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Issue #229 August 2009
Swallowing the Pill
by Steve Ciarcia
All right. I’ll admit that sometimes I’m a stick in the mud when it comes to changing things. It’s not that I have a radical adherence to the saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It’s just that I’m very selective about dumping comfortable complacency simply to jump on the next technical bandwagon. Of course, my wife wonders why I can so readily discard this rational logic when it comes to buying cars that have to include turbo-charging, active roll stabilization, and a myriad of other gimmicks. I simply smile and say, “I’m an engineer. We all have to have our toys.” ;-)
OK, you probably didn’t need to know all that, but it’s a nervous reaction I get when discussing anything Microsoft. I’m glad I’m not in Microsoft’s marketing department because I don’t know how you sell a new operating system when it appears that no one wants one. Let’s face it: even lacking some cute Vista-unique features, XP is a fairly decent operating system. With proper browser updates, good audio/video hardware, security software, and a firewall, an XP box is a pretty long-term companion. Like me, I’ll bet 95% of owners primarily use them to browse, e-mail, watch videos, write documents, collect and manipulate camera photos, print documents, download files, and burn a few CDs. The truth is that XP works just fine, and most of us see absolutely no reason to learn a new OS (and pay for it) just to do the same things.
I have to qualify my comments by saying that I haven’t personally used Windows 7. The sum of my experience with Vista is helping my wife (mostly by looking for XP-like commands under all the extra crap) with her Vista-based laptop when she gets stuck trying to do whatever she’s attempting to do—and that’s the rub.
My personal distaste for Vista, and potentially my concern about Windows 7, has to do with the fact that Microsoft doesn’t properly appreciate why people like XP. It’s not some fetish thing. It’s just that the Vista experience changes nearly every aspect of how you get things done on your computer. I don’t mean in how it processes the information (heck, most people don’t even want to know). I’m talking about the way you interact with the machine. XP is simple: find a recognizable icon, right click for info, and then intuitively follow some logical process.
My experience with Vista didn’t seem the least bit intuitive. It just dumped me onto a complicated road where I didn’t care to invest an extraordinary amount of time learning how to read a new map. All the text, all the icons, all the text with icons, icons replaced with text, etc, etc, were in different locations, different menus, different levels of menus, etc. Complicating that aggravation, we can add new rule changes about doing things with file names, deletions, and the Start menu. Heck, it took me 20 minutes to find the Off switch the first time! Certainly many professionals relished the technical challenge and now enjoy Vista, but Microsoft’s failure in inducing more people onto the bandwagon happened because the upgrade experience was viewed as a 100% learning curve for virtually everyone else.
From what I’m reading, Windows 7 will be an improvement over Vista, but it will not be an easy upgrade path for XP users. XP users can’t simply do an in-place upgrade where you apply a new OS on top of the existing one and it keeps all your old settings and programs (Vista to 7 is presumably easier). Windows Easy Transfer might still move your data, but you better start looking for all those original application CDs if you have to do a clean install from the bottom up. Arrgh!
Certainly we can hang on to our XP boxes, or even consider using XP Virtual Mode or XP downgrade under Windows 7. Of course, having to buy a more expensive OS 7 version in order to downgrade it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Besides, virtual modes and downgraded OSs always seem like a kludge—and somewhere under all the onion layers running XP, it’s Windows 7.
In the long run, the choice of how long we can keep our OS comfort may not be in our hands. It is the continued support of application and security software manufacturers that allows us to continue using XP. Today it is a no-brainer because 75% of the installed base is XP. What happens when you add a third OS to the mix and ask all these software vendors to support three different operating systems, especially when Microsoft has chosen to only support the last two?
XP has a few more years to live, and undoubtedly there will be extensions.
However, at some point in the future, we may have to choose between a PC with a comfortable OS that risks its life every time it connects to the Internet and some new whizbang jack-in-the-box Maginot Line (and yes, I know it didn’t hold) OS offering a new beginning and a new learning curve. The decision clock starts now.
P.S.—Stay tuned to News Notes for the latest in the “Critter Chronicles.” The war continues!
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