The final public test version of Windows Vista has been released. Release Candidate 2 is available for X86 and X64 clients on the Microsoft Connect site. Vista is expected to RTM on schedule next month. It will be available for general consumption in January.
From talking to clients, reading the press and reading chat forums, my gut is telling me this release could be a bit of a damp squib. I wouldn’t rush out and buy any MS stocks right now. In fact, I expect the reception to be quite negative in the technical community once the marketing types have moved onto other shiny new things.
RC1 should have been pretty close to what the curstomer can expect once it hits the shelves. If so, things could be bad:
- There are many problems not only with 3rd party applications, but I’m hearing there’s problems with MS applications too.
- I’m reading that there has not been consistant improvements in performance. Early betas sucked the life from any PC they were installed on. Things got better, then worse, then better, then worse. Who knows what to expect now.
- UAC is proving to be quite controversial. Many are turning it off straight away.
- The activation process for Volume License editions is not popular at all. In fact, it’ll probably hurt if not almost kill VLK sales of the OS. There will be no advantage to buying VLK editions any more.
- Windows Vista Enterprise is only available to those who buy a VLK edition with software assurance. SA will only be bought by those who are deploying a new OS withing 3 years of a major release and who plan to upgrade again then. I’m sorry MS, R2 releases are not a justification for SA.
- I was keen to see BitLocker. But now I’m hearing you need to prepaare a custom build for machines that will be encrypted with BitLocker including a special 1.5 GB partition for BitLocker itself.
I don’t have any problem with the stuff MS is doing with the Kernal that Symantec and McAfee and whinging about. I also must temper the above points by saying I was skeptical of Windows 2000 and many on the net thought it would bring about the end of the world.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see.