Thoughts on Microsoft’s Vista launch event
I spent Tuesday hanging out near the airport for the Microsoft Vista launch event. Supposedly there were around 3000 people there, or at least that’s what they said at the keynote, and while the intent was, supposedly, to boost awareness of how cool Vista and Office were, I was left with more questions than answers.
The keynote was a little weird. Instead of going out with some kind of “hi, we’re Microsoft, we’re awesome” variant, it was more of a “here’s why you should stay with us” theme. Yeah, “stay.” It was almost apologetic and whiney. I didn’t think MS was very worried about their position, especially in the enterprise, but the keynote actually had me wondering about alternatives.
The rest of day was broken up into different “tracks” of sessions following various themes. I don’t have my notes in front of me, so this might be off a bit, but there was a developer track, an IT Pro track, a business/government track, and a architect “track” that had one whole session in it. I went to the architect track and most of the developer track talks, skipping out on most of the Office stuff (I do mostly consumer-facing work these days) and I think I missed one talk due to a confusion on my part over timing.
Oddly, most of the stuff I saw at the Vista launch didn’t have a lot to do with Vista. I saw a lot of .Net Framework 3.0 technology, which is available for XP, and the only Vista-specific code example I sat in on was about how to make a Gadget for the sidebar, which was, from what I saw, pure HTML/Javascript with no new MS technology that made the thing any simpler to do than anything you’d write on a Linux box for any old browser. The example that was written was a basic XmlHttp request, which brought out a snaky tagline from the peanut gallery: “Vista harnesses the amazing power of COM!” I didn’t see any mention of server technologies, and nothing about the new IIS either, although there were a few brief nods to the AJAX framework, which is still in beta.
The guest speakers didn’t really do anything for me. There must be some kind of rehearsal for these things, but when they brought the partners up on the stage to talk about their successes with Vista, it wasn’t particularly inspiring, and in some cases, it was downright painful to watch.
I think the best thing Microsoft’s done with Vista is to allow .Net 3.0 to run on XP. I attended the day with some former colleagues who’d just made the migration to XP. Does anyone wanna guess how long it’ll be before Vista rolls out to their desktops? There’s no killer app in sight (at least nothing was mentioned at the event), and I don’t see the average consumer buying a new OS (hmmm, a couple of XBox games or Vista? Hmmmm….), so adoption is going to be mostly limited to new hardware purchases, which seem to be happening less frequently these days.
Robert Scoble recently wrote about Microsoft’s failure to manage Vista expectations in the early days, so maybe this was just a new hype-free direction in marketing. Still, for a launch, I would have expected a bit more glitz…