Weekly Editorial: SDR News Perspective
by Andy McCaskey
There is nothing quite like confirmation that the crystal ball is polished up.
The news from CNET and ZDNET, other distinquished commentators is that Microsoft Vista may not reach the expectations set for it – when it finally straggles onto the scene.
I was particularly irritated with the recent details to emerge that would forbid the use of Vista in Virtual Machines, or from being installed on more than two hardware turns (motherboard replacements, for example).
With close to eight different variants – sure to engender even more confusion with consumers, the comments from July of 2005 might make for some interesting reading:
I think that the near term impact of Windows Vista will not be as substantial as those of us who are close to or tracking technology would like to imagine.
A consumer mass market – - with an installed base in the hundreds of millions, has one thing going for it. Mass.
It has one thing going against it. Mass intertia.
If you look at the long tail of machines still on Win 98 or Win2000, hardware 3, 4 years old or more (that’s 28 in dog years, incidentally) – that’s entirely adequate for those users. They don’t think of their machines as being old. And compelling power hungry applications – since gaming’s the province of consoles – haven’t hit that mass market with the same forces that make SlashdotReview or CHris Pirillo show listeners crave the latest, in either performance or eye candy.
Users on that long tail – even if they have upgraded to XP — their “day in the life of a user is this:
They are bedeviled with spyware, afraid of the media hyped virus or “evil hackerâ€, mystified by the jargon and still forwarding jokes and “cookie recipe hoaxes.â€
To have impact beyond the “next scheduled release†Vista is going to have to clearly and distinctly promise and deliver a step up solution to those problems. As clear as “that’s your old B&W TV, this is color. â€
I just doubt that’s going to happen.
Besides, as Doc Searls says: We all run Linux or BSD anyway. We just call it Google or eBay ..