual-boot with the latest Linux, which I hope, will be user-and-hardware friendly by then.

As long as Linux keeps providing me with...

[ylikone]

... a cheap, free (as in freedom), reliable solution, I will continue to ignore Microsoft products for the forseeable future. Everybody knows MS is dead in the long run.

Isn't this Already the "Word on the Street"?

[eno2001]

Where I work we still have more Win2K than XP Pro because the move from NT4 to AD was a long and involved process for 3000+ machines and a team of 3 people to do it. When we got to Win2K AD (we STILL have NT4 domains because of crap legacy software we HAVE to have!) the move to XP was not relished. We've been doing it a building at a time now (60 buildings) and it's going. But this is 2005 going on 2006 and XP came out in 2002. So, you could say we are doing "managed diversity" in a big way. I don't see how this approach to Vista is any different than the way most wise insitutions proceed.

Re:Not only Vista...

[vertinox]

Microsoft is onto something, they make software that is easy to use and everyone knows how to use it,

I do corp help desk for a living supporting MS Office Applications and I would disagree with this part of your statment.

MS Office Apps are not intuitive nor easy to use for the average Joe office worker. It is why they pay me money to show people how to use them on a daily basis.

You may of course believe them to be so, but put someone who has no training infront of a windows box and you see the same mistakes over and over again by different people. Its a kind of bashing a head against my desk kind of job but its a living.

I could give specific examples about Track Changes and a few other settings that people think they should act a certain way but don't, but I could go on and on.

Have you tried it?

[JcMorin]

Did you run Windows Vista for real? I did, not just a few hours to write a review. I'm running Windows since the October 1st as my main OS.

- Software development (VS Studio 2003)
- Email / Browsing
- Gaming

First impression, wow this is great.
After 6 weeks, my impression have change, Vista (as of currently is pretty crap). I've got multiple reboot, blue screen, IE 7 is having a lots of issue (page not rendering properly, JavaScript error for example Google Spell checker not working properly on IE 7). The search "engine" is not that great, why we can't keep our old *.exe find?

Over that many application not working at all, some desktop application, other are game that just don't launch. Even stable program like SQL Enterprise Manager crash on Vista... :(

Vista new graphical engine is deadly slow too, all is on graphic card but this cause issue like to see the backbuffer when switching application and more. Application are not build like game with "Begin drawing" and "End drawing" so that cause to constantly redraw the screen and see flicker everywhere...

Iwill receive my new portable next week and I will definitely not install Vista on it... for me I agree with the report... I stay with Windows XP for a few years.

Re:The reason not to upgrade is...

[birge]

I see your point, but I think it's really more of a polite way of saying "Well, they didn't fix the shit that's REALLY wrong with Windows so why bother." In the case of Vista, maybe they actually will improve security and reliability, but heaven knows the pretty GUI isn't exactly what Windows has been most sorely missing all these years.

What's wrong with Windows may very well be something that doesn't exist at Microsoft: elegance, simplicity and modularity of design. They are trying for that lately, at least they say they are, but it's going to be hard to change the mindset of everybody at Microsoft. They've always had very clever people but not very smart people, as exemplefied by Bill Gates himself. He's a man who is as shrewd as any suit in the room, but he has no sense of elegance. He's like that guy everybody knows who can do any math problem you give him, but who has the creativity of a field mouse. Elegance goes a long way in design, and a good OS is equal parts design and science, I think. You can have the tightest kernel in the world, but when some dipshit comes up with an idea like the Registry, it's all over.

A single decision doomed Windows security

[Myria]

People don't understand the truth about Windows security. It can be traced to a single fateful decision.

In Win32, every module (EXE/DLL) is contiguous in the process virtual address space. The code and data are next to each other in each module, but not between modules. The stack and heap are allocated as blocks at essentially random addresses. The memory layout looks like this:

empty code data empty stack empty code data empty heap ...

The problem is that there is no single address that you could choose that says "only code is allowed below this address, and no code is allowed above this address".

On the x86, before AMD64, it was impossible to tell the processor that certain memory addresses cannot be executed. Anything that was readable was also executable. This means it is possible to execute from the data areas, a fatal flaw.

However, the x86 *does* have a feature that allows you to say "no code is allowed above this address". This is known as the "CS limit". By setting this, any attempt to execute from a data area would crash the program. Crashing the program is a lot better than taking over your computer.

Win32's memory layout prevents this feature from being used, because if you try to set a limit, either you have data in the code area, allowing exploits, or you have code in the data area, preventing legitimate code from executing.

AMD tried to correct this with the NX bit in the AMD64 chips, but it was too late. Too many Win32 programs rely on the ability to execute from a data section. As a result, in XP SP2 and Vista, the feature is only enabled by default in a few programs. You can turn it on for all, but then a lot of copy-protected games won't run.

Linux usually has the same problem. However, because most Linux programs come with source, it is possible to modify every application in the system to work this way.

Melissa