vnunet.com comment: Bill Gates powers down

5. Vista
Microsoft's Vista operating system is my last bad point to pin on Microsoft and it's one that will continue long after Bill has left the building.

It was spawned over fears that Microsoft was becoming too vulnerable to attack and was initially promised as a ground-up rewrite that would change forever the perception that Microsoft was an easy mark for hackers.

To me it is a classic example of a product that was badly managed from the start. Vista was announced in 2001 and initially expected some time around 2003/4, but continual rewrites and a rumoured complete scrapping of much of the code meant it arrived years later.

As deadlines slipped again and again, people began to panic and many of the promised features were scrapped and planned for later iterations.

At the same time the hardware required to run it became increasingly high-end, a classic developer's mistake of writing code for hardware that you want to run rather than what people have actually got.

As a result, if you want to use the full featured Vista Ultimate, you've got to have a very powerful PC indeed.

I won't touch a Vista system unless it's got 2GB of Ram, a dual-core processor and a powerful graphics card, and that's not an option for businesses that have become standardised on XP.

When it became clear that Vista wasn't going to ship before Christmas 2006, PC manufacturers started to grumble, pointing out that they were going to lose sales in the crucial run up to Christmas because of the delays.

So the 'Vista Ready' and 'Vista Capable' marketing campaigns were devised. Sadly, as the subsequent class action suit has shown, the term Vista Capable may have been stretching things slightly.

Vista has some very good points, especially for systems administrators and f or certain applications like high-end audio use.

But for the general consumer the only real difference is a snazzy new user interface and that's not enough reason to change. Hopefully things will improve with new service packs but until then I, and many others, are sticking to XP.

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So there we have it. Whether the good points outweigh the bad is a question that will have IT enthusiasts arguing for many years to come but overall I can't help thinking that, for all its sins, Microsoft has been a positive force overall.

We certainly wouldn't have had an industry as popular or widespread as the one we have today if Bill had stayed at Harvard and Paul Allen had stuck to building beautiful code in some faceless corporation.

Love it or loathe it Microsoft has changed the world, and we are almost all richer for it.