Vista and Marketing Basics

What was the Vista target market? I don't get it. There's an established base of customers which is probably quite a bit larger than the new customers available. So why alienate the base by making changes that appear to be no more than "nice to have"?

Voltaire said something like: "The perfect is the enemy of the good" which has been translated into my favorite version: "Better is the enemy of good enough". In comparison to Vista, there's plenty about Windows XP that's "good enough".

I care a lot less about "look and feel" than I do about functionality or the ease of finding things. So, changing where things are to be found seems a really bad idea. Who the heck was "change control" when these things got moved around:

- Add Remove Programs?
- Restart?
- Scheduled Tasks?
- Why is "Default Programs" not part of "Programs and Features" if you're going there anyway?

I'm sure there's been plenty written about LAN setup and file sharing woes. So another marketing question is "just where is the market?" If every person who has a computer in their office also has a computer in their home and if for every one of those customers there is one other customer with a computer in their home only then the home market would be double the office market. Well, I have no idea but it just seems logical.

If the typical office has 6 computers on a LAN then there would be 1/12 as many office LANs than home computers. If 1 in 6 homes have LANs then there are easily more home LANs than business LANs. That's a lot of LANs! By extension, the number of non-domain LANs or peer-to-peer LANs has to be much greater - ditto the number of LANs that one has to log in to must be small.

It only seems natural that a default sytem would either do file sharing or not. And, if file sharing is wanted then it should just work. It shouldn't take a bunch of settings changes.

The ideal OS default would be this:
- File sharing is already set up to work.
- There are default directories set up to be shared.
- When the network is all plugged together, all of the shared directories are immediately evident.
- System security remains intact.
After all, this is where most LANs end up after settings changes are made!
Then a simple toggle during setup to either turn it on or off.

Windows is a Good Thing

I've been in the trade for a long, long time. I've been in Redmond and in Silicon Valley and a few places in between like Mukilteo and Ilwaco. Anyway, it's always amazed me how strident the Windows bashers are - many of them taking their paychecks from Windows-based businesses as they speak.

So, just for the record, I want to say that Windows is a good thing, that Microsoft isn't an evil empire and we are all better off for it - if short a few more bucks. I think that Linux is great but tire over having to figure out each time all over again just how to get that new app installed and working. I do systems integration for a living - among other things - and would never venture into that camp. Been there, done that.

I look around and see all sorts of productivity improvements and all of them on Windows and MacOSes. Whether they are cutthroat or benevolent or arrogant or just very rich I say hats off to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and all (or most all ) of their folks. It's that productivity thing....

I'm not dwelling on Macs or Unix or Linux because this isn't about a comparative analysis. What I work on these days are Windows systems and their peripherals and so, figure that maybe a blog would be useful to focus on things I'm seeing. After this introduction I'll be making some philosophical comments about Vista.

I hope somebody's listening!