When I saw Miles O’brien’s interview with William Gates the III on CNN.com for Jan. 30, 2007 (I can’t believe they actually put him on CNN to sell Vista), it was a typical bubblegum piece. Essentially, it is touted as an OS that is a remote control for the living room. Now, Microsoft has focused their Vista strategy on the home market. Although it is a good strategy, I believe sales will be slow at first. Moreover, Gates said that Vista exceeds Apple’s OS X in innovation.
This is going to be a nightmare for enterprise businesses and it may hurt overall productivity because this caters primarily to entertainment purposes as opposed to actually making the workplace more efficient. Corporations already have their workstations on lockdown and are cautious to change OS’s (as experienced by yours truly during Windows NT, 2000, and XP Pro in the trenches of downtown NYC). Corporate users will not be seeing Vista anytime soon in order to see videos on the company’s dime. Microsoft knows this and that’s why they are going the entertainment route. Most companies have not added Apple Os’s (unless they are used by graphic artists) in their network so why should they make Microsoft Vista the exception?
For those enterprises that allow foreign machines in their system, this will pose new security risks and major issues with user support. A lot of anti-Microsoft black-hat and grey-hat hackers will do their best to exploit this new OS. I have not heard what the Vista Pro version will look like or enhance. When it was Longhorn, there were so many security issues found and Vista will only propogate those worries. For my fellow IT compliance comrades, please be careful because this will effect your network in some form or another.
