When bloggers judge Vista

Today I stumbled upon an interesting summary over at Cnet covering blogger comments on Vista "readiness" as is. Their general argument is that people would rather see the next OS done right even if it meant further delays. For what its worth I do agree with taking time as opposed to "crunching" it and before I say what I am about to say I think it's rather foolish to accept comments from "bloggers" as an indication when the release should happen. The only guys that should/could comment on that are the actual Vista developers. You will not hear from them though, they are in a bunker writing code trying to ship the product.  So those are my disclaimers before I say what I am about to say.

As an IT Pro I see little value in Vista over XP. My customers having seen it on my laptop percieve even less. The common question is: "But we do not have to upgrade to it, right?" That is not a pretty question you want to answer if your business relies on people constantly upgrading their computers. For the first time in.. well, ever, what we have just may be good enough and dare I say it "time tested and proven"; XP SP2 is a solid beast, I go weeks without rebooting my main workstation and even then its just for patches.

So will Microsoft take the blogger advice? Sincerely doubt that because they seem to be getting squeezed from all sides. Macintosh is taking back share, now at over 10%. Linux Desktop seems to be gaining ground, not just hot air, and people are actually installing it. Google is becoming a near defacto leader for the web applications but live.com is closing the gap. Make no mistake, Microsoft makes money on Windows, Servers and Office. All the other money-losing ventures are there to diversify the company and allow it to lead in other segments. It is a big, long term bet.

Will Microsoft ever catch up to Google? Can Microsoft compete in media applications with iTunes/Ipod? Will live.com be anything more than failed bcentral.com? Will Vista at its most basic be more compelling than Free/OSS? Will, or rather, when will people open up their pockets for a service instead of software?

The faster Vista can come out, the faster Microsoft will have an answer to the questions above.