Do you care about Vista?

With Vista, what do you get? Some new features, a new environment, new deployment tools, and so on… you know the story. The complaints fly, the developers groan, the desktop deployment teams drag their feet… and in the end, we all beat the dead-horse of change in IT.

Is this news to anyone? People are complaining about Vista as though they’ve never seen a platform change. Let me just stop here and ask… are there really that many new people employed in this profession? Do people actually not remember any of the past upgrade cycles? Surely you remember XP, 2000, NT, or DOS 6.2 (dblspace anyone?).

The cutting edge doesn’t come without pain-points.

Look… I’ve got a descent laptop – 3GB of RAM, some fairly fast Core 2 Duo CPU, nice graphics card, recently re-loaded OS with some up-to-date drivers. Even still… the thing’s not blazingly fast. And it won’t be. A year from now, with newer and faster hardware? Maybe… 2 years? Probably. That’s life. That’s what being on the cutting-edge is like. Are there some misses? Maybe. Will they be fixed? Some will. It is what is.

So do you care about Vista?

Me - as a user? Not really. It’s fine, and it works adequately. Just like my OpenSUSE workstations, my Virtual Server 2005 R2 boxes, and my VMware servers. Each has a place – be it client driven, or solution driven. But frankly – they’re all tools. If my USB-to-Serial adapter on my Vista box doesn’t have a driver, and my Linux box sitting next to is has a serial port… guess what? I’ll be using minicom to configure that switch until I fix the driver issue. If my client is partial to Virtual Server over VMware – guess what? In goes Virtual Server. I can’t say that the desktop is all that exciting. It works – and I work with more Windows boxes than Linux, or Mac boxes.

Vista is neat. Is it Porsche, or a Ferrari neat? No… it’s new $200 OS neat. Keep it in perspective.