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Vista SP1 Release Candidate Available
Microsoft has made available the release candidate for Vista SP1, after a limited beta begun last September. Informationweek points out white papers telling business users that if they were waiting for SP1 to solve application compatibility issues, they needn't bother waiting: SP1 won't solve them, and in fact might cause applications to break that were running under Vista. Techworld outlines the hoops users will have to jump through to get SP1 installed.
What the heck is going on here? That applications wont break is an upside? Wasn't the biggest selling point of MSFT has been the compatibility with the existing installed base?
This is a telling moment for all the CIOs and IT managers of corporations. The biggest reason why most companies could not migrate to a competing platform (or at least platform-agnostic technologies) was because they were locked into this proprietary system and it simply costs money to remove all the hacks and remove dependencies. Now they can't dodge the cost. It is inevitable. Given that, does it make sense to pay so much to get locked into another proprietary vendor locked system again? They were fooled once into vendor lock or vendor lock crept up on them unsuspected. But now?
The MSFT strategy is clear. They must make the cost of migrating from XP to Vista will be marginally smaller than migrating from XP to platform-neutral-technology. If the IT managers fall for this trap once more they will exactly be in the same situation five years from now.
The key is open standards. We don't have to bicker among ourselves the merits and demerits of open source vs closed source, or free software with paid software or whatever. Open Standards will level the playing field. That is all we should ask for. Let us duke it out in a level field and may the better philosophy win.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
One of the biggest reasons people and companies are not upgrading to Vista is backwards compatibility. Microsoft have a free product called Virtual PC that anyone can download. They should include a suitable version of XP with very Vista license and include Virtual PC in the standard install. If you can run all your mission critical apps in a compatibility layer like this (think 'Classic' on the old PPC Macs) then they could really move forward with Vista and make it a modern OS and drop the old cruft they've been carrying for years in the name of backwards compatibility. If they wanted to they could even include Win95/Win98/WintNT or even Win3.1 virtual environments.
If Parallels and VMware can make the desktop sharing between Mac OS X and Windows easy, why can't Microsoft make it easy between Win9X/NT/XP and Vista easy?
Problem is no one at Microsoft in interested in doing this. I was invited to Microsoft's London offices last month and suggested it to a few of their top engineers and sales/marketing people and no one wanted to admit that Vista was a relative failure. You can downgrade to XP but you need your own DVD/CD media, and can't run Vista and XP at the same time, it's one licence or the other. Madness!
Sorry, gunna have to disagree with you there. A release candidate is just that - a candidate for release. Just because Microsoft has warped the term to mean "late beta", doesn't mean that's what it is. In many cases a release candidate becomes the final release.
RC's aren't meant to have major errors. RC's are designed to be feature-complete and stable. If a release candidate has major bugs, then it isn't release quality and thus should never have been labeled as such in the first place.
Note: I'm not condoning putting RC's on mission-critical equipment, but I fundamentally disagree that an RC should be inherently considered unstable.