Telcom NZ trials Vista

When I first saw the Australian ZDNet headline TCNZ adopts Vista, I thought "oh no, they've lost the plot again".

But when I read the article it makes complete sense. Putting Vista on 500 desktops, about 7% of their fleet, allows their IT and consulting arms to get practical experience in running Vista. It certainly gives their service division an advantage over their competitors.

Another article in ZDNet though should worry TCNZ; AAPT continues to lose customers. The investment in AAPT has to be one of Telecom NZ's great failures. The fact they are considering taking over Powertel only shows they haven't learned many lessons.

As someone who's had to deal with AAPT on a business level, I'm amazed anyone's still with them. Their account management and record keeping has been terrible. The only thing going for them has been the reliability of the old Connect network.

It baffles me how telco executives get the Internet so wrong. We all think the two industries should be complimentary, but the TCNZ debacle and the poor management of Bigpond and Optus' Internet services show just how wrong they can get it. We sold our TCNZ shares years ago, TCNZ should consider selling off a few shares of their own.

iTunes doesn't run on Vista

Another reason for not upgrading to Vista. iTunes doesn't work. This joins a long list of vendors who aren't quite there yet.

While we expected quite a few difficulties with Vista, you have to wonder what these vendors have been doing for the last five years. It beggars belief so many have aren't Vista ready.

I've been very critical of Microsoft and their failure to introduce Limited Users as the default in Windows XP. But the scale of compatibility problems shows why they didn't. Is it really that hard to design programs that can run in Windows restricted profiles?