[school-discuss] M$ Windows Problems

[Joel Kahn <jj2kk4@xxxxxxxxx>]

After I offered some opinions on the possible effects of
the M$ Vista mess, Micheal Cooper responded with this:

>Don't bet on it. MS is coming out with Windows 7
>next year to cover over the bomb that is Vista,
>just like Windows 2000 covered over WindowsME.

And Richard Andrews provided this correction:

>Win2k and WinME were separate product streams
>(NT versus Workgroups kernels).

I'd like to expand on this a bit, to provide a more
detailed analysis of why I think the Vista disaster
may mark a significant turning point for M$.

Starting in the mid-1990s, there was the cheap line of
Win-blows junk for the home users who didn't know any
better: Win95 ==> Win98 ==> WinMe ==> WinXP Home.
Running in parallel, there was the somewhat better
(and, of course, much more expensive) line of products
for big organizations that actually had to get some
reliable results: WinNT ==> Win2000 ==> WinXP Pro.
Vista was supposed to follow a similar pattern, and
no experienced users were surprised by the status of
Vista Home Basic as a loss-leader having no practical
value (with Home Premium not much better).

The real kicker came in the hostile reactions to Vista
Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Micro$oft's old
reliable corporate customers were simply not going to
pay huge amounts for hardware upgrades and fat licenses
just so they could run stuff that was at best some
warmed-over XP, and at worst a significant backward step
in functionality and reliability. It is the Fortune 100
that has been leading the charge in making downgrades
back to XP a common fact of life.

There are, of course, significant questions as to whether
Windows 7 (or whatever its name will finally be) is really
going to appear in 2009. I'm seeing some forecasts that
2011 is more likely. It is a fairly safe assumption that
the sooner it ships, the more screwed-up it will be--
unless, of course, it amounts to nothing more than a big
bug-fix of Vista, which won't exactly improve the image of
M$ a whole lot. Even if we assume that a longer wait for a
new Windows allows M$ to come out with something *really*
significant (which I consider *highly* doubtful), what
will be going on when it finally hits? One blogger at
engadget.com, thinking about a 2011 shipping date for a
new Windows, recently put it this way:

"We can't help but wonder how different the OS landscape
will look three years from now, with Linux rapidly reaching
feature and usability parity, while Apple plugs away at
OS X and cloud computing lands everywhere."

Joel



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