Opaque Lucidity

Not A Good View

Windows Vista has been out for more than a year now. If you've bought a PC in that time, chances are very high that your machine sports this latest version of Microsoft ingenuity. But those of us who work in IT have been slow to adopt the operating system for good reasons: poor driver support, lousy performance on basic and mid-level machines, expense, etc., etc.

Now comes word that executives inside Microsoft had problems with the company's "Vista Capable" stickers that were plastered on laptops and desktops sold in the months leading up to the Vista release. The company lowered the minimum system requirements so much that they became a joke, even to those of us who had never seen the OS in it's beta stages. If a guy on the street knows how ridiculous an idea this was, how in the hell did it ever come to be in the first place?

It's just Microsoft. That's probably not a complete answer, but the unique corporate mentality at Redmond has floated so many bad products that the usual responses just don't apply. There are people who will say the company is making billions of dollars so it can't be that far off the mark, right? Well, no. Microsoft is kept afloat, I believe, by two things: first, their monopoly of the desktop. Walk into Best Buy and you will see every PC there running Windows Vista. From a retail standpoint, their only competition is Apple. The Mac OS is a superior product, yet it occupies only a small percentage of the market. Part of this, I believe, is intentional, but we'll talk about that some other time. The point is you can't buy a PC, with rare exceptions, running anything but Windows from a retail store. To millions of people, Windows IS the PC---that is the universe, all there is.

Second, I believe Microsoft is helped tremendously by CIOs (Chief Information Officers) at big companies who have drunk the Redmond Kool-Aid. In my three-person department, we wear many hats. In larger companies, however, the CIO or his equivalent may not have a background in tech. Rather, he/she simply makes strategic decisions and lets the people down the ladder implement the changes needed. With his/her rear on the line, Microsoft is seen as the "safe" choice. It's a company the CEO has heard of; he may even own some stock. In many companies, other solutions, such as one Linux distro or another, are still seen as esoteric and risky, even though, at least to me, Suse, RedHat and many others are mature operating systems capable of amazing expansion.

I'm not completely anti-Microsoft. They have made some great products (I believe Windows XP is one of these) and are responsible along with Apple for making computers user-friendly. But any industry in which a company has even a partial monopoly is always in danger of stagnation.