Exploration

Initial take on Vista October 20, 2006

I used Vista for about 2 weeks and found nothing especially compelling about it. The aero interface is pretty, but the rose fell off the stem for me in the first week. Instead, I kept thinking, “Look at my high memory usage for dwm.exe. Grr! What a waste!”. I found several dialogs to be confusing as well. This could simply be because I’m used to the XP style, and have to adjust as I did in moving from Win2000 to XP, but it still annoyed me.

Ok, so Vista, DX10, and future versions of .NET help bring the potential of 3D user interfaces to the masses. If future versions of Vista can somehow make better use of multi-cores to speed this experience and compelling implementations actually come out for it, then my ears will perk up. Perhaps MS Expression Suite and Cider in VS.NET Orcas will ring in such an era, but it’s really gonna take time for people to wrap their minds, and personal likes and dislikes around this sort of change.

One unavoidable fact remains, OEM’s will clamor to stuff Vista on their latest and greatest PC’s and Notebooks in hopes of a jolt in sales. This in turn will mean some of us ISV’s will have no choice but to start using it because our customers will inevitably buy Vista PC’s and we better well know if our products are compatible or not and what to do if they are not.

Sigh, the older I get, the less I embrace change for changes sake. Loved it when I was younger with time to burn, but nowadays I seem to appreciate more what simply works and gets the job done. XP does practically everything my customers and I need it do, must I support yet another flavor of windows?

The answer of course is yes, so I will prepare myself to be assimiliated. 🙂  Hah, no really, I might as well embrace it and leverage it the best way I know how for my company.   Expression Suite here I come. 🙂