Microsoft Partners Brace For Windows Vista Fallout

Microsoft’s partner ecosystem is bracing for the market disruption that will precede and follow the release of the software giant’s long awaited Vista operating system.

Hardware partners applauded Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates’ formal release of Vista Beta 2 at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) last week. But as the code moves from lab to broad beta testing over the next few weeks, partners predict that an avalanche of device drivers and application incompatibilities will crop up along with end users resistance to the new interface.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said last week at another event that Vista could slip by a month or so but will be delivered in early 2007. Some say hardware and software partners need the extra time to gear up. Officially Microsoft is sticking to a release date of November for volume licensed customers and January 2007 to the channel broadly.

’This is as big a change as when we went from Windows 9.X to NT,’ said Edward N. Dekker, a consultant and principal at Eclectic Engineering, of New Ipswich, N.H. ’The changes made in Vista, even small changes in networking and power management,will require rewrites of every driver.’

Independent hardware vendors, for example, will have to modify their drivers while independent software vendors and custom application developers must test and make changes to their applications to run on Vista. Even Office 2007, which also moved into beta 2 testing last week, has run into snags with Vista, sources said.

Microsoft’s new device driver model has improved driver quality but there are changes that will hinder developers, Dekker said.

For example, the integration of driver verification in the base OS means developers won’t have as many liberties as in the past, such as editing boot.ini files easily. Additionally, software vendors are required for the first time to develop and certify 64-bit drivers for their applications. All of these factors could slow availability of peripherals and applications.

Dramatic changes to the user interface and installation process have enormous value but will disrupt end users, partners also say.

’Vista changes a lot of behavior and requires retraining,’ said Joseph Newcomer, president of FlounderCraft, a software design and consulting firm in Pittburgh. ’The users will be a bit traumatized. The GUI, menus, toolbars will all be different.’

Vista is Microsoft’s first major Windows upgrade in five years and is currently being tested at 500 corporate customers on 8,000 desktops.

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Security is another major improvement that will help data centers but could hinder smaller companies. User account protection is a robust new security feature that will insulate users from many viruses and worms but the way it is implemented is flawed, said Don Burn, a device driver and file system consultant and principal at Reliable Networking.

Small and midsized businesses and partners will confront dialog boxes popping up fairly frequently asking if they want to run in user account mode or administrative mode. The irritation may prompt them to turn administrative mode on so the boxes disappear.

’This is a serious issue,’ Burn said. ’It irritates and tempts the users to hit administrative mode to shut up the pop up questions. And then end user is without protection.’

At WinHEC, Microsoft also announced plans to add Windows Virtualization to the Windows Longhorn Server, which also moved into Beta 2 testing last week. Microsoft also showed off new form factors and mobile devices including Motorola’s Q with push e-mail based on Windows Mobile 5.0 and ultra-mobile PCs running Vista.

As the six month countdown begins, Microsoft issued calls to action and programs for independent hardware vendors, ISVs and even system builders to prepare for Vista.

As part of this, Microsoft announced a Certified for Vista logo, which signifies that an IHV or ISV has optimized its product for the OS upgrade. A lesser logo, Works With Vista, merely assures customers that their devices and applications are compatible with Vista.

Microsoft also announced at WinHEC an Application Compatibility Toolkit released in conjunction with Beta 2.

The tests so far show that Vista will drive a new PC refresh cycle. ’In most PCs, the fancy Aero user interface won’t work with existing hardware,’ said Burns, of Reliable Networking, noting that several of his friends with year-old PCs have tested their systems' compatibility with Vista and earned a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10.

Microsoft estimates that 200 million PCs will be sold this year, and 500 million will be sold over the next two years, in part due to the launch of Vista and its hefty requirements.