At long last, Windows Vista, the first new operating system from Microsoft Corp. in five years, arrives on store shelves and in new computers Tuesday.
Vista comes with high expectations and generally positive reviews. Microsoft boasts that it has managed to tighten security, increase parental controls, make media — from photos to videos to songs to cable television — easier to use and share, and linked everything even more tightly to the Internet.
Concurrent with Vista is a revamp of Microsoft’s other signature product, Microsoft Office, the set of software that includes Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. Office gets a radical overhaul as well, and many people will need hours of training to get used to the upgraded software in Office 2007.
The two products represent “the biggest launch we’ve had in the history of the company,” said Justin Hutchinson, group product manager for Microsoft’s Windows Vista team.
Hutchinson positively gushes over many of the system’s features. Key features include:
Security: “Vista is safer and more secure,” he said. “It is the safest and most secure version of Windows we’ve shipped.”
Search: “It’s just easier to find stuff” on Vista, he said. Instead of hunting through folders, “I no longer open that stuff up. I type in a search term and Vista searches across files and applications.”
Parental controls: “I can control how often my kid uses the PC. If I choose to, I can monitor where he goes and what he does. I can set hours where he can log on and where he can’t log on. I can tell him to visit only certain Web sites.”
Gaming: Vista will feature improved graphics that will make PC gaming comparable to console games, and for the first time, PC gamers will be able to compete against console players in the same game when they’re using Microsoft’s new Xbox 360.
The new platform does a better job of organizing and opening games, helping players to get going faster. The system also includes DirectX 10, a software interface that improves the cooperation between a computer’s graphics card and the central processing unit. That, in turn, creates more vivid visuals — everything from more intricate terrains, textures and shadows to more objects and sophisticated animation.
Media: With Vista, Microsoft recognizes that people want to move photos, music and video files from their PC to other devices, including televisions and home entertainment systems. “We just make it easier to do all the big things people want to do in their home,” Hutchinson said.
In addition, with a new feature called Windows Aero, Vista puts a more beautiful face on computing. Users can put “gadgets” like photos, a clock or news feeds right on their desktop and can easily navigate between programs. “It’s going to change how millions and millions of people use the PC and how they play,” Hutchinson said.
These changes didn’t come cheaply. Hutchinson said 5 million beta testers put in close to 60 years’ worth of hours before the product’s release.
Experts are now debating how soon consumers should buy Vista, with some saying it’s a marked improvement and ready to go, while others advise waiting. Still others advise skipping it altogether and going with a computer from rival Apple Inc. instead. Consensus has emerged, however, that people who do buy it will be better off getting it preinstalled on a new PC rather than trying to upgrade a Windows XP machine. Installing a new operating system can be a major headache.
“If you do it on an existing PC, you have to be careful,” said Michael Silver, vice president of research at market research firm Gartner Inc. “Will all of your applications run? Will all of your devices work? Do you have enough horsepower to run Vista and get the benefit of the new user interface?”
Vista’s most basic upgrade will sell for $99.95, although the home premium version will sell as an upgrade for $159. The two versions, when sold with new PCs, will go for $199 and $239, respectively, and business versions start at $199 for an upgrade and go up to $399 for the “ultimate” edition.
An upgrade, said Denny Arar, a senior editor at PC World magazine, “can be expensive. It can be problematic. … If there’s a new computer in your future, wait for that.”
While a new PC with Vista could cost as little as $599, high-end users may find it worth their while to pay as much as $4,000 or more for PCs with four processors, 30-inch monitors and high-definition capabilities, said Patrick Moorhead, vice president of advanced marketing for Advanced Micro Devices, which is making chips for Vista machines. (Intel Corp., long Microsoft’s partner, is also powering Vista PCs.)
Moorhead advised people to buy PCs with at least dual-core processors and get an ATI or Nvidia graphics card installed to take advantage of all that Vista offers. “The better the hardware you get, the better the experience you’ll have,” he said.
