On the night before Christmas, I sat down to think of a special list of gifts I'd like that Santa can't deliver--that is, unless Steve Ballmer is playing Santa. It's a modest list, really--I'm not greedy, and I'm not looking for, say, an XBox 360 Halo 3 special edition and a lifetime subscription to XBox Live or anything. It's more in the "peace on Earth, goodwill toward men" category, on a smaller scale. All I On the night before Christmas, I sat down to think of a special list of gifts I’d like that Santa can’t deliver–that is, unless Steve Ballmer is playing Santa. It’s a modest list, really–I’m not greedy, and I’m not looking for, say, an XBox 360 Halo 3 special edition and a lifetime subscription to XBox Live or anything. It’s more in the “peace on Earth, goodwill toward men” category, on a smaller scale.All I want for Christmas is a faster Vista. I know, I’ve whined here a lot about Vista. It’s not like it’s even a blip on the enterprise radar yet, anyway. But I’d personally rather see Vista succeed than fail. I’ve run desktop Linux, and I’ve got nothing against Ubuntu or SuSE or Fedora or Red Hat’s enterprise offerings–they’re pretty adequate for me to handle basic information worker daily tasks like email and word processing and some IM. But there’s a reason why I’m writing an Enterprise Windows blog and not an Enterprise Linux Desktop blog. Windows XP, despite its many failings, is vastly more friendly to the unwashed masses and the various support people I can hire off the street. That’s my humble, experience-based opinon, and not drawn from any sort of hard data, mind you. And I say that as someone who, on a single desk, runs Windows Vista, Mac OS X, and a Linux desktop (openSuSE at the moment, and I’m kind of fond of it as well) side-by-side. Maybe it’s personal bias from years of working with end-users of one sort or another. But I feel like I can predict well enough what’s going to happen with Windows installs. MacOS X is a lovely UI on top of Unix, and I use it nearly as much as I do Windows, but I don’t feel as good about its application choices for enterprise work as I do Windows. And Linux….okay, Evolution’s nice. Domino on Linux is nice. OpenOffice is great. But still, I don’t think I can sell a mass deployment to a CFO yet based on a Linux/OpenOffice/Evolution or Domino/Firefox desktop. Unfortunately, Vista isn’t as ready for the enterprise as XP is, and that’s not getting solved very quickly. I can get Linux to do very well on a fraction of the memory it takes Vista to clear its throat with–even though I lose most of the benefits of my video card because of driver support. So, please Mr. Ballmer: get a Vista SP2 out in 2008 that makes Vista less of a pig. And don’t forget a quick cycle on Windows Server 2008’s SP1 too. We’ve been good, really.Oh, and while you’re at it, bury the Linux IP hatchet, will you? And as for the XBox Live account… Software DevelopmentSmall and Medium Business