Setting aside for the moment that I am pretty anti-Microsoft, the more I look at the news on the upcoming Windows Vista the more I seem to think that this is going to be a monumental failure. I think the very premise of Vista is wrong. The real reason Microsoft is releasing a new version of Windows is not because they have something worth saying, its because they need some reason to justify keeping the Windows business unit around. In any matter, that was purely speculation, there are some solid reasons why Vista will flop.

Complete lack of innovation. This is pretty subjective but when I look at what Vista is it smacks of Windows XP trying to catch up to Mac OS, and not doing a very good job of it at that. What does Vista really bring to the operating system market? What is new? Well they did revamp the user interface (or "user experience" for marketing people) however what value does this add? I have got to say that in my opinion XP is ugly, the blue new-style theme takes up too much screen real estate and the gray is... well... gray. The new UI look is kinda cool but realistically your going to need a pretty beefy computer to enable all the transparency effects anyhow, plus from what I have seen of Vista its still not nearly as sexy as OS X. What else? Well there is the typical Microsoft-style half-assed attempt to duplicate iLife. Windows "entertainment" applications have always seemed inferior to everyone else, thats why most serious Windows users use Winamp or iTunes instead of Media player. I will refrain from ripping on IE 7 and Outlook Express, everyone else on the internet beat me to it.

Crappy security. Sure, Microsoft touts Vista as being the most secure operating system they have ever written. Anybody want to take bets on how long it takes for the black hats to rip it a new one? My money is on 2-3 months. It also seems that Microsoft has added a lot of security features that mean well but haven't been well thought out. For example, patch guard, the system that is supposed to protect the kernel from patching. The only problem is that this makes it just that much harder for people to write drivers for Windows and do more advanced processing that could take advantage of patching the kernel instead of using the slower APIs. Plus, if Windows Defender is the best indication of the best Microsoft can do to prevent spyware then we are in very sad shape indeed.

Licensing and validation. This is a pretty big hot-spot issue for me. It seems like with every new release of Windows Microsoft adds more licensing security to their product. Every time I mention this it never fails that someone points out that Microsoft makes the most pirated software in the world which may or may not be true but there have got to be better ways of dealing with this. The more activation and validation they build into their products the more I feel like my computer is treating me like a criminal. Also, it really rubs me the wrong way when a vendor thinks they should be able to dictate their wishes to a customer. Earth to Microsoft, I am licensing the product from you which means I should be in control of what I do with it not you. Sigh... I could go on forever on this one but it tends to become a cyclical argument loaded with fallacies that neither side really ever wins. The main point is that when the software treats me like a criminal on my own computer that is a bad thing which consumers should speak out against.

Given all those reasons and also noting that desktop Linux is starting to become a viable alternative to Windows thanks to Ubuntu I would say that Vista is going to flop. People are starting to realize that all the really cool stuff is happening in the Apple and Linux circles and are starting to adopt alternatives to Windows.

Full Disclosure: I am primarily a very happy Gentoo Linux user who also happens to keep a Windows XP computer and a Macintosh around for fun. I use Windows primarily at my day job and I administer a mixed Windows/Linux network as a consultant. I am heavily biased against Windows for many reasons.