Well the day has finally arrived. The House of Gates has gotten it’s new flagship desktop OS out the door in all of it’s forms. They spared no expense on promoting the platform, from Featured Community Events, worldwide Launch Parties, to User Community evangelization. One has to as the following question:
Why are they trying so hard to convince us?
If you think about it, the OS is a shoe-in. OEM’s will pre-load it on all of their systems, corporate buyers will Volume License the hell out of it, and the herd mentality will do the rest. Why blow all of this money?
Well, more than anything else, it’s took make everyone forget how long it has taken to bring this OS to market. Or of the features that were promised and then cut (WinFS anyone?). Or of the "crushing DRM infection" (to quote The INQ) that has spawned several grass roots campaigns to reclaim Consumer Fair Use Rights.
To be honest, not all of these problems were Microsoft’s fault. Hollywood execs (read MPAA) demanded that if Vista was to show DVD and HD content in the box, it had to support their draconian (and often competing) content protection schemes. Drivers are another sticking point. Device driver authors don’t have the time and/or the vast cash reserves that MS does to afford the luxury of writing a device driver for a beta OS. Most will start work when the OS is final (RTM) and many still wait to see if the market will accept it. Alot of the marketing hoopla is for them too.
MS, however, did promise a lot and did not deliver on all of it. Mostly because they bit off more than they could chew and believe me they can chew. WinFS, the new technology file system incorporating SQL Server, was one of the first to go, relegated to a service pack upgrade or maybe even Vista R2. Oddly enough, it was the only one to go. Everything else that was promised, was delivered in some form or another.
No, the promise breakers here are the device driver authors. And I am not talking about the little guys with obscure products. I am talking Nvidia (no final drivers as of this posting), HP (limited support mostly relegated to in-box MS developed drivers) and other major OEMs. AMD/ATI