Michael writes:

> You are correct, the Bill Gates platform is not going away, but with 
> every new release of the Bill Gates platform, (from Win 3.x, (95/98/me), 
> 2000, XP, and now Vista) end users and developers experience something 
> similar to a blind man having his furniture rearranged.
>  
> Right now there are many  companies that need to start planning another 
> massive project to migrate everyone to Vista, training users and help 
> desk staff, checking all required applications, making sure they running 
> properly and so on. It is a massive undertaking. As for management 
> making the choice to run M$, they expect these things, and budget for 
> them, right?

One of the most unfortunate aspects of this business is the tendency of 
people to exaggerate, to try to protect whatever nook and cranny they're 
comfortable in, rather than look at the situation as the way things are.

On the whole, I'm very impressed with the design of Microsoft's OS. I am 
certainly impressed with the amount of documentation available for Windows, 
and I am deeply impressed with Microsoft's committment to backwards 
compatibility. 

I purposefully develop all of our software on a ten year-old 300 MHz, 64 MB 
Windows 98 for two reasons: (i) to be sure that I'm not doing something dumb 
and excessively resource comsumptive. If I am, it certainly shows up on this 
machine. (ii) But the second reason is for compatibility across all versions of 
the operating system. I can be assured that if my code runs under Windows 
98 it will run on every new version of Windows as well.

So far, that's always proven to be true. QCTerm, QCShow and QCReports all 
run equally well on Windows 98/NT/Me/XP and Vista, with one exception. 
QCShow doesn't work on Vista reliably due to its intensive security settings, 
and that's a bit of a bummer. Some machines under Vista work well with 
QCShow and others don't, and I have to figure out why.

Vista right at the moment is a bit of a mess and I tell our customers to hold off 
on purchasing it. XP is currently a far better choice. The mandate that 
obviously governed Vista's design was "security at all costs," and the result is 
that the intensive security that was put in place makes Vista very slow and 
clunky, but Microsoft is downloading new updates for Vista almost every night, 
and I expect within a year it's going to be a relatively nice operating system. 

Vista certainly is pretty. In fact, I think that they've passed the Macintosh in 
attractiveness, and that's saying something, which was the second of 
Microsoft's design goals for Vista.

But most importantly, I don't believe that it requires any significant new 
training. It took me about an hour to get used to it, and I care about details 
much more than the average person. For most people, it shouldn't take ten 
minutes.

In regards to computers, things on the whole are getting better, not worse, 
and their betterment is actually accelerating. I credit automatic updates a 
great deal for that. 

We use Macintoshes here as well, but mostly we use PCs, and most of Apple's 
primary software now runs on PCs indistinguishably from its behavior on Macs 
(and that's part of the reason that my long-term faith in Macs is modestly 
low). We have all of the primary browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari) on all of our 
machines, both Macs and PCs, that will accept them. 

When we first started using Safari, I thought that it too was a bit of a mess. I 
only used it to test our webpages' compatibility, but I never used it for real 
browsing. That changed a bit with Safari 3.0. It got a lot better, and it got 
that way essentially automatically. But with the newest release of Safari 3.1, I 
think the browser is well on its way to being quite excellent. The same is true 
of Firefox. Every release is a more pleasant, stronger release.

I expect Vista to recapitulate this experience as well. But my recommendation 
for the moment is to stick with XP, not for any worries about training or 
massive new investment, but simply because it's not quite ready for prime time 
yet.

Wirt Atmar

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