It has almost been a year since the release of Windows Vista to manufacturers and yet most people are sticking with XP. Why are people sticking with XP when there is something new from Microsoft? More importantly, why are people fighting to keep getting XP on new machines?
The answer lies in the fact that Vista does not offer anything people really need. The main difference between XP and Vista is a pretty interface and if you don’t have an extremely powerful machine that interface looks very similar to XP. To add to that Vista’s driver support from third parties is still lacking.
If we look back to when XP first came out the only other options were 98, ME, and 2000. The windows 98 and ME users scrambled to XP as it offered a more stable system. There were a few stragglers in this group, but the stability overcame any of the problems people had with the interface. The group who used 2000 were perfectly happy with 2k, it was stable and reliable. Most of this group stuck with 2k Windows dropped the support or they bought a new computer that had XP on it. Even then XP was based on 2k so the skills transported over easily.
Now look at Vista; what’s there that XP does not have besides the GUI. The first thing that comes to mind is badware, be it spyware, adware, or a virus. Vista has done a great job at not allowing all of that junk to be automatically installed. The problem is what really fixed this was Internet Explorer 7. Ever since I installed it on all of my work computers I no longer have to worry about that junk, it just does not get installed. I now check for these issues at the same time I install Windows updates; not once or twice a week like before.
Another thing that Vista did great is the search. In my opinion the search in Vista is far superior to anything I’ve seen on a desktop before. The issue is that the average user doesn’t care about this feature. It is something more for power users than the average joe. Sure, a few non-geeks will find the functionality wonderful, but that is the same way with any feature.
One massive flop in Vista is UCA or user account control. This is those little messages asking if you would like to give permission to an application to run. Microsoft totally stepped on this. They ask for your permission to do nearly anything. Most of the people I know want me to disable this and for a long time I refused. I knew it was there for their protection. I finally gave up my fight and started showing how to disable it; they just hit continue anyway. You have to know what you are doing to know what these windows mean and those users already know how to protect themselves. For the average user this does nothing, just like a software firewall that asks for your permission.
What Microsoft has created in Vista is an operating system that is trying to play in the world of *NIX (Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, etc.) without knowing how to do it. They’ve created some very powerful features that just cause issues for the average computer user. On top of that power they created an interface that looks pretty. For the normal person Vista just does not offer any good reason to switch over.
In the world of business there are no productivity enhancements that I can see and therefore I do not see the need for it. The only thing that will happen if a business upgrades is increase the cost of business. A company will need to train the support staff as well as the end users.
There is no real reason to switch to Vista unless you have a need for one of its features. If you are up in the air to switch or not; dont. You will just be causing yourself pain. I really wish that this was not the case, I wanted to see something great from Microsoft. XP is outdated, but Vista is not much better. To get me to sing the praises of an OS they need some new great features; Vista does not do this.
