Opinion: Vista's Pros and Cons

What’s Not

Gratuitous UI changes. I love the user interface, but I have a lot invested in the old Windows experience, and some of the changes just make no sense to me. It also seems that, given the size of some of the targets you have to home in on with your cursor, Microsoft is hiring a lot of young workers who have great eyesight and use high-resolution monitors.

Performance. All this goodness comes at a price. While most features are enabled to some degree on stock PCs, older machines just won’t be up to snuff. If you want to run the latest and greatest with all UI features enabled, you’re going to need an upgrade. Older laptops in particular are unlikely to be able to run Vista well with all the UI stuff turned on.

Compatibility. This is not a new problem, but Vista will confront business users for the first time in a long while with major backward-compatibility issues. In general, drivers and low-level utilities will be the worst hit, but all critical applications will need to be tested carefully to see what works and what doesn’t.

Cost. There’s more to the cost of migration than the price of the operating system. Installation, testing, hardware and software upgrades have to be factored in. That means wholesale migrations are going to be costly.

Bottom Line

There’s a lot to like in Vista. While most organizations will likely be best served by a phased migration over time, many users will be able to benefit immediately. Either way, Vista is on the short-term horizon, and it’s best to start planning now, before the main consumer launch early in 2007.

We've gathered the best Computerworld coverage of Vista, from in-depth reviews and how-tos to the hottest issues surrounding the OS. See Windows Vista A to Z.

Michael Gartenberg is vice president and research director for the Personal Technology & Access and Custom Research groups at JupiterResearch in New York. Contact him at mgartenberg2@optonline.net. His blog and RSS feed are at weblogs.jupiterresearch.com.

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