La vida con Vista (part 2)

Life with Vista (part 2)

OK… One of the things I have learned in this whole process with Vista is that Microsoft obviously names their products based on price points, not functionality. Vista Home is priced for the person who won’t pay more than $99 for any OS. Home premium is for the guy who will pay an extra $30 to play movies on his PC. Vista Business is obviously priced for the business OS market that is used to paying $200 for any network capable operating system and Ultimate is clearly priced for the geek who will pay anything for “all the toys”. Unfortunately they all have the same defective thinking behind the framework.

In my opinion, “Home” should be packaged with a recipe book, encyclopedia, and an on-line guide explaining what to pay the baby sitter. Now wouldn’t that be more useful? Home Premium should also include not only the ability to play movies, but an integrated PVR. A guide to fine wines and a voice activated HDTV tuner would top that one off for me. Vista Business should include Office Pro by default and should be stripped of security assuming it will be installed in a network out of the box. The Ultimate version should have all that and an on-line personal coach too.

I really think if Microsoft won’t make the above changes, they should at least release one more version and call it “Vista Guru”. This would be completely stripped of any security (and those annoying “are you sure” messages) assuming that it will be installed in a properly managed network. It would include remote management by default and all the games, movies, music, and anything else non-business would be non-existent. It would be tuned for speed, not beauty right out of the box and it would only be sold to someone who could produce an MCSE certificate. I’d buy that.

It would seem that Microsoft has created 4 versions of the same product with little regard for the fact that it completely alienates the business market that has been feeding it for years. While “Ultimate” is a really nice product for “Home” use, “Business” is a far cry from business-friendly. Every installation of Vista Business I have seen includes removing or disabling all the annoying, redundant “security”, games, media, etc that seem to be the hallmarks of this OS. This sounds like a really bad move when Red Hat, Novel, and Apple are aggressively going after that business market with trimmed-down, efficient, fast desktop operating systems.

I’ll keep running the Vista Ultimate system that I finally have connected to all the servers and network shares I need, but I don’t know for how long. I keep switching back to my Red Hat server to do anything productive… that’s not good news for the Vista box.

I’ll let you know how it goes….