I’ve been watching the Vista release lately.
So far, the execution doesn’t look good.
Here is what I’ve picked up so far:
Balmer pulled analysts aside recently and said they will not be meeting expectations. This is telling. I suspect that most corporations are not considering the switch at this time.
Evidence from friends tells me that it is not quite baked. Lots of driver issues are common and the overall performance is not stellar (sluggish UI, lots of memory leaks)
Dell still doesn’t have support for it on their high-end boxes (the XPS gamer boxes)
Unless I have a pressing need for Vista come up, I can wait 6 months. I wouldn’t risk the big switch at this time. This one needs to sit in the oven a little while longer.
What I heard from somewhere on the net was that they decided to dump their TCP/IP code, originally from BSD, to rewrite it from scratch. They did this, apparently, in order to achieve a speed improvement. Which they did, the new stack is 10% faster.
I think it shows incredible hubris to think that you can write a better stack, whoever you are. That’s 30-year-old code, written by some of the masters of programming, having been tweaked and refined continuously the whole time. To attempt a rewrite, at the company with the worst security record in software, in order to achieve a marginal speed improvement is beyond stupidity.
I expect it’s only a matter of time (and market penetration) before the cracking community decides to put Vista’s new stack under the microscope. The results will be an incredible disaster which I’m looking forward to observing from the safety of my MacBook.