Ed Bott's Microsoft Report

July 21st, 2008

First hints of Microsoft’s “fight back” ads appear

Posted by Ed Bott @ 9:00 pm

Categories: Microsoft, Windows 7

Tags: Advertisement, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Ed Bott

I just noticed this teaser on Microsoft’s home page:

If this is going to be the overall message of Microsoft’s much-vaunted new $300 million ad campaign, it might be money well spent. According to the folks at LiveSide, the first ads in the new campaign were previewed at Microsoft’s employees-only Global Exchange conference last week to rave reviews. As Tim Anderson astutely noted the other day, “Vista is now actually better than its reputation. That’s a marketing issue.” Microsoft’s biggest challenge is to get would-be customers to set aside whatever preconceptions they have and listen to its pitch for Vista. Aligning its most vocal Vista critics with the Flat Earth Society is a clever way to get people’s attention.

But the bigger job, that of actually changing people’s minds, will be easier said than done. Apple has largely defined Vista’s public image so far with its devastating “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads. Responding directly to those ads is a losing tactic. Largely thanks to John Hodgman, the humor bar is set extraordinarily high. Any kind of response ad would legitimize the claims in those Apple ads and run the significant risk of being seen as lame and uncool.

And there’s no sign that anyone in Redmond is going to go down that road. Instead, clicking the link on the “World is flat” ad leads to a page headlined, “Windows Vista: Look how far we’ve come.” The copy beneath leads off with a sheepish admission:

When Windows Vista debuted in January 2007, we declared it the best operating system we had ever made. “Windows Vista is beautiful,” The New York Times raved. It’s humbling that millions of you agree.

But we know a few of you were disappointed by your early encounter. Printers didn’t work. Games felt sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest Windows wasn’t always living up to your high expectations for a Microsoft product.

But that’s followed quickly by a reinforcement of the theme set out in the visual above:

We know that’s what some people are saying on the Internet. And in its early days, Windows Vista did experience some compatibility problems. But thanks to our industry partners’ efforts during the past 18 months, here’s where things stand today.

Next up is a bullet list emphasizing the sheer number of Vista-compatible hardware devices and applications, and it’s followed by this ringing defense aimed at XP enthusiasts:

Windows XP is a great operating system. Its continuing popularity, just shy of its seventh birthday, makes us proud.

Our goal is always to make each new version of Windows better than the last. With Windows Vista, we’re convinced we succeeded.

That’s a pretty good start. The real hard work begins with the messages that immediately follow this one. Microsoft has to identify the real benefits in Windows Vista and communicate them clearly and crisply. That’s not going to be any easy task.

Update 23-July: A Microsoft spokesperson confirms that the ad shown here is not part of the upcoming ad campaign, which is due to launch soon.

July 21st, 2008

Sony’s amazing crapware-free PC

Posted by Ed Bott @ 6:31 am

Categories: Windows Vista, Hardware

Tags: Sony Corp., Sony Vaio, PC, Microsoft Windows Vista, Option, Fresh Start Program, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Tools & Techniques, Desktops

Sony is finally taking on its crapware problem. For the past two months, I’ve been using an astonishingly light and agile Sony VAIO notebook and loving every minute of it. The best part of all was that this machine was absolutely, completely, unequivocally crapware-free, which meant I was able to be productive within a few minutes of unboxing.

That’s a huge switch for Sony, which has taken a beating as “the poster child for negative experiences” with new PCs running Windows Vista. And it was a happy surprise for me. When I wrote about my hands-on experiences with two older VAIO notebooks earlier this year, I called it a “truly miserable experience.” It took a crapware-cleansing clean install to fix a 2007-vintage Sony notebook, and I spent hours replacing outdated drivers and removing unwanted software from a 2008 model (if you haven’t read that installment, see Fixing Windows Vista, one machine at a time).

In a March interview, Sony Vice President Mike Abary assured me that Sony was “listening and taking action.” The first phase, he said, was a new program called Fresh Start, in which Sony promised to remove all trialware and unnecessary software for customers who chose the Fresh Start option as part of a custom-configured VAIO. Sony announced initially that it would charge $49.99 for the privilege of ordering a crapware-free PC and then quickly reversed its decision.

