Technology

Windows Vista: Window to the Future

Microsoft Windows Vista is officially going to be released on January 30th. Five years in the making, Vista is more of an evolutionary move than a revolutionary one.  It has broad implications for Microsoft. Inside Vista is a "sneak peak" into the future of Windows, and how Microsoft plans to position its number-one product for the future.

Windows Vista represents a pivotal change for Microsoft for several reasons. One: the company has been very public about how it changed its own internal development style to create Vista’s new architecture.

“Microsoft tried to create Vista as a modular OS with fewer interdependencies, which would ultimately make it more stable,” said Al Gillen, an analyst with research firm IDC. Previous versions of Windows had many interdependencies between different parts and layers of the OS.

Designing the OS in this fashion gives Microsoft the ability to bring features and functionality out in a much less disruptive fashion (supposedly, lol...but remains to be seen).

Windows should be better able to take advantage of virtualization technologies in the future, which are becoming more integral to the OS environment on both the server and the desktop which is allowing multiple OSes and applications to run simultaneously in environments where previously only one OS or application could run.

"Virtualization is going to have a big impact on all OSes, and the more we use it and integrate it with our hardware and OSes, the OS has less to do because virtualization covers some of the features," he said. An OS has to be modular to take full advantage of future virtualization enhancements, Gillen continued. Secondly, Vista has come at a time when Microsoft and the industry is making the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit computing. The first version of Windows to come out in 64-bit was Windows XP, and Vista will follow suit, but both XP and Vista are primarily 32-bit OSes. It’s widely believed, and Microsoft has hinted, that Vista will be the last version of Windows client to come in a 32-bit version.

Michael Silver, analyst for Gartner, said most PCs sold now are capable of running 64-bit applications, but that capability has not been widely used because the device drivers are not available for those applications.

However, by the time the next version of Windows client OS is available in 2009 or 2010, "the device vendors should be caught up in terms of 64-bit drivers," he said. Still, Microsoft’s huge partner ecosystem for Windows limits its ability to make drastic changes to its OS, and this may hamper its move to a 64-bit only version of the Windows client OS, Gillen said.

"If Microsoft brings out a release that disrupts 10 percent of their customers, that creates a lot of negative press for them," he said. That comment rang true when Microsoft unveiled that the next version of Exchange would run only on 64-bit systems. Partners and customers protested because many of them already run Exchange on 32-bit servers, and the transition to Exchange 2007 will require them to either purchase new servers or retool their IT architectures to run the application on 64-bit servers.

This factor also could affect the notion that Vista will be the last packaged version of Windows, and that Microsoft will deliver future versions as updates over the Web. Windows Vista is the first OS to be available that way, at least in upgrade form. Microsoft is giving consumers the ability to upgrade to higher-end versions of Vista over the Internet with an activation key.

Bottom line: I think this may be THE most anticipated OS to date because of it’s future implications and the direction the PC community may progress from Vista’s introduction, and the future of PC OS’s.

January 29, 2007