First let me say, I have yet to hear anything good from people who have used
it. Which makes me really warry about upgrading. Second, I've been a huge
Microsoft software fan forever. I've been deploying and supporting windows
since the land before time. So this isn’t some random ranting. I'm just
seriously confused about the different versions. I’m permanently disabled
from military service now and I’m now feeling out of the loop. I missed all
of the beta’s, the conventions, basically all of the fun. Yes I’m
disappointed (again) Microsoft keeps ignoring one of its key target users,
but I’ll get into that later. I’m also a little frustrated with the marketing
team’s constant ability to over boast the functions of a product making its
delivery disappointing. We’ve all heard the analogies. They could make jell-o
sound like cream brule. Unfortunately when the waiter brings it out, it
doesn’t matter if jell-o tastes good, it’s not cream brule. I also want to
apologize because I can be excessively long winded. I use teach three dozen
different MS products as an MCT. I go off on analogies because I never know
the background of those listening. I’m really just trying to have a common
ground.

What I'm confused about is the 4 versions (5 if you include enterprise which
honestly sounds like it's suppose to be bigger and better tha Ultimate but
it's actually a step down from what I read). I just can't seem to get a real
view of what each one is and what they are. There are a few very general
comparisons on the site but not a full list. I mean when Office came out with
the Office Small Business, Professional and so forth. You actually had a list
of apps (outlook, excel, word, access, front page or whatever). I could tell
WHAT the difference was because there was a list of the ones included in
each. The best I have right now is my own personal impression of the name.
It’s based on my understanding of the things marketing has done to name
things in the past. I would love to see some kind of realistic way of knowing
the differences. Also I must say I’m wary of the names because of the
over-boasting of marketing in the past making it sound like it includes more
than it really does.

Here’s a quick impression of my understanding.
Home edition – It SOUNDS like it would be a natural upgrade for XP home or
Media Center; tuned for users at home not having a domain. Not necessarily to
be used as a bastardized mega DVR but with the functionality. Mostly for
entertainment but very easily let’s you jump into doing a variety of homework
or productivity needs. The REALITY, no upgrade path from media center tells
me the multimedia is seriously lacking. My honest impression is it’s an
extraordinarily locked down Internet Browser with email tuned to try to keep
the people who are very naive and always fall for EVERY scam out there safe;
the stereotyped 12:00 flashers.

Home edition professional – It SOUNDS like this is the type of machine based
for the home network. Still tuned for the priority on entertainment with
functionality for business productivity. Something for the tech savvy family.
Teenagers with cell phones and digital cameras able to take 30 minutes of
high quality video on their 1 or 2 gig SD cards. Then able to edit and make
creative things to post on MySpace or the family type web sites. Machines
able to join a domain because they have a personal server in the house with a
couple 400 gig drives in them for sharing stuff. Possibly running a personal
family web site and maybe even a light weight email server. Systems able to
interact with the web sites on that server like share point or DotNetNuke.
Systems where the firewalls are all turned OFF and the network stacks kept
thin because they have a wireless router running the firewall. However they
do have their anti-phishing and spam stuff going. REALITY – it’s the upgrade
path for Media Center which means just like Media Center you probably don’t
have domain membership ability (which I always thought was odd that you could
install XP Pro and be able to join domains but as soon as you add the media
center add-on software your can’t join anymore) You get all of the extra crap
people not only don’t need but REALLY NEED out of the way is turned on, like
the excessive firewall, bridging and other stuff not wanted. Stuff that is
completely redundant or put there to give people the impression they’re
getting a lot for their money. Peppered with tons of simple stuff that really
is a severe annoyance and in actually prevents you from even being able to
see the real meat of the few powerful apps included. One of which is not the
Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore. Come on guys, we know there are
always tons of bugs. Any type of better backup and restore as well as
scheduling should have been included in all versions. There's no excuse for
that.

Business, This is obviously where they reverse the priorities. Systems
designed for the 24 hour “hot cot” call centers and routine productivity
users. People who come in to work and don’t really think much of their
computers because they’re all locked down to only browsing the company’s
internal web site and only run the applications approved by the company.
Which is probably easy on this version because any application a business
might use has been taken off in order to get them to pay extra for it.
Because it specifically says it’s not in the media center upgrade path these
are the machines you really don’t want to in the hands of your marketing team
because they are the other side of the pendulum needing multimedia apps for
creating all the pretty marketing packets and videos. REALITY, it’s the basic
Home edition with the ability to join a domain. Also, still already running
the firewall and other crap. Which in turn actually pisses off the IT guys
because NOW, they have to figure out how to get it out of the way so their
custom enterprise management tools, scripts and services will work. And by
the way if you were going to get rid of backup on ANY version this is the one
to not include it. WHY, because any computer running this will be in an
office where any failure to the machine that takes more than 10 minutes to
figure out is resolved by re-imaging the system. Places where the IT guy just
walks around with the image CD's in his pocket.

Ultimate, basically all the stops pulled so you have all the functionality
it was designed for but didn’t have to cut out in order to create the lesser
versions. Unfortunately this means by default EVERY single function is turned
on and running. And even though they aren’t doing any good running because
they haven’t been configured they are all running and killing any machine out
there. Possibly needing a system housing 2 dual core procs and 4 gigs of ram
minimum and still taking 30 seconds just to launch notepad.

