Very well said. My sentiments exactly!
Linda
Ben Scott wrote:
On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 8:24 AM, John Hornbuckle
<john.hornbuc...@taylor.k12.fl.us> wrote:
And as you say, Vista isn't nearly as bad as the FUD-spreaders would have
people believe.
Of course, neither is Linux. I must admit, the Linux fan in me is
somewhat amused to see Microsoft falling victim to one of their own
favorite tricks. I have a hard time dredging up any sympathy for
Ballmer and company. Especially when they're obviously trying real
hard to get people to move off XP to Vista/7, when many of their
paying customers are apparently are saying we'd rather not.
... just plain unwilling to learn something new.
A big part of my objection to Vista (as an IT management weenie) is
that the apparent improvements don't warrant the apparent costs of the
changes. The ROI just isn't there. Aside from the learning curve,
there's lots of incompatibilities. Drivers. MSIE 7. Roaming
profiles. UI. Sure, those incompatibilies only affect existing stuff
-- guess what, we've got existing stuff we have to worry about. So
does 99% of the rest of the world.
If there were some radical improvements -- like there were with the
95/98/NT4 -> 2000/XP switch -- it would be one thing. But I frankly
just don't see it with XP -> Vista.
Image-based deployment? We've already invested time/effort/money in
RIS here, and now we're supposed to invest in something different that
does the same thing. BitLocker? Licensing issues make it non-viable
for all but very large companies. Better GPOs? Don't help our 100 or
so existing XP stations.
It seems like the major added capabilities in Vista are Aero,
DirectX 10, and home multimedia stuff. Fine for home users, I guess.
But none are something I want in a business environment. Indeed, in
business, *we want a consistent UI*. Otherwise support, training, and
documentation all become more expensive.
Likewise, a big part of the reason we haven't deployed Office 2007
anywhere is the radical UI change. Sure, people can get used to it.
Sure, it's arguably an improvement in some ways. But guess what?
Throwing out 25 years of working UI conventions for a very marginal
improvement in usability is just plain not worth it.
It's like the auto industry engineers who keep trying to replace the
steering-wheel/pedals/shifter arrangement. Sure, it might be possible
to do things a little better, but it's simply not worth the effort of
teaching hundreds of millions of people how to drive all over again.
Heck, the very thing that keeps many people on the Microsoft
platform is that it isn't worth the pain and drawbacks of switching to
something Linux or Mac. When it comes right down to it, a computer's
pretty much a computer, regardless of the software you're using. All
the various offerings have their strengths and weaknesses. But
throwing out something that mostly-works just to replace it with
something else that will mostly-work is a bad value proposition.
So Vista isn't the train wreck some say it is, but it also didn't
provide Microsoft a good ROI for the huge amount of time and money
they spent making it. Maybe it will pay off eventually by making it
easier to introduce improvements in future versions of Windows, but I
kinda doubt it. In 50+ years of the IT industry history, such
scenarios have rarely paid off.
-- Ben
~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~
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