Cooking With Linux

Last night I went to a presentation/pitch for Vista deployment in the enterprise (there's a Star-Trek joke in there somewhere). It's not that I'm dissatisfied with Linux, but I like to know what's going on with Windows, especially since we do deploy Windows machines at work. At some level I always want to learn something new. What I learned was more pitch than enlightenment. The presenter, Mitch Garvis, did a great job of pitching Vista, though I would disagree with him on several points (which I will below), but my impression (keep in mind most of the room were Windows-centric IT Professionals) was that a few people were buying the pitch, but not too many.

One of the more interesting statements Mitch made was that Windows XP was released as a stable operating system, but the reason it crashes is the fault of third party vendors who hack up the Windows registry. Fine, the first point might be valid if no one used any applications other than Microsoft applications. But it's not really a fine point, Linux hackers write applications that get rolled into various Linux distributions and those applications don't bring down the operating system with the kind of frequency I see it happen in Windows XP. Vista's stability I can't comment on because I haven't rolled it out, but the one person I know who has is cursing the fact that it's died horribly 2 days in a row with nothing special added (no extra drivers for scanners/printers, etc.).

I was glad to hear Mitch pitching the functionality of the Aero eye candy. The eye candy in all recent OS's do add minor functionality improvements, but I didn't see ANYTHING that Linux didn't do years ago and on less hardware. Someone brought up Apple and asked why Microsoft wasn't pushing ads like Apple is and this brought up the fact that Microsoft owns a 25% stake in Apple - the implication here is that they're not really competitors as much as some would like to believe. The live search presentation didn't impress me either, Beagle indexes quite well and Gnome displays content just as slickly as Vista's "live icons." It just didn't impress me - thought I think a small handfull were seeing this kind of functionality for the first time.

The one thing that did intrigue me was the deployment tools, but this area was glossed over pretty quickly. The presentation was suppose to be 97% "fluff free," but seemed quite the opposite to me - 3% content and 97% fluff. I think that if they really wanted to prove Vista's readiness they should have concentrated on deployment. Show, instead of claiming that they could do it in an hour (we had 3), how to set up and deploy Vista. Actually deploying Vista on 2 or 3 machines would have been more interesting and more technical than a power point presentation with selling points. The audience were all people who would potentially deploy Vista. I think they might have cozied up to Vista more if they were really shown how easy deployment is (if that was the case).

Overall I'd have to give Mitch props for taking a stand and making a good pitch. I think he probably interested a few people who'd never seen any kind of indexed search or icons that display content, but the presentation really didn't convince me that Vista is innovative or business worthy.