The great Vista gravy train

By Stan Beer
Saturday, 18 November 2006 17:48

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft and its adherents would have us believe that the world is breathlessly awaiting the arrival of Windows Vista. However, many - perhaps most - of us Windows XP SP2 users are grumbling at the thought of once again being forced into lining the pockets of Microsoft and just about everybody else in the IT industry jumping on the Vista gravy train.

Those of us who have been involved in this industry for a couple of decades or more can just about pinpoint the exact time this gravy train that came to be known as the Wintel Alliance started. It was around the time that Microsoft decided it no longer needed an alliance with IBM to sell its operating system.

The year was 1987 and people started to referring to PCs as having Industry Standard Architecture and stopped referring to them as being IBM compatible. IBM tried unsuccessfully that year to re-establish its dominance in the PC space with a new proprietary hardware standard called Microchannel Architecture and a new operating system called OS2.

However, the rest of the IT industry and users liked the idea of having an open hardware platform based on the Intel x86 chip and a standardised operating system - MS-DOS - that could run on any brand of machine that conformed to that platform. From that moment on, Microsoft and Intel knew their mutual future was assured.

From then on, the game that Microsoft and Intel played was for Microsoft to make its operating system bigger and snazzier so that it required more powerful hardware based on the Intel chipset to provide reasonable performance. At the same time, Microsoft kept the same basic operating system kernel in order to provide backward compatibility for users.

For the next eight years Microsoft figured out ways to make MS-DOS bigger and fancier so that it would require more resources, including wrapping it up in a graphical user interface shell called Windows - which was a poor imitation of Mac OS. The rest is history - Windows 95, the Internet, the demise of Netscape, bugs, system crashes, viruses, a continual need to upgrade hardware, promises of better security with each new release and the birth of an entire industry just to protect users when they go online.

Each time Microsoft has released a new version of its operating system since 1995, it has required considerably more resources to run than the previous version, while providing relatively few additional benefits. The promises of increased security and stability have never really come to fruition. Windows 98 used to crash often, Windows Millenium was shocking, my Windows 2000 used to freeze quite often and my Windows XP SP2 still freezes too often and requires me to power off and do a cold restart.

Now once again Microsoft is about to unleash a killer diller operating system called Vista. From all accounts, it's bigger, snazzier, more secure and more stable than its predecessor. And of course, it is exceptionally resources hungry and will require a significant hardware upgrade.

Intel (and AMD) lick your chops, you have a captive audience who have no choice but to buy your new hardware. Symantec and McAfee stop whining, you now have a whole suite of new products to sell to protect this "secure" new operating system. IT services providers get ready for an increase in the number of support calls as users come to terms with issues they have never encountered before. Welcome aboard the Vista gravy train, the ultimate user pays ride.