The news from Redmond is, as usual, ugly. Microsoft Vice President Mike Nash has published a document that's generating some talk. It seems that no one wants to run Vista and this produces a lot of hand wringing in their monolithic dungeons, so they put out a treatise on all the reasons to upgrade from Windows XP and the problems you'll have if you don't. I haven't read the propaganda, and I'm not going to, but I'm willing to bet this article is more than a bit hyperbolic.
I'm the last person to defend Microsoft, about anything, ever. I jumped ship years ago and encourage everybody I meet to do the same. I'll pay to see a George Lucas movie before I buy anything from Microsoft. At this point I won't even loot a copy of Windows; it just has nothing to offer me. Nothing good, anyway. They've dug a hole so deep it would take a Herculean effort to earn any praise, even backhanded. They can integrate some Unix principles into their OS, they can release interoperability documentation, whatever. Even when they do something right they do it wrong.
I've drawn some conclusions from some of the remarks in the Nash's whitepaper. It's no more than a reiteration of the party line: XP is old and busted, Vista is new hotness. Nash says that waiting to be upgrade leaves users vulnerable because XP and its attendant applications are outdated and "don't employ proper security safeguards." He wants you to use Vista and new applications that don't employ proper security, which you'll be reminded of with each new 0-day attack. Vista is supposedly built of sturdier stuff, making it more difficult to compromise. The comments about XP use leaving you insecure only mean that all those years they spent telling you that XP was a security paragon, they were mistaken, but new hotness Vista is really secure. Which is taking the piss. All it takes is one developer working on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon, or one user installing a new screensaver downloaded from a "respectable" website in eastern Europe.
Let's be clear: security begins and ends with the user. Only a truly insecure system - like most Windows releases to date - can be owned without user interaction. A dumb user can cause a secure system to be destroyed, and a smart user can keep an insecure system intact.
As for users who don't upgrade because mission-critical applications won't run on Vista, Nash says that they should just switch now because those apps will still be incompatible with Windows 7, due in under two years. So he wants users to be without functioning software immediately rather than have two more years to prepare for the changeover. For that matter, he wants users to shell out for an upgrade now, and do it again in two years.
The Tech Cult article seemed to be drawing conclusions about the upgrade paths from XP to Win 7, but I don't see any evidence of those threats. Maybe he actually read the whitepaper, but I'll be damned if I waste my time doing that. In either case, I can't imagine anyone buying an upgrade-only version of Windows. It's more desirable to have fresh installs on bare metal every time; if memory serves, that can only be done with the more expensive "full" packages.
Look at features missing in Vista, I'm not sure why anyone would want to upgrade. Yes, they removed Active Desktop, but they dropped useful things, too. A lot of items on the list seem like fringe features (RIP, gopher) but they also seem like Microsoft went out of their way to cull them. Customize the Windows startup sound? Create secondary actions for files in the context menu? Shutdown menu in the Task Manager? Visual progress indicators in Defrag? Not with Vista. Hell, from the way it looks, they castrated the Defrag gui: no pause, no choosing which drive to defrag. Backup won't allow you to choose which directories to archive or exclude. The list goes on. Vista isn't an operating system, it's a digital charnel house.
I'm the last person to defend Microsoft, about anything, ever. I jumped ship years ago and encourage everybody I meet to do the same. I'll pay to see a George Lucas movie before I buy anything from Microsoft. At this point I won't even loot a copy of Windows; it just has nothing to offer me. Nothing good, anyway. They've dug a hole so deep it would take a Herculean effort to earn any praise, even backhanded. They can integrate some Unix principles into their OS, they can release interoperability documentation, whatever. Even when they do something right they do it wrong.
I've drawn some conclusions from some of the remarks in the Nash's whitepaper. It's no more than a reiteration of the party line: XP is old and busted, Vista is new hotness. Nash says that waiting to be upgrade leaves users vulnerable because XP and its attendant applications are outdated and "don't employ proper security safeguards." He wants you to use Vista and new applications that don't employ proper security, which you'll be reminded of with each new 0-day attack. Vista is supposedly built of sturdier stuff, making it more difficult to compromise. The comments about XP use leaving you insecure only mean that all those years they spent telling you that XP was a security paragon, they were mistaken, but new hotness Vista is really secure. Which is taking the piss. All it takes is one developer working on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon, or one user installing a new screensaver downloaded from a "respectable" website in eastern Europe.
Let's be clear: security begins and ends with the user. Only a truly insecure system - like most Windows releases to date - can be owned without user interaction. A dumb user can cause a secure system to be destroyed, and a smart user can keep an insecure system intact.
As for users who don't upgrade because mission-critical applications won't run on Vista, Nash says that they should just switch now because those apps will still be incompatible with Windows 7, due in under two years. So he wants users to be without functioning software immediately rather than have two more years to prepare for the changeover. For that matter, he wants users to shell out for an upgrade now, and do it again in two years.
The Tech Cult article seemed to be drawing conclusions about the upgrade paths from XP to Win 7, but I don't see any evidence of those threats. Maybe he actually read the whitepaper, but I'll be damned if I waste my time doing that. In either case, I can't imagine anyone buying an upgrade-only version of Windows. It's more desirable to have fresh installs on bare metal every time; if memory serves, that can only be done with the more expensive "full" packages.
Look at features missing in Vista, I'm not sure why anyone would want to upgrade. Yes, they removed Active Desktop, but they dropped useful things, too. A lot of items on the list seem like fringe features (RIP, gopher) but they also seem like Microsoft went out of their way to cull them. Customize the Windows startup sound? Create secondary actions for files in the context menu? Shutdown menu in the Task Manager? Visual progress indicators in Defrag? Not with Vista. Hell, from the way it looks, they castrated the Defrag gui: no pause, no choosing which drive to defrag. Backup won't allow you to choose which directories to archive or exclude. The list goes on. Vista isn't an operating system, it's a digital charnel house.
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