KEY POINTS:
A first birthday party is usually cause for celebration. It means you're out of the woods, infancy hasn't claimed you. You'll soon be walking and talking and making less of a mess for everyone else to clean up.
So what then of Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system? It turned one last Wednesday. The software, five years in the making before its January 30 launch last year, has racked up a hundred million sales and according to research group IDC is shipping with 74 per cent of new PCs sold in New Zealand.
You'd think then there'd be reason for some anniversary bash, even a press release from Microsoft marking the occasion. Nope, there was nothing. The only people reflecting on a year of Windows Vista are journalists and a lot of them seem to think Vista may still succumb to cot death.
Take technology publication Infoworld for example. It has started a petition for XP, which will be discontinued from the middle of the year, to be kept alive. Some, 72,000 people have signed it.
I'm struggling to think of a technology platform that has been so widely pilloried, one where people are fighting to stay on the aging platform - Windows XP, rather than get the shiny new version. In the age of automatic updates and beta versions of software coming thick and fast, there's something wrong with that picture.
I've heard the whole gamut of stories about Vista - the good, the bad and the ugly. My first experience with the operating system started well then went very ugly thanks to a lack of early availability of compatible software drivers.
My second experience involved my friend's computer. I went to Dick Smith to try and buy a shrink-wrapped copy of Windows XP recently to replace the copy of Vista that wasn't working properly on her underpowered PC. I couldn't buy it. The Dick Smith salesman advised me to look for a copy of Trade Me as the electronics chain isn't selling XP any more except with computers.
My third experience involved a gruntier computer and a copy of Vista Business. There have been a few hiccups and a few Vista features I thought I'd like - the Aero interface for instance, haven't entered my daily use. But it is better than XP. I'm not going back.
I just wish there was more to Vista a year on. Where are all the third-party software applications written specifically for Windows Vista?
What about all this innovative integration between desktop software and internet services Microsoft trumpeted? Are widgets and Windows Live the sum of it?
While Vista uptake with new PCs is high, that's not a very good measure of an operating system's success.
A better measure perhaps is to look at the more conservative business sector - companies only change when they're sure an upgrade won't disrupt business. Microsoft claims four per cent of enterprise Windows in New Zealand have taken up Vista, seven per cent in the middle market.
By mid-year it is aiming for 6.5 per cent of medium and large-sized customers to be using Vista. Even Vista's critics agree on one thing - Vista has better security features than XP. That's driven the first wave of upgrades in the business community, says David Rayner, Microsoft's Windows client marketing manager.
"It's the security side around notebooks. They look at Vista for the Bitlocker technology and for group policy management."
He admits the incentive to upgrade for consumers and small business is not as apparent.
"We need to do a better job of articulating the value for small businesses and consumers," he says.
"It's a shame Vista has got some of the press it's got. I don't think XP is good enough. Vista does a lot more."
It may well do, but even some of Vista's consumer-friendly built-in features, like Media Center, which lets you easily store, view and play all your videos, photos and music, haven't been pushed by Microsoft as it has spent the last year with the hatches firmly battened down. The software giant is fighting to restore faith in its core product before it starts talking about everything it can do.
A big patch to fix Vista bugs, service pack 1, will be released some time in the next couple of months, though it won't have the soothing affect the second service pack issued to fix XP did.
"It isn't new features. It is really freaky things like fixing performance issues and improving reliability," says David Rayner, Microsoft's Windows client marketing manager.
Many people will have received much of what service pack 1 has to offer by then anyway as much of it is bundled into Vista's automatic updates. I've received 53 of those since I bought my laptop in October.
Year two will only bring more hard slog for Microsoft, especially as Apple's rival Leopard operating system is introduced to a new wave of Mac owners and Google and Yahoo try to make the operating system irrelevant by doing everything online.
By mid year XP will likely be put to bed forever which gives Microsoft precious little time to prove to the signees of that Infoworld petition and the world in general that we are better off with Vista anyway.
