The (Post-SP1) Vista Verdict: Wait for Windows 7

Like many of the IT organizations I consult to, I’ve been waiting for the release of Service Pack 1 before passing final judgement on Windows Vista. Now that SP1 has nearly arrived (I’ve been working with the RC0 bits for about a week now), I think I’m ready to make my formal pronouncement:

For the vast majority of enterprise IT shops, Vista is NOT – and likely NEVER will be – the right choice for their immediate desktop computing needs.

The preceding conclusion is based on several factors, some of which I’ll attempt to outline below:

1. Lack of Value – Ask most IT professionals why an enterprise-caliber Windows shop should upgrade from XP to Vista and you’ll likely get a blank stare. The fact is that there’s very little about Vista that is compelling to large IT organizations.

   Yes, it’s theoretically more secure “out of the box.” However, no sane IT shop implements XP using the default security settings. They lock it down with layers of Group Policies and configuration management. And even with User Account Control (UAC) enabled, Vista is still vulnerable to external breaches.

   Once you get beyond security the arguments become steadily less compelling. Integrated search? Limited to local storage. Aero? Cool, but hardly a compelling feature. DirectX 10? As an enterprise selling point? Are you kidding me? There’s simply not enough “meat on the bone” to make this a compelling upgrade.

2. Poor Performance – I went easy on Vista’s performance characteristics when it first came out. After all, it was a major new release and I’ve always been loathe to judge a Microsoft OS before the first batch of updates. However, as the “year of Vista” waxed and waned I became increasingly concerned by the myriad poor runtime experiences reported by early adopters. At the same time, I witnessed a growing trend in the IT media towards dismissing any and all complaints about Vista’s performance as being from “fringe users” with “old hardware.”

   The problem was that many of these early adopters were in fact using state of the art hardware and, far from being “fringe,” were more often than not platform engineers and deployment technicians hailing from some of the larger Microsoft shops. With feedback like this, Vista quickly gained a reputation for being “fat” and “slow” compared to Windows XP, especially in memory configurations of 1GB or less.

   My own testing – confirmed by my colleagues at the exo.performance.network – showed Vista lagging behind Windows XP by a factor of 2:1 across a variety of business productivity and multitasking scenarios. So when Service Pack 1 failed to close the performance gap I, too, wrote-off Vista for performance-critical tasks. After all, if there’s no measurable value proposition (see #1 above) to justify the lost CPU cycles, why upgrade?

3. A Resurgent Windows XP – It’s the OS that everyone loves to hate. It’s old (the first bits hit the market way back in 2001), has been patched more times than the Goodrich Blimp, and has been the launching pad for some of the most notorious virus and worm outbreaks ever recorded. However, it’s also well understood, generally reliable (when implemented correctly/securely), and fast. In fact, with the release of Service Pack 3, Windows XP is  now even faster than its previous incarnation, Windows XP w/SP2 – something that’s never happened before with a Microsoft OS.

   True, speed isn’t everything. But when you consider that the majority of Vista’s advantages can be retrofitted onto Windows XP – including IE 7, desktop search and the bulk of newer .NET framework technologies – the tradeoffs, in terms of lost performance and new training and support headaches, make a Vista upgrade look more and more like a Faustian bargain.

Bottom Line: When the choice is between a buggy, bloated, immature OS with no tangible value add vs. a lean, clean and reliable (if somewhat dated) OS that has the broadest support base in the history of personal computing – plus performance to burn – there really is no contest.

Microsoft knew going into this game that Vista’s toughest competition would come from its own wildly successful predecessor. Sadly, their attempts to outdo themselves with the top-heavy Windows Vista have fallen flat.

All of which leads me to conclude that, for enterprise IT shops at least, the best course of action is to do nothing…except, perhaps, to deploy Service Pack 3…and to pray for something better from Windows 7.