In consumer electronics, the most complicated endeavor of mankind is a PC operating system. With 40-60 million lines of code and deeply nested routines, it it all but impossible for lay people to assess an OS based on anything but an intuitive feel. Itis like sizing up a date gone bad.
Or understanding Halis motivations in 2001: A Space Odyssey
There is a lot we donit know about human behavior and why people do the things they do. The best we can hope for, at a lay level, is to create a set of values and assumptions, based on the culture, and apply them to the creepy or laudable behavior we see in others.
Those Who Really Know
An operating system is like that. There are so many layers that hardly anyone sees an OS is the same light as another.
However, there are two classes of people who can provide valuable insights: professional IT managers who maintain hundreds (or thousands) of installations and computer science experts who can spend weeks and weeks with an OS and probe it with forensic tools.
IT Managers have the dubious distinction of, on a daily basis, looking at:
- Application compatibility — Do our old apps run reliably with a candidate new OS?
- Driver compatibility — Do our peripherals, printers, other hardware items used in our business work with the new OS?
- Network compatibility — Can the candidate OS operate on our network in accordance with our standards and continue to allow us to monitor activity, install updates that are compatible and backup user data?
- Security — Can we use tools weire accustomed to to obtain visibility into the state of the desktops, manage them, keep users out of trouble and report on anomalies?
Testing all these items for a corporate rollout takes at least a year, which is why itis taken so long for Vista
to gain a foothold in corporate America. But when itis all said and done, these weary IT managers know a awful lot about a new OS in their environment.
IT managers donit like surprises.
The consensus, from my readings since Vista launched, is that Vista has been a headache in many ways because of the changes Microsoft had to make to Vista to improve its fundamental security. Vista may have been the biggest mistake ever made by Microsoft, according to the people whoive had to deal with it every day. However, any OS due to its complexity, has these kinds of rollout problems, including Linux and Mac OS X. The rest of us just pick up on tidbits and make popcorn while we watch.
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