In early May, I ordered an ultraportable notebook from Sony’s website, configuring it to order and choosing the Fresh Start option (no extra charge).

The notebook arrived a few days later, and I’ve been using it since then for a variety of real-world tasks. The bottom line? Sony’s Fresh Start delivers exactly what it promises: a crapware-free PC. It runs Windows Vista remarkably well, and the hardware has been a sheer delight to use. In today’s post, I’ll show you why this VAIO is different from its predecessors and explain how Sony plans to widen its selection of crapware-free models.

No crapware? Really? –>

July 18th, 2008

Has Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows Easy Transfer Companion?

Posted by Ed Bott @ 10:27 am

Categories: Windows Vista, Windows 7

Tags: Team, Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Ed Bott

Back in March 2006, more than two years ago, Microsoft purchased Apptimum, Inc., which had developed two system utilities for transferring programs and settings from one computer to another: the consumer-focused Alohabob PC Relocator and its corporate cousin, Migrate DT. Roughly six months later, around the time Windows Vista was released to corporate customers, Microsoft announced that it would release the software under a new name, Windows Easy Transfer Companion. The stated plan in Redmond, as I wrote back in October 2006, was for an “extended public beta.”

And so the software sat for more than 18 months, available via Microsoft’s Download Center for the curious but otherwise lacking in vital signs. No one from the development team ever blogged about it, as far as I can tell. It never got so much as a mention on the official Windows Vista blog. A brief Utility Spotlight column that appeared in the January 2008 issue of Microsoft TechNet magazine appears to have been just a random flickering of attention from outside the Windows team.

Then, last month, with no announcement, Windows Easy Transfer Companion disappeared from Microsoft’s website around the middle of June. (That’s when my co-author Carl Siechert noticed that the link from Windows Vista Inside Out was no longer working. The download page was unavailable, and the associated KB article returned a 404. On several Microsoft-run forums, I found notes from Microsoft employees confirming that the download was officially unavailable. When I checked in with Microsoft, I hit a brick wall, with a contact explaining that there had been a great deal of turnover and reshuffling on the team, and it was hard to find out exactly who was in charge. I did get official confirmation that it’s “unclear” what shape this functionality will take and when the next public release might be.

Based on this sketchy evidence, I’m willing to bet that Windows Easy Transfer Companion has been abandoned as a standalone product. It’s far more likely that the developers who built the original Apptimum technology have been moved to the Windows 7 team, where they’re probably integrating the technologies they used in Alohabob and Migrate DT into the OS itself. I suspect it’s being merged into the existing Windows Easy Transfer feature, to reduce resistance to Windows 7 from would-be XP or Vista upgraders.

In fact, many of the concepts involved with moving applications between PCs can also pay off in other, more common tasks, such as uninstalling programs, saving program settings, and even providing a common framework for downloading and installing application updates. It’s possible that we’ll see much-needed improvements in those areas as well.

The other possibility, of course, is that someone looked at the technology, decided it wasn’t worth the time and developer-hours to update, and pulled the plug on the whole project.

Something tells me we won’t know for sure until later this year, when the first big wave of details about Windows 7 should emerge.

July 15th, 2008

Windows Update versus Ubuntu Update

Posted by Ed Bott @ 10:00 am

Categories: Windows Vista, Security, Linux

Tags: Ubuntu, Microsoft Windows Update, Operating System, Update, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Operating Systems, Software, Ed Bott

A few months ago, Steve Ballmer publicly noted that Windows Vista was “a work in progress.” That inspired a predictable outpouring of Vista-bashing. After all, look how many updates Windows Vista has had since it was first released. Obviously, it was a disaster, or there would have been no need for that many updates, right? Why couldn’t Microsoft get it right the first time?

The reality? All modern operating systems used as mainstream business and consumer platforms are “works in progress” and require frequent updates to fix bugs and resolve security issues (and occasionally to add features). Many of those bugs and security issues don’t surface until the code gets deployed widely, and even then it sometimes takes detective work to figure out where the actual problem is. Presumably, the big issues get worked out within a few months, and the pace of updates drops off (but not to zero).