Some critics say that the headaches and costs are not worth it, at least in the short run. “It remains to me an uncompelling product,” said Christopher Null of San Francisco, who writes the Working Guy blog on Yahoo Tech at tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null. “It’s got pretty bells and whistles and new features, but for the average user, it’s not something to spend money on. Not today.”
Among Null’s major complaints are that Microsoft’s increased emphasis on security has created a lot of new interference in routine tasks. “You’re clicking unnecessarily on a lot of ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ prompts,” he said.
In addition, many old software programs won’t work on Vista.
My own experience supports those arguments. Microsoft loaned me a laptop with Vista loaded on it. I wanted to write this story on that machine, but when I tried to load Citrix, the software that supports The Chronicle’s production system, I found that it was not ready for Vista. I was able to get a version that seemed to get things moving along, but then found that the new Internet Explorer 7 that came with Vista did not support the Java applet needed. Frustrated with the challenge of downloading all the pieces, I gave up.
Similarly, when I uploaded a video to YouTube, I was incessantly warned that the site was trying to gain access to my PC. I was unable to check the box turning off the warning and had to click at least 20 times to get to the video I wanted to upload.
I will also concur with Null’s assertion that many of the features in Vista are already available for Windows XP from other software vendors. For instance, I use Picasa to manage my photos, a free download from Google; in addition, I use Google Desktop to search my PC. Null said these are superior to Vista’s features. In the search, for instance, Vista will look only at file names, while Google Desktop will search the file contents as well.
That’s not to say I’m completely down on Vista. I frequently use the Alt-Tab function to get from one program to another, and while that is completely pedestrian on Windows XP, it is wonderfully rendered in Vista. I also like a lot of the little things, such as how the screens have a transparent pane that allows me to see behind them.
And the security is improved. Microsoft had long been criticized for making software that is easy to hack, so it’s hard to fault it for tightening things up, especially as online scammers are getting more sophisticated. “I don’t envy Microsoft there,” said PC World’s Arar. “You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. … The minute you want to start installing software, you get a lot of prompts, and that can be very annoying. … On the other hand, we live in a world where there are a lot of Web sites that try to download malicious software onto your computer.”
One tech consultant has been completely turned off by Vista. Lee Rodrigues, chief executive of Ethotec, a San Francisco IT consulting and training company, said Vista seems to be built atop Windows XP, and its new features have been ripped off from Apple’s OSX operating system.
“We all know that Microsoft has been copying Macintosh since 1984,” he said. “It looks like it, it acts like it, but it’s not as good. Vista is the worst example of this I’ve ever seen.”
He was particularly offended that Microsoft took a popular feature from Apple — its “widgets” — and barely disguised it when it renamed the feature “gadgets” in Vista. Although Ethotec was a Microsoft partner, Rodrigues is backing out of that relationship and advising clients to buy Macs. Apple has a new operating system due out later this year.
Despite the criticism, Microsoft’s market dominance almost assures that Vista will be a big launch, and the system will wind up on millions of machines before the year is out.
“It’s going to be fun to see this delivered to hundreds of millions of people around the world,” Microsoft’s Hutchinson said. After more than two years of work, he said, “It’s like Christmas Eve for us.”
Vista’s visual highlights Flip screens: Among the additions to Windows Vista are new ways to look at what windows are open. Instead of seeing simple icons, users who hit the Windows and Tab keys together will get a real-time snapshot of the open windows and programs, beautifully laid out and easy to flip through. This will look familiar to Apple users, but it’s new for Microsoft.
Parental controls: Vista comes not only with improved security, but also with easier ways for parents to decide how they want their children to use the computer. Parents can limit access to certain Web sites, limit the time they spend on the computer and the applications they use.
Photo management: With more people using digital cameras than ever, Microsoft has built photo management software into Vista, making it easier to share and fix photos, burn them to CDs, and give them “tags” or labels that make them easier to find later on. Vista also includes similar features for videos and music.