Windows Vista: 100 days later

gallery

Devices are also starting to take advantage of the new hardware support in Vista, although it's still a small proportion of hardware. Only a handful of notebooks, remote controls and digital picture frames sport secondary Sideshow screens to remote Sidebar gadgets so far, for example. Jim Barber, a senior program manager, claims plenty of interest in Windows Rally "There's a lot of momentum: many people are starting to evaluate and some people are starting to ship web services for devices. These are the protocols we believe are going to make network connected devices to easy to use in the future, easy to configure and easy to maintain."

Rallying to consumers

The first Windows Rally devices shown in the WinHEC keynotes were consumer devices; a wireless digital camera and a digital picture frame. The wireless access point and Seagate's prototype Maxtor Shared Storage II NAS shown in the keynote are more suitable for home than enterprise use, but Barber expects the Rally technologies - Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD), Windows Connect Now, the Devices Profile for Web Services and Plug and Play Extensions (PnPX) - to find a home in the office. As well as simpler setup and maintenance, Rally offers security, he explained; "you can build devices that have strong cryptographically secure communications channels between that device and the PC". That could be secure printing, or scanning; he demonstrated initiating a scan from an MFP device rather than from the PC, so you can go to the scanner and push the scanned documents to the PC remotely, so you don't have to walk back and forth across the office to load the documents and start the scan, making it easy to leave confidential documents in the scanner when you're done.

Security strategy director Jeff Jones claims that Vista is ahead of the curve on security too. "Vista shows an improved situation over its predecessor as well as modern enterprise Linux distributions and the most recent major Mac OS X release. Windows Vista fixes in April had some effect in pushing total vulnerabilities up to seven, with five of them being High severity. Mac OS X, on the other hand, had the worst three-month count for both total and High Severity vulnerabilities.

If Vista is doing better than people expected, have the hardware and software companies been caught flat-footed? Roger Kay thinks in some cases, yes. "You could see stockpiling of memory going on a couple or three months in advance, you could see the vendors betting on memory, thinking Vista was going to take off. But they were hedging their bets, betting on it not being quite as big as it could have been. My sense is that people are playing catchup more now. I think that the ecosystem missed an opportunity and if a lot of partners had been able to step up simultaneously there would have been an impact that wasn't there, because Vista support rather dribbled out."

Email to a friend

Print this page