Night of the Living Vista
By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
September 28, 2007

Vista has turned into the desktop operating system no one wants, and even Microsoft is beginning to get it.

Today, I think of Vista as the zombie operating system. It stumbles around, and from a distance you might think it's alive, but close up it's the walking dead.

The first sign that Vista was in real trouble was when major vendors started to offer XP again on new machines. In February, Microsoft insisted it had already sold more than 20 million copies of Windows Vista. Oh yeah, like there were actually 20 million copies of Vista already out there and running. Pull the other leg, it's got bells on.

If Vista was doing great, then why did Dell break ranks with the other major OEMs to start offering XP again and become the first top-tier vendor to offer XP in replacement for Vista in April? Adding insult to injury, Dell actually had the effrontery to offer desktop Linux to its customers.

Other OEMs followed Dell's lead, or to be more precise, its customers' demands. Lenovo, for example, when it rolled out its revamped high-end ThinkPad T61p workstation notebooks in July, made a point of offering not just Vista but XP Pro and, yes, several Linux distributions, including Novell's SUSE, Red Hat and Turbo Linux.

So it came as no surprise at all to me when Mike Nash, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Windows product management, announced that, due to OEM demand, Microsoft will keep selling XP until June 2008. Of course, he also claims there is little chance the June 30 date will be extended.

Want to bet?

Nash and Microsoft apologist Rob Enderle claim that it's no fault with Vista that's causing customers to stay away from it. Indeed, Nash insists that Vista is on track to become the fastest-selling operating system of all time. Really? Then why in the world is Microsoft continuing to offer in-house competition?

At the same time, Enderle, an analyst who counts Microsoft as a customer, said, "Vista adoption is well below where I thought it would be by now...Corporations aren't even close to being ready for Vista, and many of us have been expecting this move. The biggest issue is that most don't seem to see the value in the product. Right now the majority of the comments I'm getting would indicate the people [who] don't want Vista right now are in the majority."

Enderle, mind you, is about as pro-Microsoft an analyst there is in the business today. If he's saying that people don't want Vista, and the OEMs, which at the end of the day are all about selling units, don't want to sell it, the only conclusion you can come to is that Vista is failing to win the market.

There are many reasons why Vista is doing the zombie stumble. Microsoft has and continues to mislead customers about how much PC is really needed to run Vista. Even some of Windows' most loyal users are finding that its poor performance, lousy software support and pathetic driver support is too much to stomach. People who wouldn't touch any Microsoft product until the first service patch appears. And, last but never ever least, if XP isn't broke, why "fix" it with Vista?

Now you might think some of this is legacy backlash. People don't like change. They'd rather use Windows 2000 than XP, Windows 98 SE than 2000,and Windows ME more than...well, OK, no one liked ME. But I've been through these cycles many times before. This is different.

XP SP2, with XP SP3 finally due to show up soon, is not only the best Windows to date, I can't think of a single reason to switch from XP to Vista. I'm not talking a good reason, I really mean any reason.

If you want a better operating system than XP, may I recommend Xandros as the most painless way for an XP user to give Linux a try, or if the idea of installing Linux gives you hives, you can just buy an Ubuntu-powered Dell 1420 laptop, which is a very sweet machine. Or just bite the bullet and go ahead and buy, say, the new MacBook Pro 15-inch to give Mac OS a try.

Whatever you do, even if it's just sticking with XP, you'll be doing better than moving to Vista. Vista is the walking dead of the operating-system world.

Night of the Living Vista
By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
September 28, 2007

There may be problems. But the solution is to work into Vista as people did XP. Get a mobile/dockable HD bay, and have the different OS on different drives. Your data goes on a separate, possibly docked, drive. So you can swap data drives, too. Problem solved.

That is, software with Win9x drivers runs on the Win9x HD. Anything from Win98SE on can read FAT32. Another might be your XP SP2 drive, with programs that work fine on that. And another might be you newer Vista drive, in whatever variation (there are too many 'flavors' of marketed Vistas), as one tries to find software to work with it. Put it aside until Vista SP1. But at least it's there. And maybe something works on it, now. This is what people have been doing with Windows - multiple OS, multiple HDs, and sort of moving over to the new as it becomes possible.

But the reason Vista survives is the same reason XP survived. Software is written for it that won't run on previous versions. And not just Microsoft software. You can find Adobe software, key products like Photoshop, and now their acquisition of, Flash, that only run on XP SP2 and later.

I see that this article is very interesting to the many Linux sites. But Linux is no serious option. It can do certain tasks well, if carefully set up by company experts. The guys who do the work are somewhere else, and won't use Linux as a general desktop computing environment. To attempt to use Linux in the way people use Windows or MacOS would be foolish. It's not up to it.

But is MacOS an option? Browsers are notoriously flaky running on Macs, requiring perhaps more fixes, and facing more limitations, that simply worrying about versions, major and minor, or vendors on a PC. And that's important as the 'web' is supposed to be 'the thing', and the move in OS is supposed to be toward 'distributed functionality' - over that same wire (or wireless). But for others, they'll look past and see what Next was up to. Or they'll have both - the Mac and PC. But I don't think Vista dies. I think it is incrementally 'improved'. And I think programs that run fine on previous versions, continue to run fine when that HD is placed in the dock, and that OS is booted up.