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 If you didn't know already, Microsoft has called time on Windows XP and major PC manufacturers will cease shipping PC's pre-installed with Windows XP as from June 30th, a little over a year after the launch of Microsoft Windows Vista. There are some exceptions, smaller pc builders have a little longer and the bigger players will be selling some machines with downgrade rights from Vista Ultimate or Vista Business (ie you pay for a Vista licence whether you use it or not). A good summary of the situation can be found by clicking here, or you can get "the facts" direct from Microsoft by clicking here .
How does this affect you?
This may pose you a problem depending on your point of view. If you
were an early adopter and have already migrated to Vista you've dealt
with the pain and probably won't be worried (you are in the minority).
If you are slightly conservative and find XP perfectly adequate for
your needs you will probably feel your hand is being forced,
particularly if you have a well managed network of XP machines and have
to shoehorn Vista into that. A lot of small business, I am sorry to
say, don't manage their networks properly (they don't know how and
don't see the benefit in paying someone to do it for them) and just buy
pc's on an ad hoc basis. To them a new machine with Vista on it will
probably seem exciting and just another part of the IT learning curve.
What are your options?
There are alternatives of course. Apple's Macs go from strength to
strength and seem dominant in some industries (media and publishing in
particular). To us the user experience on Mac's seems a lot better
thought out than on Vista, and with Parallels virtualization Macs can
happily run PC applications. Then there's Linux. While Linux on the
network seems to be growing significantly the Linux desktop still
hasn't caught on, other than in very vertical applications (POS
terminals etc), although reviews of the latest releases of Ubuntu and
Open Suse have been very positive.
Does it matter?
In my view, probably not, it's another complication in an already
complicated world, but the operating system you run on your pc is
becoming irrelevant. Most of our business lives are out on the web
these days. Sure we still pass around Word and Powerpoint documents but
that's more out of habit, a habit Microsoft are keen to lock us into by
integrating Office apps with on-line services, and on the intranet
through Sharepoint. But if you analyse what is actually being done with
these applications the same results could be achieved much more simply
without all the heavyweight proprietry software. This blog is being
written in a browser (Firefox as it happens) which could be running on
any operating system. You are reading it in your browser served from an
open source operating system (Ubuntu) running an open source web server
(Apache), an open source content management system (joomla) built with
an open source programming language (PHP) accessing an open source
database (MySQL). Do you see where I am going here? The only proprietry
software in the mix is XP on the machine I am using, and that's not a
positive choice I've made, it came with the machine, it does the job ok and I have had no
reason to change.
Give Vista a chance?
I
am running Vista Ultimate dual boot on my laptop. It hasn't won me over
yet. Microsoft have put what I can only describe as interface layers
into the product which means tasks you knew how to achieve in XP are
done subtly differently. Why should I have to re-learn something I
already know? Vista has has a bad press for the intrusiveness of the
security system and I can only concur with this, and it suffers from the same weakness that all other security systems suffer from, the lump of meat behind the keyboard (that's you and me). Vista looks very pretty, but it will be a while before I am compelled to upgrade. But there's no hurry, XP will continue to be supported by Microsoft until 2014 and, given the amount of multimedia and video that goes on round here, I have a feeling my next "pc" purchase could be a Mac - or will it?
Microsft Windows, Windows XP, Windows Vista and their logos are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.
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