Zdnet has an article titled Gartner: Ignore Vista until 2008. It was an interesting read in the sense it made me write after a long hiatus. It talks about Vista being evolutionarily better that XP. Very little was mentioned about the features that are coming in Vista and how they might or might not be useful to customers. Also, nowhere in the article I could any special importance to the year 2008 – how did they come up with that date? The article also downplays the security features in Vista, which was most surprising given the fact that it is one of the most critical issues for end-users and enterprise customers alike.

So based on my dogfooding experience with Vista and watching a bunch of channel 9 videos, here is my short laundry list for why NOT to wait till 2008

  1. Security – One can never have enough (unless it hampers usability, of course) especially in today’s world of Viruses, Worms, Trojans, Malware, Phishing and SPAM. In Vista, an extra-ordinary focus has been given to security. Improvements around reducing attack surfaces, threat modeling, User account protection (UAP, also known as LUA) – (and much more) have gone into making existing features a lot more secure. But there is a more – new firewall, Windows defender, low-rights IE, enhanced smartcard support for winlogon, Full volume encryption, improved EFS , support for stronger crypto algorithms, support for federated identities using Infocards, new authorization manager (AzMan).
  2. User experience – Glass (it looks swell), desktop gadgets and sidebar (for the gadget freaks like me), WMP 11 with a very clean UI and amazing library support, support for auxiliary displays, Media Center (this has to be seen, words don’t do enough justice), etc.
  3. Information organization and retrieval - Search (much faster and granular than what MSN and other DS offer), virtual folders, integrated RSS, improve file metadata, etc. Search is critical because it is not just a feature. It is ingrained in the whole Vista shell experience. So its there in the start menu, in control panel, in windows explorer, in IE.
  4. Performance - improved network and audio stack. Support for USB device to increase virtual memory (this is a killer feature given the fact that USB 2.0 drives are so cheap)
  5. New application platform - Winfx, Avalon, Indigo, Metro (and XPS) - PDC2005 for tons and tons of developer-related info
  6. Games – 3D chess looks delicious but again it is the work in the gaming platform that’s more importantly. Xbox 360 will rock the console world (its launching on my birthday, so you guys know what i want as a gift :-) ) but Vista will have a lot in store for gaming on Windows
  7. IE7 - if you have got your hands on the CTP builds, you will know how vastly different this is from IE6 – quick tabs, RSS, improved printing, standards support. Check out IE Blog for more

And this is just what I could come up within 15 minutes and that too amongst the things that’s already out (almost all of the above can be experienced in the CTP builds we have). There is so much more that I don’t know of (I am a mere PM working on RMS) that’s yet to come. http://channel9.msdn.com has bunch of demos for most of the above. Scoble is doing a fantastic job of running around getting product teams to talk about what they are building and why.

Let me know what you guys think

Mayur

P.S. the usual disclaimer applies – opinions expressed are mine and not representative of my employer. No rights conferred. No guarantees.