I've been writing quite a bit about Vista (and February's Vista SP1) and am now beginning to write about the Windows Server 2007 RC1 on my Network World blog. It's not news to anyone that Vista has had some rough spots since it's introduction in early 2007.
What's interesting is that we all anticipated the introduction of Vista because of improvements in security. Today we hear very little about security in Vista. That could be good, and could be bad. In many ways Vista is a big leap forward from the security model in Windows XP. Though there have been many patches and fixes, we've not had a major vulnerability scare to date with Vista (cross our fingers, lets hope we don't.)
But the focus on improving security in Vista caused Microsoft to take their eye off of something very important; the user experience. User Account Control (UAC) forgot the lessons of so many personal firewalls and created another "barking dog" Vista users had to put down. Performance and reliability issues, something any operating system rewrite will inevitability face, became front and center because new dual core machines and big disk drives don't have don't have the same zip we are accustom to in Windows XP and Windows 2000. While adding somewhat of a "cool factor", Aero and 3D icons only updated the Windows Explorer experience, not made it easier or more useful to end users.
The lesson is that while intending to fix or improve an area of your product, security in the case of Windows, it cannot come at the expense of the experience to which users have grown accustom. This is a lesson I've learned myself in my own product development experiences over the years. Sometimes you do take a hit and delay new features to address a more fundamental need in a product, but forcing the user to step back and accept reduced functionality or lesser performance caused a significant backlash for Vista.
Rewriting something like the Windows operating system is a massive undertaking. Frankly, I'm surprised in many ways there haven't been bigger problems than we've experienced. I've used Vista since it's introduction and not had to revert back to Windows XP. That I'm pretty surprised about. But I think it is still worth stepping back and learning from what Microsoft has experienced over the past year with Vista.
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