XP gets a lifeline while Vista struggles

Finally Microsoft have faced the reality that Vista is not popular with the market and have announced Windows XP will be available beyond the planned January 30, 2008 cut off date.

I've ranted enough about Vista's problems enough on this blog but the main reason why Vista has failed is that the benefits of moving up to Vista do not, for most people, outweigh the negatives.

In my view, the core problem is that Vista is Windows XP with a tutu. That tutu is the User Access Control feature. It gets in the way of what people are doing.

This is a problem of Microsoft's own making. To keep users, and their own software developers, happy they allowed the mess that was the Windows 9x security model to extend into XP.

The stupid thing is the Windows NT family, which includes Vista and XP, always had superior security to earlier versions of Windows but Microsoft decided to ignore it .

I suspect this was because their own software, especially Office XP and 2000, didn't run properly in Limited User profiles.

Being stuck with running most users as Administrators they decided on putting on the UAC tutu and that's made Vista as attractive as pig with lipstick.

There's a lot of things about this debacle that amazes me; how it took the world's biggest software company five years to come out with a substandard product, how the rest of the IT world completely bungled getting their products compatible and why Apple haven't doubled their market share because of this fumbling.

While Microsoft deserve most of the scorn in this schemozzle, the rest of the IT industry should hang their collective heads in shame as well.