Microsoft's Big Bet: Win With the Web

Although the latest version of Microsoft Windows is more than six months from shipping, company brass already have christened Vista as the best and biggest Windows release since Windows 95. The company is making bold predictions, claiming Vista will be preloaded on as many as 200 million new personal computers in the first 24 months that the product is available. Windows 95 shipped on a mere 67 million new PCs during its first two years. These numbers are important. The prospects of nearly every product Microsoft makes ride on maintaining the ubiquity of Windows, which has in excess of 90 percent of the PC operating system market. It's been five years since the current Windows version was released, and Windows XP now is looking rather dated.

Development of Vista has been slow, and some significant planned features have been put aside to keep the massive effort on track. The company is in a race to release Vista in time for the holiday PC-selling season, and the new operating system must stand out to entice consumers to upgrade their present computers. More importantly, Vista needs to impress the big corporations that spend so much money on software. This Windows overhaul, so long in coming, may indeed be a bigger deal than Windows 95. If Redmond-based Microsoft is overstating Vista's prospects for success, it's hard to overstate the importance of that success to the future of Microsoft.

Complicating predictions, Vista will be more than an upgraded desktop operating system. Microsoft marketers claim Vista will be more secure, more reliable, and more just plain fun than older versions of Windows. But the real action is in less-obvious functionality that will enable a growing stable of Web-based Microsoft services to seamlessly hook into Windows. The software marketplace is changing, with tools migrating from the static realm of the PC hard drive to the Internet. Microsoft helped pioneer the business of shrink-wrapped software and became dominant, but computer tools these days increasingly are services you use, not things you buy. Web-based companies like Google are offering free services online and even installed desktop tools that tread on Microsoft's turf. So Microsoft plans to use Windows Vista as base camp to begin a new assault on the Web, where rebranded and brand-new products will be popping up in the months to come. It's an ambitious plan, but the world has changed since Windows 95.

It turns out this Web integration might provide a side benefit for Microsoft by helping to tamp down the company's pesky antitrust problems. But an assessment of Vista begins on the desktop.

No Desktop Revolution

Microsoft

Vista got its start as "Longhorn," a code name that can be traced to a saloon near Whistler in British Columbia. Testers have been dabbling with early iterations of Vista since 2003. In 2005, it became clear that development was taking too long, and Microsoft yanked from the product the most touted feature, a new file system called WinFS. (The plan now is to add WinFS to a later version.) Microsoft has been cranking out test releases of Vista since July, when it issued the first full-fledged beta release.

Above all else, Microsoft is betting on souped-up features to sell Vista. Thousands of testers inside and outside Microsoft have been using the beta version. Feedback has been mixed. Some testers have complained about "feature bloat"—more can be less if software gets overly complicated for hardware and users. Some claim Vista runs like a dream on their existing PCs. Some testers claim Microsoft is doing little more than trying to make Windows more like Apple's Macintosh operating system by introducing 3-D rendering of the user interface. Others say the new interface is distracting eye candy that could hamper users with older, slower machines.

"Vista doesn't have the killer feature that will make everyone want Vista the day it comes out," says one tester, Sandro Villinger, webmaster of the Windows Tweaks Web site (www.w-tweaks.com). "It has great features, a new and sleek user interface, and some nice foundations that people will love. But I am not seeing the advantage of Windows Vista yet. It's not the revolution I hoped it would be."

Another tester, Brandon LeBlanc of Longhorn Blogs (www.longhornblogs.com), agrees. "Many people expected Windows Vista to be this giant leap and an enormously innovative operating system with a complete overhaul," says LeBlanc. "Unfortunately, those who expected that will be disappointed. While Microsoft has indeed innovated several key areas of Windows, they focused on fixing the problems that plague users today using Windows, which is very admirable."

The many Windows features and services that Microsoft will tout as new to Vista can be grouped into four buckets: safety and security improvements; user interface changes; better support for mobile devices; and Internet advances.

Of these, safety and security is the change Microsoft is planning to push hardest. Microsoft is bundling its new Windows Defender anti-spyware product into Vista. And the new Windows will have a "protected mode" to keep Internet Explorer users from downloading potentially dangerous files and content. It also will include new anti-phishing software, firewall, parental controls, and encryption technology to help protect lost or stolen computers.