Microsoft's previous OS Windows Media Center Edition was predicted to be the flop of the year - 2005 by Philip Swann. But, by the end of 2005, 50% of the PCs were shipped with Windows Media Center Edition. So, predictions don't really matter when it comes to Microsoft. They know how to rule the market and they are doing it.
Windows Vista will be an enhancement of Windows XP which was released about 5 years back. Most corporations use Windows XP, and for the migration to happen from XP to Vista, it's not going to be a fast process. The corporations would like to test all their applications on Vista before jumping on the Vista bandwagon.
The first question that came to my mind when Vista news came out is "why do I need Vista?" I am happy with my XP Pro except that it crashes every other day and it takes an hour to boot and gives me an error a day. Seriously, how many of you have not coped up with a faulty OS? If I don't see any error messages on my XP, I seriously start to wonder if my computer is working fine. The error messages define Microsoft products, never perfect, just like us.
The features for Windows Vista are on the Microsoft Website. I am going to talk about some features that I think are going to be detrimental in Vista's success.
Security
I am impressed with Vista's security feature of minimizing administrative rights. A user uses the administrative feature only when he is installing a program or modifying a program. Hence, malwares find it hard to make avenues on our system behind our backs. In other words, we will be prompted every time a program is installed, it might sound annoying for those dialog boxes to pop up every time but trust me, it's is worth it.
Internet Explorer 7
With the boom of Firefox, Internet Explorer was losing ground in far too many places. In my own opinion, Internet Explorer spoiled the joy that is derived from browsing the internet. Coders had a hard time coding for IE since it always screwed up while decoding. There is an anti-IE campaign if anybody wants to be a part of it.
Microsoft announced the arrival of Internet Explorer 7 which would be targeting Firefox. IE7 comes with tabbed browsing, and most importantly, it claims to be much more secure giving access to only web components and not to any other files on the system. The biggest anticipation would be the decoding in IE. Web programmers would be praying day and night that IE fixed their issues with decoding so that the programmers can have an easy day out on the field.
Super Fetch
The Super Fetch feature gave me goose bumps. I have noticed many times on my XP system that whenever I start using my system from a sleep mode, it usually takes around a minute or two to load everything back. It's annoying to be honest. But, Vista's Super Fetch understands the programs that I use frequently and loads it in the memory, so after sleep mode, the contents from the memory can be loaded quickly.
Other features like the backup enhancements, sidebar module(in yahoo widget mold), networking and speech recognition may not be as major as the other ones that I talked about, but still they make a difference to an operating system.
There are reports that 60% of Vista's code is being rewritten. But still Microsoft has set the release date for PC manufacturers on the 23rd of July 2006 but the consumers may be able to get hold of them around Christmas time. Sounds like a good Christmas gift to me.
