Vista. WOW?

Vista. The WOW starts now. Stunning. Entertaining. Dependable. Worth the wait.

These are some of the headlines I saw in my junk-mail catalogues this week. When Windows Vista is 5 years late, has only half of it's planned features and costs more than any version ever sold, all people can say is WOW? This is certainly an example of Microsoft's strong marketing position. They create a new product, and BOOM!: even though the product is at a lower grade than many of the alternatives, it takes off in the market place. Of course, the shops also make a profit out of selling Windows Vista, so they will want to promote it simply for the sake of it's income.

But is Vista really worth the wait? I don't think so. One of the main things Vista is promoted for is better security, but quite a few zero-day exploits have already been found, including a fundamental flaw in the speech-recognition technology. Another much-touted feature is the better graphics: Aero, vector-based icons, etc. But no reasonably priced computer now days can actually run Aero smoothly; you need to pay $2000+ for a good Vista experience!

And then there are games. According to independent testing, Vista actually runs games slower then XP. That means that Vista really isn't a good option for your PC at the moment unless you're willing to fork out thousands of dollars upgrading your system

So Vista isn't that good after all. But I bet that lot's of people will get it anyway. The uninformed buyer will have it recommended to them by the salesman, a new computer will come with Vista pre-installed, and a lot of people will get it just for the graphics.

Overall, I believe Vista will be a success. Even though the competition is better than it in many ways (linux & mac also run on current systems well), Windows is simply the operating system that everyone uses. Vista is certainly better than XP, and this is the reason that I think most people will upgrade for.