I thought about this over the weekend when I opened up a Hyper-V virtual machine running Ubuntu Linux 8.04. This was a plain-vanilla install of Ubuntu, with no additional software except what is included with the downloaded distro. I had last used this VM 51 days earlier, at which point the OS release was about a month old. At that time, it was completely current with patches and updates, and I hadn’t reopened it since. (A side note: My Ubuntu and OpenSUSE 11 installations on this Hyper-V server were exceptionally easy and performance is excellent. I’ll be migrating my Fedora installation from Virtual PC 2007 to Hyper-V and adding an OpenBSD machine on this platform as well.)

I expected that I would have to install a few updates. But I was surprised to see how many.

Read the rest of this entry »

July 10th, 2008

How should Microsoft fight Vista criticism? “We’re sorry” is a good start

Posted by Ed Bott @ 5:31 pm

Categories: Windows Vista

Tags: Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Corp., Service Pack 1, Frank Shaw, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Operating Systems, Microsoft Windows, Software, Ed Bott

I filled in for Dan Farber on this week’s EIC-squared podcast. (It’s well under 10 minutes, and we cover a lot of ground. Go listen.) In the course of our talk, ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan asked me what I would do to fix Vista’s tarnished brand if I were in charge of Microsoft’s marketing for a day. OK, I’ll take the job, but on two conditions: First, I want face time with Steve Ballmer and Steven Sinofsky. Second, I want some of those dollars Steve was going to fork over to buy Yahoo, because cleaning up the Vista mess is gonna cost some bucks.

The context of the conversation, of course, is Microsoft’s campaign to “fight back” against Vista’s poor reputation and Apple’s relentless Vista-bashing ad series. Mary Jo Foley has more details in her report from Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston. I’m hearing the same messages in my conversations with Microsoft executives and product managers.

In classic Microsoft style, they can be distilled into three key points:

• Hardware and software partners weren’t ready for the launch. As Mary Jo reports, Windows honcho Brad Brooks “acknowledged that partners stopped believing that Microsoft would ever manage to ship Vista and thus didn’t prepare adequately for the launch of the operating system.”
• Many of the architectural changes, especially those involving security and device drivers, caused existing hardware and software to work poorly or not at all. Most of those issues have been fixed in the past 18 months, and the exceptions are generally older products whose owners have decided not to invest in Vista support.
• Windows Vista as it exists today is not the same product that Microsoft shipped back in November 2006. Service Pack 1 is the biggest fix, of course, but Microsoft has been delivering bug fixes and compatibility updates continually via Windows Updates

There’s a great deal of truth in that summary, but it’s not the whole truth. It misses the mark dramatically by not acknowledging the negativity in the market and in the press and confronting it head on. More importantly, it doesn’t include any serious ‘fessing up to the series of blunders that Microsoft has committed over the course of Vista’s development and release. This week one of Microsoft’s top executives admitted that the changes in Vista “broke a lot of things” and “caused … a lot of pain.” Usually, that sort of confession is followed by “I’m sorry” and “Here’s what we’re going to do to make up for that pain.” Read the rest of this entry »

July 7th, 2008

Why you’ll have a long wait for Microsoft’s next OS

Posted by Ed Bott @ 4:00 am

Categories: Windows Vista, Windows 7

Tags: Operating System, Microsoft Windows NT, Microsoft Corp., Midori, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Ed Bott

The recent buzz over Microsoft’s efforts to build a completely new OS from scratch has led to some wild speculation. The silliness reached its apex last weekend in the New York Times, where San Jose State University business professor Randall Stross argued that “[t]he best solution to the multiple woes of Windows is starting over. Completely. Now.” In a rambling essay filled with factual errors and mistaken assumptions, he mentions Microsoft’s Singularity research project and says “Microsoft should move its researchers into the heart of its systems development team” and begin turning that research project into a replacement for Windows.

That point of view is a popular one. Over the past year, I’ve read plenty of speculation that Microsoft is planning a “complete rewrite” of Windows. Most are based on wishful thinking rather than anything concrete, and Microsoft has pretty much stomped those rumors for Windows 7. But hope springs eternal for the version after that, which is why Singularity has taken on an almost mystical aura for Windows critics.

I’ve got good news for Prof. Stross: As my colleague Mary Jo Foley has reported, Microsoft already has an all-star team that’s working on a next-generation operating system. It’s called Midori, and Mary Jo’s sources say it’s in “incubation,” which means it’s on a fast track to being turned into a product.

