After what seems to be an eternity, Microsoft is about to
put its next operating system out for beta.
Perhaps I am becoming jaded but the operating system releases from
Microsoft over the years have been more of a relieving of pain from the last
one, rather than excitement over new features.
In this preview: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1840730,00.asp you will see that Microsoft has gotten a
clue from Unix/Linux and users will no longer run under accounts with
administrator privileges. Additionally,
they are introducing tabbed browsing in IE 7, another take from an existing product
(Firefox for one). Obviously there are more
changes than these so you need to take a look.
Why do I say need?
Well despite statements like this from the article linked above,
It’s too
early to see how Vista measures up against competitive operating systems, but a
lot of the more visible features are familiar. Apple’s Mac OS X
“Tiger” already has many 3D visual effects and a search interface,
Spotlight. Unix has had usable limited-rights accounts for years. But Vista’s
biggest competitor probably isn’t any of theseit’s previous versions of
Windows. Microsoft needs to make these features more mainstream and make them
attractive to developers, while still retaining compatibility with previous
versions.
– we all know that
there is really no competition for the OS and your enterprise licensing
agreement will help make sure you make the transition to the OS when it comes
out.
Actually, there is competition, but it takes a lot of courage to switch an organization to a
new OS. I believe it can be done and
Ill share my thoughts on how in the near future.
Keep up with the issues and challenges that uniquely affect
public-sector IT with TechRepublic’s free Government IT newsletter,
delivered each Tuesday. Automatically sign up today!
