Vista to bring it all to a head for Microsoft in November

Stan Beer
Monday, 02 October 2006 11:00

Opinion and Analysis

The revelation that Vista was still vulnerable to exploits in the critical class was a wake up call to many Windows users who may have thought that Vista was going to provide the universal panacea for their security issues. It was quite obvious that Vista will not see the departure of Patch Tuesday, as some in Microsoft have claimed.

• Announcements

The security questions surrounding Vista have been given added impetus by the uncertainty surrounding the upcoming release in Europe. The European Commission (EC) has already expressed concerns about Microsoft using its near monopoly on the desktop to bundle security features with Vista and, in so doing, squeeze out third party security providers.

A number of security vendors, including Symantec, are doing their best to convince the EC to force Microsoft to unbundle security features from Vista and to allow third party security vendors access to the inner sanctum of the operating system kernel.

While some say that forcing Microsoft to unbundle its own security products would be a victory for free competition, others say it will just make Vista inherently less secure.

Aside from the security issue, there is the question of cost of moving to Vista for users. Aside from the hefty cost of the software, Vista is a resource hungry system that in many cases will require a hardware upgrade.

No doubt many users will eventually bite the bullet and spend the money for the hardware and software and upgrade to Vista. If so, will they have any money left over to spend on that other new and expensive software release from Microsoft, Office 2007?

Here's some food for thought for Microsoft. I have written this article on a free web-based word processor called Zoho Writer. All I needed to write the article was a computer with an internet connection, regardless of the operating system. But that's another story.