[For another point of view on Microsoft’s next-generation OS, see
Mary Jo Foley’s post, “Might Microsoft’s Midori be ‘Cairo’ revisited?”]

But will Midori replace Windows in the near future? Not a chance. If Microsoft really does turn this project into a commercial product, I believe it will exist alongside Windows for several years, at a bare minimum. To learn why, let’s dust off the Windows history books.

Read the rest of this entry »

July 3rd, 2008

Nothing stealthy about this Windows Update update

Posted by Ed Bott @ 11:27 am

Categories: Windows Vista, Security, Windows XP

Tags: Microsoft Windows Update, Update, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Ed Bott

For years, Microsoft has occasionally updated its Windows Update client software automatically on systems that are configured to check for updates. This has been true even when Windows Update is set to simply check for (and optionally, download) updates but not to install them.

That decision led to a flurry of negative publicity about “stealth” Windows Update updates last year, triggered when one of those automatic updates caused problems on a small number of Windows XP systems whose owners used the repair option from the installation media. Most of those customers were surprised to find that the culprit was an update they never realized they had installed.

At the end of July, Microsoft is going to make some changes to the infrastructure of its Windows Update back end, and as part of the change it will begin delivering another update to Windows XP and Vista systems (as well as systems running Windows Server 2003 or 2008). This time, though, the plan is to communicate the details well in advance and to provide more notice before and after the process.

I spoke yesterday with Microsoft product manager Michelle Haven, who told me that the primary purpose of the update is to improve performance, scanning more quickly for updates and delivering those updates more quickly. It won’t change the way Windows Update looks or feels, she says. In a related blog post, Haven says Microsoft has “invested heavily in reducing the amount of time it takes the Windows Update agent to scan to see if new updates are available. In this case, we’ve seen some instances of the scan times on some machines decreasing almost 20 percent.”

Unlike previous Windows Update updates, this one isn’t sneaking in under anyone’s radar. In addition to the Microsoft Update blog, this update will be documented in an updated version of Knowledge Base article 946928 (“Information for network administrators about how to obtain the latest Windows Update Agent”) and will be available for download there.

One additional change provides a notification in the Windows Update history with a link to additional details. This screen shot show what the Windows Update log will look like after the updated agent software is installed.

If you want to opt out of this update until you’re certain that it won’t cause problems on your system or network, you’ll need to completely disable Windows Update. On systems running Windows Vista, that means selecting “Never check for updates” and on Windows XP it means selecting “Turn off Automatic Updates.” The update will be applied if any other option is selected (including “Download updates but let me choose whether to install them” or “Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them”).

And because I knew the question would come up in the comments here, I asked whether this update has anything to do with anti-piracy or Windows Genuine Advantage features. The answer was a categorical no: “There is no WGA component in this client update.” A follow-up e-mail message from a contact at Microsoft’s PR agency confirmed this information for me.

July 2nd, 2008

Microsoft Equipt: good deal, lousy name

Posted by Ed Bott @ 11:45 am

Categories: Microsoft, Microsoft Office

Tags: Circuit City Stores Inc., Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Ed Bott

I am baffled by today’s announcement of Microsoft Equipt.

I had a chance to beta-test this product beginning in March, when it was available under the code name Albany. The released product combines Office Home and Student 2007 and Windows Live OneCare, plus access to a cloud-based storage and sharing service called Office Live Workspace. The version I tested was indistinguishable from retail shrink-wrapped versions of the software and worked perfectly.

Today’s announcement adds a price tag to the mix: $69.95 for a one-year subscription, with the right to install the software on up to three different PCs (the same as the shrink-wrapped packages of the two separate products). Office Home and Student 2007 typically costs $129, and the going rate for an annual subscription for a security suite like Windows Live OneCare is about $30 (or $90 for a three-year term), which means the Equipt subscription costs much less upfront and the shrink-wrapped option doesn’t hit the break-even point until the end of the third year. Assuming Microsoft updates Office every two or three years, the subscription deal gets even better: Equipt users will be upgraded to the next Office version as soon as it’s available, whereas Office Home and Student 2007 isn’t eligible for upgrade pricing and users would have to pay another $129 to upgrade.

