To Vista or not to Vista, what is a company to do?

Don’t do it! At least not yet, unless you are a company that loves experimenting with new technology or because Vista has some or other feature that you need and which is not available in another “reasonably stable” operating system such as Windows XP.

Of course, despite its short life, there are those out there who love Vista and those who hate it. My stance is neither, more a neutral “wait and see” attitude based on practical considerations that companies need to weigh up when introducing newly released technology such as Vista into their company, and this is especially true for software.

Let me explain. With any new technology, the software component is arguably always the “weakest link”. Reasons for this are that software is never as thoroughly tested as hardware because there are often far too many permutations and scenarios to test compared to hardware, as well as the fact that software engineers always know that there will be a second chance to fix bugs with patches and upgrades etc should the need arise (as it always does), a luxury that does not apply to hardware (except at much greater expense).

Hence, the very software nature of a new OS platform such as Vista means there are bound to many “unwanted features” that will take time to fix. For example, one of the biggest issues with Vista currently is the lack of drivers for hardware, making upgrades very difficult and time consuming. As for buying a new desktop or laptop with Vista already installed, I would still avoid it for now if possible, because who knows what incompatibilities may lurk when working with existing operating systems. A search on Google also shows many problems that have been found since its inception, all of which are going to take time to resolve. This seems to justify my position for now.

So if your company simply uses computers/laptops as tools for internet access, email, database management, documentation etc, and things are stable at the moment, then why take the huge risk of introducing a new platform such as Vista now?

Windows XP will be officially retired in 2008 on new desktops/laptops so it is probably best to wait until then to embrace Vista. Hopefully by then most of the major problems will have been found and resolved. As the saying goes, for now ”Better the devil you know…”