The Vista bashing campaign continues, so I can’t help myself and blog about it again. Computerworld presents new data from Forrester with an article entitled “Forrester survey: Enterprises reject Vista like ‘new Coke‘”. I will write about the same data in this post, but as you might have noticed, I used a slightly different heading. After you have read my version of the story, you will have to acknowledge that sometimes reality is a matter of perspective.

The hard facts of the Forrester survey are that 8.8% of 50,000 enterprise users are running Windows Vista on their PCs and 87.1% Windows XP. Now, I am asking where is the connection to sugar water? Did those 87.1% decide to stay with XP because Vista didn’t taste sweet enough? Or do these enterprise users just use the Windows version that their IT departments installed on their PCs?

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During research for my series on Vista vs. Windows XP, I stumbled across an article at ChanelWeb that claimed that according to Gartner, the adoption of Vista by businesses is in line with that of XP at a comparable juncture after its release. As I will also publish an article at Computerwoche on this topic, I wanted to be sure if this surprising data really is correct. So I contacted Gartner and they were kind enough to mail me their latest numbers. This data does not exactly match with that of the ChannelWeb article, but it allows us to draw the same conclusion: the adoption rate of Windows Vista is indeed comparable to that of Windows XP after its release.

Here are the numbers I received from Gartner:
PC Installed Base by Operating System, Worldwide

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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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When I started reading my RSS feeds this morning, one of the first headings that caught my attention was this one: “Microsoft lies about Vista being the most secure Windows ever”. Since it is from a Vista blog that usually has good stuff, I clicked into it. After reading about the meaningless data that is supposed to support the claim of the heading, I just thought, okay, good job, you lured me to click on this. Very funny, really! Then I moved ahead and was quite surprised how many news sites took the same bait. So my second thought was that I am missing something here.

So what is behind all this? The source of this new Vista bashing campaign is Simon Clausen, CEO of PC Tools, a security vendor. This is how InformationWeek cites him:

Ironically, the new operating system has been hailed by Microsoft as the most secure version of Windows to date. However, recent research conducted with statistics from over 1.4 million computers within the ThreatFire community has shown that Windows Vista is more susceptible to malware than the eight year old Windows 2000 operating system, and only 37% more secure than Windows XP.

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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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Paul Thurrott published a new review about Vista SP1. I covered many of the things he said in several posts here on 4sysops. But his article gives a good overview about the changes in Vista SP1. Actually, it is more of an assessment where Vista stands today. It might be of help for those who are hesitant to deploy Vista or not.

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Todd Bishop hosts the birthday party. He invited a couple of interesting people, not all of them came to wish a happy birthday. This post just contains my favorite snatches of conversation I picked up at the party.

The consumer version of Windows Vista was released exactly one year ago, that is on January 30, 2007. Volume license customers were able to get it two months earlier. At that time, I wondered why Microsoft missed the Christmas sales. Considering how long it took until the first Vista computers showed up in the shops, this move was not too bad with hindsight. It seems as if Microsoft already knew that it would be a long way to go for Vista. Nobody believed that adoption would still be a topic on Vista’s first birthday.

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Considering the bad and often unfair press that Vista got during the last months, it must surprise many that Microsoft reports the fastest revenue growth in any first quarter since 1999. 88 million Vista copies have been sold by now. That’s more or less the population of Germany. Since many have been waiting to upgrade, mostly because of the bad press, I would expect that it won’t be the last record that Microsoft will set in the near future.

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12,000 private testers received Vista SP1. Although there is much stir in the blogosphere and on the news sites about it, I must admit it isn’t really that exciting since there are no revolutionary new features. More interesting is an interview at Channel9 with Mike Nash, corporate vice president in charge of Windows client operating systems product management. His interviewer, who is also a Microsoft employee, was cheeky enough to ask if Vista is a failure.

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I just read in the German print magazine IT Administrator (08/2007, p. 12-13) that Vista heats-up hard disks more than XP does. Hard disks in idle mode have a five to seven degree Celsius higher temperature and hard disks in operation are seven to nine degrees warmer than under XP. The hard disk’s temperature can get ten degrees higher than the vendors’ specifications allow. This could cause hard disk failures eight times more frequent than with XP.

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