Column from PC Magazine: Windows Vista: Where's the Buzz?

Column from PC Magazine: Windows Vista: Where's the Buzz? Windows Vista: Where's the Buzz?
ARTICLE DATE: 07.25.05
By John C. Dvorak

As readers know, Microsoft has announced the name of its new operating system, which was followed by a collective yawn from the computing community. Vista? As in "Hasta la Vista, baby?" That name might be appropriate as a symbolic goodbye since it might be the end of the line for Microsoft's dominance in the OS business.

I'm not saying that Microsoft is doomed as a company, but its reign as the OS dominator may end fast if things go the way I see them headed. The new OS is getting zero buzz. Zero. There has been nothing like this since Windows Me. And now the name Vista,along with the new Microsoft Vista logo, has made it worse. Could anything be less exciting?

First of all Vista sounds like a credit card company. It's implications as a name are not apt for an OS. Webster defines vista as:

1 : a distant view through or along an avenue or opening
2 : an extensive mental view (as over a stretch of time or a series of events)

I think the key word here is "distant." A distant view. Perhaps the company has chosen the name subconsciously to indicate that it – Vista -- itself is distant. In other words, it is a far cry from what was originally promised. Indeed, that seems to be the case. Years have passed since the product was first specified and the company with all the resources in the world could not develop its promised file system that would help users out of the multigigabyte morass of confused data.

Bill Gates had always wanted Microsoft to become the IBM of its era, which it has in more ways than one. In the case of Vista, Microsoft should have adopted an old IBM trick for product development: parallel teams working on the same thing at the same time to create a faux competition. If there is no competition outside the company it's now apparent that Microsoft cannot generate any internal impetus. The languishing of Internet Explorer until recently is a perfect example of this.

THE FUTURE OF DESKTOP COMPUTING.

Apple. Vista will open the door to what I believe will be a radical change in the computing landscape. The trends are clear. Once the new Mac OS appears next year it will gravitate toward the existing x86 community much more rapidly than anticipated unless Apple does some incredibly dumb things to stop it. Personally I cannot see what they can do or why they'd want to stop it. — Continue reading...

Right now, and as much as x86 users do not want to admit it, the Mac OS is already better than Windows in its modern look and feel as well as its functionality. I see too many smart people with Mac laptops nowadays.

Microsoft will retreat to its cash-cow applications: Microsoft Office and the potentially profitable Xbox. Microsoft's Xbox gamble may actually keep the company on a long term growth path.

Linux/Apache will own the server space and with the emergence of MySQL and PHP as the hot development tools over Microsoft .NET and J2EE there will be no way to unseat it. In popular parlance this is commonly referred to as LAMP.

Google will dominate the Internet and online applications. So there will be four dominant software forces each in a niche. Google's next frontier is to break into the AOL/MSN space which it could do at will and crush both.

Now looking over this scenario poses two questions: Is this wishful thinking, and is this what we want? I don't think it's wishful thinking, although it is always possible that Apple doesn't understand the power play position it's in and might actually believe that it's better off somehow keeping its OS in a small niche rather than the big market. If the world changed tomorrow to 85 percent Mac "OS x86" its laptop sales alone would triple overnight. Apple didn't put together what many consider the finest in-house industrial design teams in the world to fool around with piddly sales and more redesigns of the iPod.

That said, how much more of Steve Jobs can we handle? Do we really want to hear him say "I told you so?" If it gets some excitement back into desktop computing, yes, we do. I think we can take it.

There are flies in my predictive ointment. Google is still a wild card. It could do an OS that could threaten both Apple and Microsoft. This company's ability to come up with cool concepts puts even Apple to shame. And Google is already part of the LAMP camp.

One odd possibility would be a Google Linux that is Mac OS X– (or Windows-) compatible with a more Googly interface. I'm sure that would have an interesting impact.

Whatever the case, this is all triggered by Microsoft Vista – the thud heard round the world.