Vista a year later: Why IT clung to the status quo

It didn't feel like anyone was really rooting for Vista last year. Seldom has
a product been launched with such low expectations from industry observers --
expectations that in some respects had little to do with the vendor or even
the product itself.

On this, Vista's anniversary, the occasion feels less like a cause for celebration
but a ritual in self-righteousness on the part of those who want to prove how
astute they were. I'm not going to bother, because Vista's prospects weren't
that difficult to forecast. It's a crappy market for upgrades, especially operating
systems. Companies are cheap. XP is still doing a decent job. Instead, why not
explore an alternate scenario: What if Vista had taken the enterprise market
by storm?

The most basic outcome: corporate networks would probably be safer and better
managed than they are right now. These, and not the fancy-dancy UI stuff, were
the important feature sets Microsoft incorporated into the product. Would Vista
have helped stave off the rampant Storm worm? Maybe not, but it might have gotten
in its way a little, and that would have saved many firms a lot of pain. The
management features, meanwhile, sounded like a laundry list of what you would
assume most IT managers are asking for: Remote Assistance to deal with out-of-office
workers, a Performance console to speed up troubleshooting and a completely
rewritten Even Viewer to be more proactive about problems. You can't keep whining
about how bad Microsoft's software is if you don't give this kind of update
a chance.

Vista adoption would have forced a lot of companies to invest in new desktop
hardware, which might have led some users to explore the advancements PC and
component makers have been making lately. Home users have already started to
experience the power of hyperthreaded applications from the more recent Intel
processors, for example, but businesses have been slow to investigate whether
they might have processes that could benefit from improved performance at the
client level. Instead they invest in more expensive software and wonder why
everyone seems to be working at the same pace they always have.

It should be noted that Microsoft not only hoped for customers to embrace Vista
but a combination of the OS, the latest Office and the latest Exchange. If that
had happened, a lot more companies might be better prepared to move to unified
communications, content management and integration of user applications with
business intelligence and other advanced IT tools. Instead, they'll probably
try to adopt the advanced IT tools and realize they neglected to lay the desktop
computing foundation for such projects.

Vista's supposed failure did not come at a great gain of any competitor, be
it the Mac OS or any viable desktop Linux, including Novell's Suse. For all
the hyperbole, enterprises did not move en masse from a desktop OS environment
to the kind of purely online application environment which Google and others
have been promoting. Vista's biggest enemy was the status quo. And the status
quo, through the media, analysts and even a lot of customers, got nearly as
much marketing support as Microsoft gave Vista.