WARNING!!! Jargonistic Technobable ahead…
Recently the Gartner group presented their views on the state of the future of Windows as well as a their assesment of the problems with the current MS operating system, Windows Vista. Leave it to the boys at Gartner to take a relatively simple issue and make it complex. Vista’s failure is about hardware requirements and performance. It’s that simple.
The gaming industry was slow to adopt Vista because quite simply, XP is faster. When it’s about speed, why pay more for less.
Corporate environments could have made very good use out of the inherent security features that were central to Vista but the required hardware to effectively run the software was cost prohibitive. Having managed a fairly sizable client base, I can tell you that IT has become a cost to be managed instead of the first line provider of business solutions. When you operate under that model, budgets don’t lend themselves to a $1500 PC to run standard office software and a mail client.
Vista has been adopted fairly widely by the standard home user. It has been a stable platform to operate on and that is what most average users care about, well that and the eye candy.
According to Gartner’s annoucement, the future is hypervisor and virtualized machines. Didn’t I hear the same thing about Java years ago? Wasn’t java supposed to make us OS independant and replace old warhorses like RPG and C++?
If you haven’t read Gartner’s last announcement regarding the future of Windows, you should give it a few minutes to at least get a chuckle. At least they were spot on with licensing. MS licensing has become more convoluted than the tax code.
Until next time, happy blogging.
Megadisclaimer: Take nothing at face value. Everything on this blog is for entertainment purposes. It won’t change the world, or even your opinion in most cases. If you believe everything that you read stop reading now!
April 11th, 2008 at 8:03 am
Hmm…
It seems to me if corporations were really worried about keeping IT costs in control they’d run Ubuntu on a $300 PC using free office software.
I think it’s more a case of them shooting in the dark and thinking the real work lies in making the decision. Any decision will do…it doesn’t have to be the right one.