Honestly this is the same reasoning that when MS launched IE7 they made it a
High-priority update. They have finally moved it down to an optional piece
but it’s too late. They already pissed everyone off by doing it. The teams
try so hard to impress their bosses that the most stupid features are boasted
off as mission critical. You know, all the crap that some clueless person in
market thinks is a cute feature therefore JUST HAS to be added. Kind of like
making the default outlook view “In Groups” and not making and easy way to un
do it.

I hate to digress because this is already getting really long. I am
seriously trying to find out about Vista, but as much as I love Microsoft
products, I find myself suffering from PSTD solely from IE7’s release. So
I’ll treat myself to just a little bit of ranting. Any time it’s mentioned I
can’t help but pull two fists of hair out. I’m still absolutely flabbergasted
that in a time when MySpace type web sites and personal customization are the
hugest thing out there, they thought taking all of the customization
functionality would be acceptable. That was such an astronomically huge
error. I can’t believe they haven’t fired any of the IE team. I lost a lot of
respect for them when they did that huge debacle but the fact that those guys
still have jobs is beyond my comprehension. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to
trust them again. I still remember putting IE 1.0 on people’s machines even
though many said mozilla was better. IE 7 has become a huge black stain on
Microsoft. You can get mad about this statement but you can quote me. I have
never been able to get people to really understand how truly horrible it is.
And yes, I don’t even think you’ll still truly understand. “The release of
IE7 was worse that the Holocaust”. I also dare any survivor of Auschwitz to
have a conversation with me for 30 minutes and not walk away with the sudden
urge to storm Dave Massy’s office with torches and pitch forks. End Rant! By
the way, can you run IE 6.5 on Vista?

I left this for last and I'm really hoping someone would be able to either
answer this or honestly forward this to some one who could explain this or
maybe even do something. The HUGEST problems I have about Vista are first
there is a very bad set of upgrade paths. I'm absolutely disgusted there is
no upgrade path for W2k. Even though I haven’t run it in years I know many
people do. That's just really poor work. Even “IF” in essence you were doing
a fresh install you still could have created a way to keep selective parts of
the person profile information. I have a feeling the first answer someone is
going to try and say to me is, you just don't understand, we can't know
everything about every program to make sure they upgrade right. Unfortunately
if you have the ability to state something like that then you should have the
intelligence to work with or around this issue.

Did you ever think maybe you could solve the problem by making a very easy
way to help people do an "upgrade" when in technical reality it's a fresh
install. You could do a really great job of automating the setup. Have it
check the list of installed application to see if any have already been
worked for upgrade like say office. Then make a list of the other apps. You
tell the user they will have to provide the original install disks or select
an option to not include it. This way you can use the information in the
installer system to re-run their installs and overlay the users previous
settings. I'm not going to try and say it would be an easy one, two, three
type thing to do, but it really looks like it was just completely ignore.
Almost like they twisted it into an up-sale, saying you have to buy the full
version versus just the upgrade version.

The second thing is how everyone I've talked to says they hate it, or it
just pisses them off. The complaint I hear the most is that it nags you
constantly about everything. They actually say the mac commercial is not an
exaggeration but actually a kind way or talking about it. I hear from fellow
IT people they hate how they added so many extra unnecessary pieces to the
network stack. I say unnecessary because it's not that they aren't a
functioning item but again everyone is more interested in bragging off the
programming they did than determining if it really should be added by
default.

Now, here's the thing about what I said about an ignored user base. It’s
also the basis for most of the input I’ve received as to what people think of
Vista. The user base is the smart users. I realize there are MANY people that
have no interest in knowing the deep inner workings of the OS. I always use
the analogy of the car industry back closer to the 60s and 70s. All the cool
people knew everything about the insides and the inner works of a car. And
then there's people who just really don't care and are very happy with just
driving and taking it to jiffy lube to change the oil. But the thing is there
IS a segment of users who actually have a big impact on the impression of it.
What do you think would happen if “The Fonz" came out saying mustangs were a
piece of crap, or sucked. Ordinary drivers recognize if the guy who lives
this kind of thing says it sucks I'd rather just avoid it if only to avoid
the ridiculing and not buy one. Who do you think people ask if they like
Vista?

Why isn’t there an IT Pro or Architect Version. A version where by default
everything is included but not turned on and running. A version where we can
just use the Add/Remove Windows Components to choose what we want. Making the
list very detailed as to the sub components. And when something is added you
have to actually turn it on and have an easy way to turn it off. We’re the
guys who spend half the day in the registry. We constantly want to tweak and
refine our systems so that we can get them to operate as fast as possible or
just the way we need. We want to control absolutely every aspect of the
machine and the Task Manager just doesn’t really do us any good. Hell, you
could even add tons of the freebee downloads like the Command Prompt Here
power tool or the ISO drive mapper. Include a copy of SQL Express and add
VS2005 Express in the list. Add a bunch of SDK’s to the list like the .Net
Framework SDK’s. Maybe instead of the retarded default welcome page web site
you include a preconfigured version of DotNetNuke using the SQL Express and
Pre-linked into the Visual Studio. Hell, make a default template that has the
**** welcome text on it and all the Microsoft images you can possibly think
of. I’m sure you’d have tons of room for stuff on a DVD install disk.