Vista beckons buyers with translucent Aero Glass 3-D window displays, the promise of faster boot ups, more reliability, and stouter protection against viruses and spam. But is the new Windows Vista operating system (OS), a great leap forward or the last big splash as computing migrates to the Internet and away from PC-based software? Either way, one study predicts the software will be installed on as many as 90 million computers worldwide by the end of 2007.
Five years in the planning, Vista promises to turn older PCs (if they can handle the heavy technical specs) and new ones into sleek, slick user-friendly environments. Versions for business use are now on the market. Basic and premium versions for consumers will be available at the end of January.
Realizing that they would miss the lucrative Christmas selling season this year, Microsoft and computermakers are offering holiday buyers coupons giving them a free upgrade to Vista when it hits the market. But retailers seem to have put selling "Vista ready" machines and the coupon program on a back burner and are concentrating on slashing PC prices to rack up December sales.
With Vista almost certain to become the dominant OS inside the world's PCs well into the next decade, missing the Christmas sales season this year is an "almost insignificant" part of its overall impact, says Michael Gartenberg, a senior analyst at JupiterResearch in New York, which follows consumer technology trends.
"This is a major, major upgrade," Gartenberg says, "Microsoft's best work to date in terms of an operating system." Users will find that in the Vista environment, "Things flow much more naturally," he says. "It feels like a much more holistic and polished experience."
Early sales are expected to come mostly from consumers. Businesses are notoriously slow to adopt a new OS. A Forrester survey of more than 450 North American enterprises earlier this year found 11 percent said they would switch to Vista within six months of its release and 29 percent within a year. But 60 percent said they either would wait longer than that or had no plans to switch at all.
PC owners will be able to buy a copy of Vista to install on their current computer. But the computer will have to be "Vista ready" - most likely a fairly new machine with plenty of memory and other robust technical specifications. To add to the confusion, four versions will be available - Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate - each with its own set of features and requirements. Microsoft's Vista website offers advice (microsoft.com/windowsvista /getready) that can help determine which version, if any, an existing computer will be able to run.
More than half of the PCs in use by businesses today can't run any version of Vista, and 94 percent can't run Vista Premium, says a report from Softchoice Corp. Though Vista Basic should operate with 512 megabytes of system memory, for example, 1 or 2 gigabytes is recommended for Vista Premium, the version that displays the most innovative aspects of the new operating system.
Earlier this month, Gartner Inc. predicted that Vista would be the last big release of a new Windows operating system by Microsoft. "The next generation of operating environments will be more modular and will be updated incrementally," the research firm said in a forecast for 2007. "The era of monolithic deployments of software releases is nearing an end. Microsoft will be a visible player in this movement, and the result will be more flexible updates to Windows and a new focus on quality overall."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1221/p17s01-stct.html
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