The Vista train is coming

As everyone who reads ZDNet blogs already knows, Vista has gone gold. Hallelujah, Hallelujah.

I'm curious to see what happens next. I look at Vista and I see stacks of programmer advantages, but then again, I have a bizarre point of view…I'm a programmer. Granted, many of these advantages extend to other platforms, at least those to which .NET 3.0 have been ported (currently, Windows XP and Windows 2003).

They don't get all the performance, however, of Windows Vista. Furthermore, they don't get all the consumer benefits that Ed Bott has made me aware of over the months leading up to Vista's release.

I'm curious to see, however, if my prediction from November, 2003, shortly after my trip to the 2003 PDC in Los Angeles, holds true. Quoting from that article:

In closing, I offer a warning to fans of other operating systems. If history is any guide, much effort will be expended trying to downplay the importance of Longhorn, if not suggest that no one will, in fact, buy the product. Besides the fact that history seems to counter such naysayers (.NET is popular, as is PocketPC, XBox, SQL Server, Windows XP and the various components of Office), it provides a rationale for a lot of people to do nothing to respond.

Consumers don’t tend to be privy to the ideological warfare that shapes so much of the dialogue between programmers in the various programming domains, and are thus unlikely to be swayed by such arguments. Mark my words, Longhorn will be immensely popular once it is released, because Longhorn is revolutionary technology that makes desktop computing better.

Proper competition demands that you reject the comforting fantasy that Microsoft never does anything right, and deal with the reality of what their technology offers consumers. So, as a final point (in the "sharp stick in the backside" sense), it’s time to start learning from Longhorn so as to plan an adequate response to it.

How big a deal is Vista going to be? Granted, most people buying new computers will certainly get Vista (which speaks more to the popularity of Microsoft operating systems than to the inability to provide systems that run other platforms), but is it going to put a serious crimp in other platform's growth prospects? Do you think other platforms are ready for the arrival of Vista?

I am glad, however, that Microsoft managed to navigate the antitrust minefield and prevented regulators from removing features from Windows (let's face it, Microsoft does that just fine on its own, witness my description in my Nov, 2003 article of the cool new WinFS system…now removed).

At the core, that is pretty much all Microsoft was fighting about in its decision to contest the DOJ's antitrust charges rather than just knuckle under to government demands and remove IE from Windows. Think about it. Imagine you were writing an application and were told you couldn't include a media format (as an example) of your own creation. I'm pretty sure it would annoy an open source programmer just as much as it did Gates.

Yes, antitrust invites whole new levels of scrutiny, and I do see value in enforcing interoperability (e.g. protocol documentation, tools to enable customers to choose non-Microsoft handlers for functions like web browsing or search), but there is a red line being crossed when government starts to make fundamental design decisions (such as whether an operating system can assume the presence of HTML rendering functionality that conforms to certain interfaces and is predictable in a way only home-grown and home-tested code can be), and that's not a line beyond which consumers should ever want governments to pass. Just ask the ex-Soviets.

Vista has run the gauntlet and will now emerge as an intact product designed by the people who are supposed to design it…which is Microsoft. We now get to see whether consumers like what they see (versus what government regulators think they are supposed to want to see).

That's the way markets are supposed to work.

John Carroll has delivered his opinion on ZDNet since the last millennium. Since May 2005, he's been a Microsoft employee.