Windows Vista Is Here: Will Companies Use It?

By NewsFactor Network | December 4, 2006

Windows Vista has arrived. Last Thursday at a Nasdaq event in New York, Steve Ballmer released Microsoft’s first version of Windows in five years, calling it nothing short of a “new era of business productivity.”

Despite Vista’s many delays and the sometimes skeptical eye that members of the press and pundits have turned on it, Vista’s release is a mammoth achievement. If nothing else, Microsoft spent billions to test, tweak, and vet the software’s 50 million lines of code. (Windows XP had some 40 million lines of code at its launch, by most counts.)

“It is the culmination of work that began in earnest in August 2004, when the first beta kicked off, followed by 27 months of stress testing, more betas, two RCs — release candidates — and more than 2.25 million downloads of the beta software,” wrote Forrester analysts Simon Yates and Benjamin Gray in a published research note.

Why Upgrade?

What’s in those 50 million lines of code? Among other features is Vista’s much-vaunted Aero interface, with semitransparent windows and so many fancy graphics that you’ll need high-end hardware just to run it.

But companies will find more value in Vista’s back-end improvements, including its tighter security. “They really have added multiple security features to the product that are beneficial to any customer who would consider the upgrade,” said security expert and Forrester analyst Natalie Lambert.

Among them are Windows Defender, a native antispyware tool, and User Account Control (UAC), which, according to Lambert, can prevent drive-by downloads, in which unwanted and often malicious software from suspect Web sites honeycombs your hard drive.

Vista also has BitLocker drive encryption, to keep private contents from prying eyes, and Microsoft Network Access Protection (NAP), which lets I.T. departments enforce their policies on users’ machines. “That will probably work as Longhorn is rolled out,” said Lambert, referring…

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