I have been asked to write an article about the Windows Vista vs. XP issue for the German magazine Computerwoche. They translated an InfoWorld article by Randall C. Kennedy which is one of the best Vista bashing articles I’ve read so far. After reading it, I was attracted by the challenge to defend the Vista pro stance. I agree with some of Kennedy’s views, but quite a few of his claims distort the real picture, in my view.

His article addresses eight fields: Security, Manageability, Reliability, Usability, Performance, Hardware compatibility, Microsoft software compatibility, Third-party software compatibility, Developer tools support, and Future-proofing. Today, I will only cover the security aspect. In future posts I will blog about the other fields. Not all of them deserve a single post though.

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This is the second article in my series about the Vista v. Windows XP issue. In my last post I replied to an InfoWorld article by Randall C. Kennedy, who claimed that Vista did not really improve security. Today I will discuss Vista’s new capabilities regarding manageability. The text in italics summarizes Kennedy’s view.

Vista has a couple of features that improve its manageability, such as the ability to restrict access to external media devices, easy deployment of printer drivers and, most noteworthy, the image-based installation. However, myriad third-party tools also offer those features for Windows XP. That’s why moving to Vista provides little or no ROI from a systems management perspective.

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We have seen three rounds so far, and Vista clearly won two of them (Security, Manageability) with knock outs and lost the last one (Reliability) on points, mostly because the old champion XP just picked up lots of experience in its countless fights over the last 7 years. Let’s see if the old man can also outlast the young challenger when it comes to elasticity and smoothness. We are talking now about usability.

This is my summary of referee Kennedy’s judgment of the fourth round:

Aero’s changes are only superficial. Many settings were moved to other places which makes it difficult for XP veterans to find their way on Vista. Most modifications of the user interface were just made for the sake of change and didn’t improve usability. Some modifications are even a change for the worse. The “up a level button” in Explorer is missing, the Search field shows up much too often, and the backup tool doesn’t provide enough feedback about the success of backups.

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It is time for the next round of the Vista vs. XP match. In my view, Vista won the first two rounds (Security and Manageability) by knocking out XP within the first few seconds. If this were a boxing match, XP would have been counted out already. But because we are fair sportsmen, let’s give the old champion another chance to regain its title. As before, the text in italics summarizes Kennedy’s arguments.

With Vista, Microsoft introduced some enhancements under the hood that improve reliability. Examples include improved heap management, power management and support for low priority I/O tasks. During day-to-day operations, however, these new features don’t have much impact (expect low I/O priority). When it comes to stability, Windows XP SP2 has proven to be rock solid, and SP3 might even improve the situation. Vista has little room to score in this area.

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Today, I can just quote Kennedy because he expressed the essence of his stance in just two sentences:

Windows Vista is a bloated pig of an operating system. In fact, compared to Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or 3, Vista requires roughly twice the hardware resources to deliver comparable performance.

He knows what he is talking about, because he ran numerous performance tests. I have been discussing some comparable performance tests before, and I don’t want to go into this again, since I think that they are rather pointless.

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Compatibility has been Vista’s weakest point since its release. Hardware compatibility was even more problematic than software compatibility, because Microsoft mostly depends on third-parties here. The fact that they have changed the driver model will pay off in the long run, but if you have to decide now whether to deploy Vista or not, this doesn’t help much if you can’t find device drivers. Kennedy boiled it down into two sentences:

When’s the last time you worried about driver support under Windows XP? With an installed base into the hundreds of millions, chances are you’ll still be finding XP drivers long after Vista’s grandchildren are being put out to pasture.

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Kennedy dedicated three rounds for this topic, one for Microsoft software compatibility, one for third-party software compatibility, and one for developer tool support. I’ll cover all three topics in one post. Let’s see first what Kennedy said about Microsoft software compatibility:

And as I just noted, the current version of Office – Microsoft Office System 2007 – runs great on Windows XP.

What about future versions? There’s no doubt that, eventually, Microsoft may try to target Vista exclusively. However, finding features and functions that Vista supports and XP doesn’t is not as easy as it sounds. Remember, much of Vista’s “newness” is only skin deep.

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In his last post, Kennedy discusses an interesting point that no other Vista bashing article has addressed so far. He voices a fear that is probably shared by most IT Pros who have decided against Vista. They might not be aware of it, but it is nagging unconsciously under the surface: Will I be left behind if I skip Vista? Is there something essential I missed about Vista?

Kennedy tries to ease the mind of the worried IT pro:

If ever there were an opportunity to skip a Windows upgrade cycle, the XP-to-Vista transition is it. XP may be showing its age, but its age is mainly skin deep: The new challenger is flashy, but also slower and heavier, and it lacks a killer combination of compelling features needed to unseat XP.

At the end of the decade, when Microsoft’s executives look back at the debacle that was Windows Vista, they’ll see that simply slapping a fresh coat of paint on an otherwise aging Windows architecture wasn’t enough to fool anybody.

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