Vista's replacement first sightings

Today I am doing house-keeping, that is catching up on my expenses, sorting out my calendar, and generally doing all the stuff that you never get time to do. The big advantage of working from home is that you know what you must produce; you know how long you are allocated for that, so you can arrange your work accordingly.

New Microsoft Operating System

The first public news on Microsoft 7, as it is code named, was revealed on youtube. The replacement for Vista, which had very little new and compelling features, hence the slow up-take in the market, appears to be moving towards the Apple iPhone concept of touch screen, voice commands and jesters. However, Microsoft have been very secretive on this and very few people have been party to what they are thinking, but they need to get their skates on as the rumours suggest that it is due for release in the 2009/10 time frame.

Whatever, Microsoft 7 looks like the one thing it must do is provide the customer with the features that they want and do not yet know, they want and already know, and what they will need to compete in business successfully in the next five years. Therefore, it should be more like Server 2008, built to make out lives easier and increase productivity, security and collaboration.

What is Microsoft doing on the desktop

Another day working from home, today I am investigating ITIL v3.0 upgrade options for a customer who has FrontRange technologies deployed. I suspect this will take most of the day as the information will need to be collected and then combined in a written response. I much prefer to perform these subscriber enquires by doing a telephone call, as the question asked is not always exactly what they want answered.

SIMtone, have sent me a trial of their Virtual PC beta software to test, the only problem being the device has a US plug, so I need to buy a US to UK convertor first, as my convertors are all the other way, for obvious reasons. So any spare time will be spent setting that up.

Windows XP Service Pack 3

Windows Vista has received a bad press from the media and us analysts alike, the truth is that the number of deployments is increasing slowly, in-line with that of XP when it was launched. However, Microsoft by releasing XP SP3 are sending a very confusing message; on the one hand if SP3 was just bug fixes and security updates, then no body would argue, but by including NAP (Network Access Protection) in the release they are adding new functionality to a product they want people to migrate from.

The launch of Windows Server 2008 I believe will be the catalyst for Windows Vista migrations to accelerate in the corporate world: as Server 2008 and Vista are the same code base, and they have been designed so that deploying Server 2008 will make managing the desktop Vista client much easier. This I believe will be the big driver for organisations when they consider upgrading their server operating systems, which combining the desktop as well can yield management savings. However, only time will tell, but I for one am not writing Vista off just yet, although I am still on XP for all my work and home PCs.