The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group To Vista or Not to Vista Peter Renowdan |
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Peter Renowdan asks "Where is Microsoft taking us?" |
About three weeks ago, my son and I set out to buy two new notebook computers: one for his university studies, and one for my business and personal use. Assuming we chose a Microsoft Windows computer over Linux or Mac, the question was: do we go with the new Vista system, or stay with XP? We are not technical experts, but decided to investigate. We started looking at technical issues, but soon found ourselves grappling with wider strategic issues — where was it all going?
We had seen the impressive demonstration of Vista by Ms Megabyte at the Melb PC February Monthly Meeting. It certainly looked swish. We read reviews, such as PC Authority Feb 2007. It seemed that Vista had a new interface, improved security, better networking and a number of other desirable features. Then there were a host of bundled apps: a browser, photo gallery, media player/centre, movie maker, e-mail client etc. All in all, according to PC Authority, 50 million lines of code — being marketed under the theme of "Wow".
As is wont to happen, my son declared he was busy at university and would like to delegate the rest of the research to me. I assumed that given a sufficiently large PC and appropriate graphics card, Vista would run, and it probably did have better security, networking and mobility features than XP. The issues? what were the problems and traps (if any).
My first concern was with the 50 million lines of code. If it's extremely well written, with only one error per 100,000 lines, that leaves potential for about 500 errors, not counting errors of logic. This may sound sceptical, but there are always issues of quality assurance with any new software.
My work has been as a management and strategic consultant. My clients (large and small organisations) are not interested in "Wow". What they want, as do I, is an operating system that is sound, reliable, compact and robust. If it's good, it will be almost unseen as our main interaction will be with the applications we are running. My business clients also want security. So I find it puzzling that Microsoft has left out the "Bitlocker" drive encryption from the Business version of the product — the version that many businesses would buy.
Vista itself has a raft of bundled applications. Why? For me, the operating system needs to be just that: an operating system. Applications have a place, but they can be optional extras. As I see it, the problem with bundled applications is that it makes the product too large; it slows time to market, and it dilutes the development effort that could have been focussed on the core operating system. Jon Honeyball in the above magazine comments that security could have been taken further, and with regard to the "One Care" Live strategy "Microsoft ... is trying to make customers pay to have their machines protected from infections and spyware that shouldn't be infecting the machines in the first place". Information Week, March 2, 2007 reports a recently released independent evaluation of 17 anti-virus products': Microsoft One Care was in the group. Where did it rank? Last. Why? Presumably because Microsoft has too many balls in the air.
Why, again, the bundled applications? When Netscape was becoming dominant, Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer. Netscape now has less than 1% of the browser market2. With these bundled applications, if we start to use them by default, what will happen to the free market suppliers of similar applications? Chances are, they will decline or go out of business. So where will that leave our future choices?
Upgrading to Vista
A review of the Internet quickly turned up examples of experienced users having substantial problems upgrading to Vista. For example:
- "Falling into the Vista Trap" by Tim Weber, Business Editor, BBC
News Web site
- "Vista causes an array of problems" by Andrew Kantor, USA Today'
Accounting Packages
I have to use these from time to time, so I decided to check them out. The results were:
- Intuit: Quicken 2007 will run under Vista. Earlier versions will not5.
- MYOB: Accounting ver 16 will run. Earlier versions will not.
Content Protection — DRM
If you're looking into Vista, it's not long before you walk into, or trip over the so-called "Digital Rights Management" or DRM. We were not familiar with this, but it soon turned into a significant issue. It is the link that swung us from looking at the product to looking at the strategic issues behind it.
At one level, the rationale for DRM is relatively simple. The music (RIAA) and motion picture (MPAA) organisations not unreasonably want to prevent piracy of their digital media. The actions they have taken have included lobbying (and obtaining) much stronger legislation, wide ranging law suits, and the implementation of DRM technologies to prevent copying. In Vista, this involves the implementation of the highly complex AACS encryption system.
For us, the issue with DRM in Vista was: in conjunction with proposed Australian legislation, is it an overkill, excessively representing the interests of RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft at the expense of users?
Whilst music and standard definition DVDs have been able to play on Windows XP, it seems that Microsoft is making a free choice with Vista — to substantially re-engineer Windows to upgrade the content protection mechanisms so it will support the protection requirements (in particular) of high definition content. In effect, they are making a choice to turn the PC into a High Definition media device. High Definition content, after all, could be played on an inexpensive (high definition) DVD player.
