Thursday, August 6, 2009

The future of Windows Vista? Widespread use

...unbeknownst to the user, though. In fact, news of the demise of Windows Vista, after the welcome-by-a-majority Windows 7, have been greatly exaggerated in what seems to me like wishful thinking coming from Vista haters. What is most likely to happen is that Microsoft might offer a discounted version of Windows Vista with a future update to Windows 7 attached, so Windows Vista will not be stockpiled in a corner while Windows 7 takes all the accolades and all the buyers. The first misconception about Vista was born of a less than a stellar performance in 2007 before the release of SP1 and a lot of would-be buyers/adopters stuck to the perception (that is "buggy" or "slow" or "incompatible") rather than to the reality: that Windows Vista is indeed a good, a very good, rather, OS, SUPERIOR to XP. The second misconception circulating around now with the advent of Windows 7 is that it is not necessary to "go through" Vista when upgrading from XP or Windows 2000 (yes, there are still folks out there using that 10-year old OS) and that the "recommended way" is to skip Vista altogether and jump into Windows 7. I predict that companies that will follow this path will be involved in a painful process tantamount to upgrading from Windows 95/98 to Windows XP. Big jump!