RSSVista to sink or swim?
With the June 30 demise of Windows XP rapidly approaching, there is a lot of speculation among those of us who are paid to speculate on what will happen to those hold-outs who have been demanding that XP be granted a stay of execution, and what fate will befall Vista considering its marked unpopularity in the marketplace. I will now add my two cents worth.
Nothing spectacular will happen in any regard. XP will not be resurrected, no guerrilla campaign or mass civil disobedience will cause it to continue to circulate from pirated copies, Vista will be the chosen successor in most Windows shops and no migration to other operating systems will occur. Neither, in the great majority of cases, will businesses skip Vista and place their bets on Windows 7, as I have been somewhat diffidently urging.
Although I share Larry Dignan's befuddlement at the reasons people and businesses continue to allow Microsoft to dictate the terms of use of their own computer systems, there is an inertia to the system which is not going to be swayed by a single mis-step in the process, or even repeated affronts. The signs which are being read, hopefully in some cases, to indicate a general dis-satisfaction with Vista and a slow abandonment are generally overblown; the much cited Evans group report on lack of Vista development is being badly misinterpreted as showing a lack of developer support for the platform, but every Windows program in development today will work on Vista, and those developers and their users aren't going anywhere else soon.
I think, however, that there will be some long-term effects from the Vista debacle. While there are no doubt some enterprises which will hold on with XP until 7 is out, or until they transition to another platform, they will be the exception. More, however, are at a point where they cannot break out of the cycle currently, but are having their eyes opened to their own entrapment inside it, and quite possibly being forced to consider the costs and benefits of such a system just when the attractive alternative of SaaS and cloud computing are coming into their own. In fact, there could not be a worse moment for Microsoft to have committed the sin of Vista, not because Vista will pay, but because future Windows versions will. Switching a platform inside of a year (which is about the timeframe we would have to be talking about for any business looking to shed Windows after Vista's crapulence was revealed but before XP's demise) is an aggressive step in the IT world, one not many CIOs could be comfortable with. But now they're considering it; and when 7 comes out, with the alternatives that much stronger, they'll be much more likely to diverge from the Microsoft Way than they are now.
Another trend to throw in the mix here is virtualization. Companies are starting to want to reduce the number of physical machines not only in the server room, but on employees desks as well. Why run Windows XP natively on your hardware when you can virtualize it under Linux or Mac OS?
As services and software virtualizes to the web, the underlying OS you run on your machine almost doesn’t matter. For those applications that require a particular version of Windows, they can simply be virtualized and be reasonably secure, even if Microsoft never updates Windows XP again.
Virtualization is indeed a strong factor which may reduce the Windows hold on the desktop in the future… you’re right, I should have thought of that as well. I see application virtualization as the real avenue for this, however, and it’s still in its infancy. Traditional, full-OS virtualization has many benefits, but most shops running Windows desktops will see little sense in replacing those with a ‘foreign’ OS just so they can keep doing what they have been doing in VMs. If they adopt VM desktops for other reasons (which is not much of a trend at present) then it will certainly enable them to move to other OSs on the desktop that much more easily in the future, however.