Peter Gutmann in his article "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection" provides an excellent overview of the key issues with DRM and Vista content protection". This has been widely discussed' and in part challenged by Microsoft on their blog. The blog contains over 300 general comments which are running strongly against Microsoft, for example: "Until every possible risk associated with this technology is solved and known I won't install this operating system". All kinds of actual or potential issues have been identified. Much of this is fairly technical, but it seems issues include:
- the cost of graphics cards will increase (ATI)
- existing graphics cards that otherwise would work with premium content may not
work because either they don't have the right drivers or they will be disabled
by Vista because they don't support the necessary content protection
functionality.
- hardware functionality has to change to comply with Microsoft's requirements,
some of which will have secret specifications, so it will be harder for Open
Source drivers to be written for that hardware.
- regardless of whether anything is happening on your computer or not, Vista monitors the hardware about 30 times per second to check if there is any content piracy going on. This is a system overhead.
Legal Considerations
The Scottish Society for Computers and the Law (Jan 2007) has released a paper called "Survival Guide to Microsoft Windows Vista Licensing". The paper points out:
" .. the terms of the Microsoft Windows Vista Licence contradict common terms of contracts found in some industries. The commercial lawyers present potentially had clients who should not use Windows Vista for legal reasons". They also note:
- Vista has the right in the licence to automatically disable the computer based
on Microsoft's belief of licence validity or opinion of installed software;
- The Vista licence restricts what
software a user may run when Vista is running under a virtual machine
- Every Vista computer is tracked:
- in space by explicit and implicit geographic data
- in time by explicit and implicit temporal data
- by software installed, both Vista and other applications
- by the licensing entity, whose identity is not disclosed
- when the user launches certain kinds of software for the first time
- in space by explicit and implicit geographic data
Office 2007
With the release of Vista came the release of Office 2007. Reviews quickly showed that this was a major change to Office. Gone were familiar items like menus and toolbars. In its place was the Ribbon (a central point for all commands). Also included were items such as the mini-toolbar, Themes (collections of colours, fonts and effects) and new XML file formats which are stored as zipped files to reduce file size. Should we buy this?
Both my son and I needed to substantially upgrade our "office" skills. Should we invest our training time in Office 2003, or jump straight to Office 2007? The reviews seemed to be significantly in favour of Office 200716. What I liked about it was that the changes were based on extensive usability testing with users in the real world. The decision seemed clear: make the jump to Office 2007, invest time in learning it thoroughly, and stay with that product for a long time. Then we hit a snag.
With document storage, as with many other things in information processing, there is a need for international standards. With a standard, regardless of how the document is prepared, or with which word processor, it is stored in a standard way, and can be retrieved at any time with any word processor that is standards compliant. The Open Document File Format (ODF) was developed by/through OASIS" and in May 2006 was ratified by ISO and IEC as international file format standard 263001.
The snag was: Office 2007 in its present form was not ODF compliant. There is a real irony in this: Word 2007 will allow documents to be stored in many ways: as a Word 2007 document or template; as a Web page; as RTF; as plain text, as a WordPerfect document etc. but not in ODF format. What were the consequences of this for me?
Some of my clients will use Microsoft Office and store their documents in Office format. Others, however, are considering or making moves to ODF as their standard. I could use Office 2007 when working with the first lot of clients, but not for the second. I would need an alternative word processor for them. Do I want to use two word processors in parallel? Absolutely not! So with Office 2007 I see a great product, but severely encumbered by its lack of ODF compliance. I would certainly urge Microsoft to add "Save as ODF" and "Use ODF as default" as options in Office 2007. This would swing us to buying the product.
Strategic Considerations
One of the questions that arose for us was: "Where is this all heading?" The Microsoft Annual Report 2006 provides an overview of the company's strategic directions19. Whilst stating that at the core they are a software company, Microsoft's new directions include moving strongly into Internet services (with Windows Live and Office Live) and a range of related areas including online advertising, digital communications, online gaming, entertainment and Internet TV. Other areas include new initiatives in high-performance computing, life sciences and manufacturing. This is a huge outgrowth from the original software business. Vista, apparently, is a platform to facilitate the movement of customers into some of these new directions. It is not clear to us what the impact of these new initiatives is likely to be on a daily basis. Moving to Vista, it seems, is not just about obtaining new software, but about obtaining a platform to move into some/all of these new directions.
Conclusion
The above are my findings based on a task of setting out to buy two notebook PCs. The conclusion we have reached with Vista is "Not Yet". Our notebooks will run on XP, and we would move to Office 2007 if Microsoft added ODF compliance.
Reprinted from the April 2007 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
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