Sounds like a great deal, so why was I baffled?

Well, for starters, there’s the name. Equipt? Seriously? What is that supposed to mean? Presumably, it suggests a “well-equipped PC.” It doesn’t leverage any of the brand equity in the Office name and suggests hardware rather than software or a cutting-edge service.

And Microsoft’s press release delivers co-billing to Circuit City, which is called out in the subhead as if it were an exclusive deal. The body of the press release reinforces this perception: “Microsoft Equipt will be sold in nearly 700 Circuit City stores in the U.S. starting mid-July 2008.” But this part, several paragraphs later, suggests that the exclusivity, if any, is only temporary:

“We are very pleased to be the first partner to offer Microsoft Equipt through nearly 700 Circuit City retail outlets throughout the U.S.,” said Elliot Becker, vice president, general merchandise manager technology, Circuit City.

Mary Jo Foley dug a little deeper:

Starting on or around July 15, Equipt will be sold exclusively through the Circuit City retail chain, but Microsoft is looking to add other distribution channels for Equipt in the U.S. and abroad, said Bryson Gordon, Group Product Manager for Office. Gordon said Microsoft is looking to add other retail partners, PC makers interested in pre-installing the Equipt bundle and other “direct-from-Microsoft” channels over the next 12 months.

It certainly takes some of the luster off today’s Microsoft announcement when their exclusive partner, Circuit City, announces bad news on the same day: the white knight (Blockbuster) that had been considering an acquisition of Circuit City has backed out of the deal, two weeks after the company announced big losses. If your major partner is struggling financially and no stronger partners are willing to step up and begin selling this product, what does that say?

As for customers, the most interesting option for the subscription package is as a way to replace the trialware versions of Office normally bundled on new PCs and available for conversion at steep prices. Customers who would resist the $199 price tag of Office Basic or Standard might be willing to pay $70 for a one-year subscription (as long as they don’t need it for business purposes).

Conspiracy theorists can see this as the opening salvo for Microsoft’s attempts to convert all its software, including future versions of Windows, to pay-as-you-go services. Of course, it really isn’t new at all. Businesses that buy into Software Assurance have been paying the equivalent of subscription fees for years, and Microsoft has run trials of subscription software in other countries. The real question is whether this becomes an alternative to conventional open-ended licenses or whether it’s intended to be a replacement.

July 2nd, 2008

Microsoft to ratchet IE8 security another notch in Beta 2

Posted by Ed Bott @ 10:05 am

Categories: Security, Internet Explorer

Tags: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, ActiveX Control, Microsoft Corp., Beta, Site, IE8, Microsoft Windows, ActiveX/COM/COM+/DCOM, Phishing, Web Browsers

Sometime in August, Microsoft plans to release Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8. Yesterday, I spoke with Austin Wilson, Director of Windows Client Product Management at Microsoft, about some of the security-related changes due in this milestone, and got a preview of the changes announced today.

The most noticeable change is the SmartScreen Filter, which replaces the Phishing Filter found in IE7. It uses the same reputation-based filter as its predecessor, but adds a few tweaks to make it easier to spot social engineering attempts. IE8 adds domain highlighting (as shown below) to frustrate phishing attempts that use long, complex URLs to make a link appear to go to a legitimate domain.

Part of the work involves simplifying the interface for displaying potentially dangerous websites. In IE7, for example, the address bar turns yellow when you encounter a suspicious site and red when you attempt to visit a site that is reported as unsafe. In IE8 the yellow bar is gone, replaced by a dialog box. The green address bar for sites that use Extended Validation certificates remains.

When you try to visit a site that is listed in the database of known unsafe sites, the background of the browser window turns blood red and this stern warning appears:

The SmartScreen filter in IE8 also extends protection to download attempts, blocking access to servers that are known to be serving up malware

The concepts behind that work should be familiar to anyone who’s used a competing browser, such as the just-released Firefox 3. Corporate customers and security professionals should be more interested in architectural changes designed to block access to vulnerabilities in ActiveX controls and take advantage of Data Execution Prevention features.

