The "1920" experience

I have been making a few observations lately. Windows Vista will be a success, I know everyone doubts it ( I even started to doubt it myself after the dismal public beta release that had my centrino 1.6 1GB compaq nx 7010 widescreen blinking and grinding like a late nineties hard drive being defragged. I saw some good things though..unfortunately most of those have been sitting on a Mac for a good 24 months. I know 2 people in the last week that have gone out and bought mac books cause they thought it was game over. I'm hanging in there.

Anyway, there are good reasons for the delay....and Bill Gates needs to be respected....he holds back the release when he knows that he's going to be in the dog box with the CFO (a Kiwi i might add) for missing the holiday season this year.....any CFO would say 'Lets ship mate...our revenues for Q3 will be screwed otherwise, who cares if it isn't perfect, 75% of our fellow americans households have broadband and isn't that what 'Update Tuesday' is all about, "we have made update Tuesday painless now haven't we Bill ?...Bill where have you gone? Bill! Meanwhile Bill had already run off to the XBox team to check up on how Zune is going. Cause thats shipping for the holiday season. Some real interesting articles on that floating around the net. Microsoft is apparently prepared to take losses for 2-3 years on it as it knows it just has to be there - that is so true

Right....Vista...why it will be a success....What all the industry seem to fail to recognise is that Bill "gets" Moores Law...you know how PC's get more powerful by a factor of y every x years....Bill knows that Intel were on to something good....and his arch rival totally realised as well and completed validated by building Darwin OS X in parallel on the x86 architecture (what a well kept secret) then switched to Intel processors overnight...ever wonder why Apple didn't go for AMD instead (mate AMD have slaughtered Intel recently, why didn't Jobs go for them) ...its cause of the Pentium M, Celeron M, Solo, Duo, and now Core 2 Duo range... are FINALLY bloody amazing (the core 2 was the breakthrough) ....and it means faster computers for both desktops and mobiles that can run Windows Vista gracefully.....if you need more Ram (like 4 or 8 GB) , then get the "Booster"...another legendary idea...i blogged about that the other day if you are going WTF - that is old news. And the cool thing is that the CPU prices are going to be as cheap as chips - no price premium - don't you love when there are two heavy weights lugging it out.

So timing...well Intel can now ship 1 million units of the Core 2 duo immediately (thats amazing compared to what they could produce when they launched the Pentium series - i agree times have changed since 92 ).....Bill knows that people are going to be curious about the Zune....but the biggest hit this xmas has to be the Xbox 360. Microsoft know there is so much money in gaming and this Xmas is payback. Poor Sony...well the Japanese can play online by themselves on their PS3's this xmas...we know they are loyal supporters..and we know their cell phones (Sony/Ericsson) are so much cooler and better than anything else on the market...althought Motorolla have made a come back..the newest Razor is so cool.

Anyway....The latest build of Vista is way quicker anyway, alot of the inefficiences have been tidied up apparently since 1 June , combine that with an entry level Core 2 Duo and you have a great experience that will last the good part of 2.5 years. If you are a punter that will probably last 3.5 years cause everything for them now runs in the browser. if it doesn't it runs on your xbox360 or your phone Combine it with the 22" widescreen MS are promoting with their name on it (thanks Samsung) and you have a 1920 wide pixel Vista experience -the absolute minimum for a home pc...1680 may scrape through on a laptop but i suspect we'll start to see some real beefed up laptop displays come out cause its what we all use these days with our 3G/3.5G cards and WIMAX.

Then throw in Vista Media Centre (on a Aopen mini pc or Mac Mini running both Os's - that will be a cool party tricky to show off with your Mini Remote, switching from iTunes to Media Centre at the push of a button), link it up with your Xbox 360 with the Live Marketplace and Kachingo. Lets just hope MS ditches the Spotlight in favour of some new immersive gateway to the TV Internet. You can throw away all your remotes..the MS media centre remote is the easiest to use..no clutter just buttons that actually do stuff.

We live in challenging times people, where information overload is so bad (we are slowly starting to learn to manage it) but now web services are standard and our development shops finally get Web 2.0 (we hope) .They have to deploy on desktop, roaming laptops, hybrid smartphones,TVs, and cars. MS are now playing drs and nurses (have you heard about Microsofts latest aquisition to tidy up the technology solution for hospitals -this is great - get the NZ health system as a beta customer to cut our waiting lists - thats what they've been doing in the US)

Adobe Flex 2 and traditional HTML AJAX is good as well but its just the beginning, with the web community finally pulling up their socks....still way too much bloat.

Microsoft have been in all these games for year and finally will start to see some returns for the seeds they have planted.

The cool thing is that open source model is proven, and is needed to continue to champion innovation. mySQL turned the database world upside down. Apache web servers running Linux made 24x7 web busness a reality. yes our biggest ecommerce site was up for 515 days without a single reboot - thats more dough and cheese than anyone could argue with.

The 1920 experience will be here ready for the US school kids to go back to school in force next Summer. the business community will start to hit it up large next February. and the early adopters will be out next week buying the latest Dell notebook with one of these new COOL core 2 duos, slapping on latest Vista build, Office 2007 for word, ppoint and excel (yes they do rock)...they will use IE 7 with tabbed browsing, and Gmail (even though it is annoying) and google calendar on a second tab (cause outlook doesn't cut it anymore -i know 2007 is cool but it isn't cool enough) , google news on a third, they will have their RSS Atom feeds to keep them in the know, and they'll continue to blog as they try and put it all in perspective. they will tap control twice to use google desktop and find anything instantly on their machine.They still go for a run or bike with their Nano cause it just makes sense or they might use "pPod" on an old IPAQ and get the latest touchscreen clickwheel IPOD experience for free.

And people this is why the "1920 experience" or Microsoft way of doing things will live on.
Visionaries, architects and developers are the real ones that will make it happen though.