I’ve been wanting to write about how Vista is going to be the worst OS ever but i’ve recently changed my tune a bit. Vista is the perfect example of the problem with proprietary software development, especially on the OS scale. We can get into other issues if people would like to but for now I’d like to talk about what vista will do to the hardware market and Free software.
Vista’s hardware requirements are outrageous system wide with the biggest hit on the video card. Almost all computers will require a significant upgrade of one or more major system component if not an entire system upgrade. Vista will be shipped on new dell/gateway/compaq boxes and corporations wishing to stay current will be forced to upgrade most if not all their computers.
This will do two things for the Free software crowd: linux is becoming more and more advanced as an end user desktop enviroment. within a year, i feel strongly the Ubuntu desktop will be a modern operating system on the level of look and feel to OSX and Vista. There will be a greater movement toward Linux in corporate and personal environments for nothing else than to save money (despite many other advantages) rather than a costly software and hardware upgrade to Vista.
The second windfall for the Free software movement will be the flooding of the used hardware market. Vista will cause systems to become obsolete which are quite powerful computers. The average desktop computer today is far far more powerful than its common uses require. People developing and using open source often use obsolete machines (PII, PIII sometimes older, very small memory, etc) with great success because of the small footprint and superior hardware use of linux/unix/BSD. Vista will accelerate the useful lifespan of many computers which will upgrade the level of hardware the Free software hobbiest will be working with. This may increase the speed of open source development.
The other day I found an ancient MP3 player i haven’t used in years (rio600, 32Mb capacity) and sure enough there are drivers and utilities people have reverse engineered to keep this hardware usable. it only takes one person with an old piece of hardware and a few hours to code to revitalize on a global scale any piece of forgotten hardware. it is a very soulfull movement.
Vista is just a symptom of the problems microsoft is having as a company: not being able to pull the trigger, not having realistic goals and expectations for release and upgrade schedules, etc. remember IE is over 6 years old and was originally written for the PII/PIII upgrade. I think they are in bigger trouble than anyone is admitting.
The Vista demos i’ve seen have not been that impressive. There is very little new “content” being developed. The false sense of “security” with anoying dialog boxes being a good example. IE is just trying to keep up (and doing a poor job of it). there are no features it has that haven’t been available in firefox or opera for a while now. the desktop eye-candy looks like they think png’s and alpha levels are something new and exciting.
ubuntu releases a full upgrade of the OS (with new kernel, upgraded window manager, the whole works) every 6 months. let that sink in. a free competitive operating system developed largely by hobbiests updates every six months with features that (one of) the largest company in the world can’t keep up with. Yet I read all these microsoft appologists justifying ANOTHER 6 month set back to the release date of Vista.
Greg Gauthier made the following excellent points as well:
Rapid upgrade schedules are at least as much of a problem for both businesses and home users, as are Jurassic sized upgrades that only happen every three or four years.
For large businesses, an upgrade schedule of anything less than 2 years is likely to become an out of control disaster. My own company set a 5-year schedule, and with an employee roster of over 15,000 now, even that is a little aggressive. Add to that the rediculous hardware demands made by Vista, and subtract the fact that there really is nothing worthwhile to be gained from it in the business environment (Security and other manageability aspects are already being handled quite well by third party network-and-server-level vendors), and it’s pretty clear that there is no value in yet another conversion.
For home users, As long as Microsoft can command obedience from hardware vendors like Dell and Compaq, every ‘average joe’ shopping for a new computer will simply ‘live with’ whatever came out of the box. They’d rather not have to think about it - and who can blame them? However, for people who already have a computer in their home, you guys are absolutely right - almost nodody I know, is going to look at their present Win2K or WinXP system, and say to themselves, “Gee whiz, I really need alpha levels.”, and then go out and drop 2 or 3 grand on a new box. The headache of switching machines, for most folks, is just not worth the payoff.
So, I think this is one of the reasons why there’s been so much ‘bad blood’ between the MS folks, and Dell, for example. Dell sees it’s own fortunes being dragged to the bottom of the sea by the MS Vista Titanic, and they can’t figure a good way out. That’s also why I think *RIGHT NOW* would be a great time, to convince one of the hardware vendors to partner with a FUNCTIONAL linux distribution, and really push hard on the marketing. The Lindows/Linspire folks had the right idea, for sure, but just not the right time. The hardest part of making a plan like this succeed, though, is GAME VENDORS. Convincing them it’d be worth their while to invest time into producing Linux-compatible games would be a real chore, but without it, getting a biege-box linux system off the ground (or out of the store) would still be a struggle.
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