The ActiveX changes (some of which were announced in May) allow controls to be locked to a specific site and to be offered on a per-user basis. The former prevents a hostile website from being able to call an existing ActiveX control (such as one installed by the system builder or with another program, or one downloaded from a different, presumably safe web page). The user (or a system administrator, using group policy) has to opt-in to those controls and can lock them for use only on a specific site.

ActiveX controls can also be offered on a per-user basis, bypassing the need for UAC prompts and lessening the possibility that one user can install a control that compromises the entire system or other user accounts.

In IE7, Data Execution Protection is disabled for the browser process by default, primarily for compatibility reasons. IE8 enables DEP on Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3, and Windows Server 2008. As a result, any page or add-in that tries to use a buffer overflow or other exploit to write executable code to an area of memory that is reserved for data will crash that browser tab (but shouldn’t take down other tabs).

Finally, IE8 is designed to protect from some forms of server-based attacks as well. The most noteworthy change is code that blocks common forms of cross-site scripting exploits. According to Wilson, IE8 will detect Type-1 (reflection) attacks and block script from being injected to web a server via URL.

I’ll have a more detailed look at these changes when the beta code is available next month.

June 26th, 2008

Intel stays behind the curve … again

Posted by Ed Bott @ 5:33 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Operating System, Microsoft Windows Vista, Intel Corp., Inquirer, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows XP, Operating Systems, Software, Ed Bott

The Inquirer is making a big fuss over Intel’s decision to continue using Windows XP instead of migrating to Windows Vista. A stunning rebuke, obviously, leading to a rousing chorus of “I told you so.”

Except that there’s nothing new here. The same thing happened in 2002, when Windows XP was shiny and new. What, you don’t remember? Why, I read it in the Inquirer, on January 10, 2002:

Windows XP might be the “best OS Microsoft ever produced” but it’s [sic] long time partner Intel thinks that ain’t necessarily so.

The corporation, which has around 80,000 employees, is rolling out Windows 2K rather than the latest greatest OS from Microsoft.

The decision was taken last year and Intel will spend much of this year standardising on W2K in every site and country in the world.

By the end of 2002, Windows 2000 was three years old, and Intel was just completing its OS rollout, skipping the then-current version. Sound familiar?

Steve Lohr of The New York Times piles on with this observation: 

Large companies routinely hold off a year or so after a new version of Windows is introduced before adopting it, waiting for initial bugs to be eliminated and for applications to be written. “But by 18 months, you’d expect to see a significant uptake, and we haven’t seen that,” said David Smith, a Gartner analyst. “There’s not much excitement.”

I don’t know what they’re putting in the brownies at Gartner these days, but by 18 months, most large organizations are just beginning to complete their evaluations of how their internal applications run on a new operating system family. Only a tiny percentage of enterprises do “forklift upgrades,” where every corporate PC is upgraded to a new OS in a short time. Not much excitement? Corporations don’t look for excitement in their IT investments. They look for stability and compatibility and, especially in the current economy, low costs.

I wrote about all this about six months ago (“Windows adoption rates: a history lesson”), and nothing has changed since then. Back in 2001, when Microsoft released Windows XP, Gartner correctly predicted that large businesses would shun both Windows 2000 and XP, with 75 percent sticking with Windows 95, 98, and NT4 at the end of 2002. What was XP’s market share one year after its release? Try “less than 10 percent.” How long was it before XP hit the 50% mark in terms of market share? The correct answer is “four years.”

Meanwhile, the real problem with any comparison between adoption rates of Windows XP and Windows Vista is the decision that Microsoft made in 2004 to ship Service Pack 2 as a free update rather than a new OS version. If Jim Allchin had made a different call and released XP SP2 as a separate product, Windows XP might have gone into the record books as a miserable failure, plagued by security problems and shunned by customers. Instead, it got a new lease on life and an unprecedented seven-year release cycle.

It’s unquestionably true that large businesses have resisted Vista. That’s not surprising, given the problems in the initial release and the relentlessly negative press coverage. But an equally important reason for the continued sluggishness in Vista uptake rates is the economy, which has slowed to a crawl. In trying economic times, one way for big corporations like Intel to save money is to stretch the useful life of hardware and software investments. Intel’s decision makers no doubt have a pretty good idea what’s in Windows 7 and when it’s likely to be released. Their decision to skip Vista tells me that the next version of Windows is further along than most outsiders think.