So, this week, Microsoft's Vista operating system has become publicly available in your local computer store, although businesses and professional groups have had it available for a while, both in Beta and the final versions.
Five years in the making, deadline after deadline missed -- sounds like a software project we are involved with at the moment -- and, finally, yet another holiday season missed by Microsoft. The launch has been very soft for one of their products despite the predictions that there will be over 100 million users within twelve months. Certainly, there have been no lines outside stores of people waiting to hand over money.
All the reviews and comments I have read so far describe the new OS as being a close replica of Apple's OS X, but Bill Gates described it in London to the BBC: "The wow starts here." That's where Mr Gates flew to following his dash to leave the studio set of The Daily Show after being interviewed by Jon Stewart the afternoon before…
What we know so far seems to be that there is a lot of clever graphics stuff going on -- unless your video card isn't ready for it -- it needs 12 Gbyte of hard drive space for the program, and another 500 Mbyte for it to start up every time you turn the computer on. Perhaps that is why Microsoft suggests you use the sleep function (no more XP "hibernate") so that it only takes two or three seconds for your screen to come alive. How long does it take from the power-off position, we wonder?
Talking of time, reports are that the upgrade versions of the software take over an hour simply to load on your PC.
Versions? Yes, there are six so far: Vista Starter; Vista Home Basic (basically, it seems, just e-mail and browsing); Home Premium; Ultimate; Business; Entrepreneur. The quoted prices differ from article to article but range somewhere from $99.95 for the Home Basic upgrade to over $400 for a non-upgrade version of Entrepreneur.
Supposedly, if you are running XP you can run Vista. If there are features in the OS that your PC cannot handle, then it turns them off.
EN-Genius is in line for some serious computer upgrades this Spring. If we stay with PCs we are going to get stuck with Vista or, if we have stronger guts -- "bottle," as they would say in Britain, Mr. Gates -- we would make the leap of faith to Linux. With a choice of six versions of Vista - what an incredibly weird way to market a product, anyway - what is the average Joe going to think, and do, when even the technology savvy are confused. Probably nothing. Mr. Gates told the BBC, "Safest ever!" Well, I certainly wouldn't accept that at face value until a year's worth of patches are applied. Microsoft is just too big and ripe a target for the baddies to ignore.
No, Microsoft is driving us towards the Apple world. My last experience with a Cupertino product (other than my daughter's iPod -- pink, of course) was with a then
very expensive Apple IIe. The video output coax connector was forever shorting and blowing a fuse. I hope the quality has improved rather considerably since then…
