Eyes Open To Windows Vista

By
Ugo Eriobuna
and
David Valker




Microsoft has long promoted itself as being about helping individuals and communities around the globe with the mission of enabling new avenues of social and economic opportunity extending particularly to the estimated 5 billion people that have yet to realize the benefits of technological advance. The multinational company’s tools to achieve this are transforming education, fostering local innovation, and enabling jobs and opportunities to create a continuous cycle of sustained social economic growth for everyone. While achieving these goals currently remains a distant prospect, thirty years ago the dream of a PC in every middle-income home seemed likewise impossible. Today, with Microsoft having reached more than one billion users, life has changed profoundly: information is more readily available, connections are more easily made and commerce is more quickly undertaken. Bill Gates - along with his company – has indeed moved closer to his goals.

The latest move is called Windows Vista. Naturally, it contains a dazzling array of new features; some of the most significant include an updated graphical user interface and visual style called Windows Aero. Aero uses graphics hardware to add translucent boarders to your windows. Windows Aero builds on the basic Windows Vista user experience and offers Microsoft’s best-designed, highest-performing desktop experience. Using Aero requires a PC with a compatible graphics adaptor and running a Premium or Business edition of Vista. László Vajgel, working for Fourcut, an editing studio, when asked his views on Vista he said:

“There have been a lot of changes in the new software,” said László Vajgel, of Fourcut, an editing studio in Budapest, Hungary. “The buttons and functions I got used to in XP are not quite the same in Vista.”

Vajgel also expressed doubts about the number of people actually making the switch to the new software in his home market of Hungary.

“Most people here use, well - what is a nice way to say - ‘unlicensed products.,’” he said. “This cuts off the biggest share of buyers. Also, people don’t think that the product is that good at first.”

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, editor of the US-based Ziff Davis’ Internet Linux & Open Source expressed his own views.

“Vista will be better than XP, which has easily been Microsoft's best desktop operating system to date,” Vaughan-Nichols said. “However, Vista also requires far more hardware oomph than previous Windows systems. I'd say Intel's recommendations are pretty much a minimum for Vista. I would only add that if you expect to see the fancy desktop, you need to invest.”

On the other hand, companies, institutions, and business organizations can afford to use this new software at the moment in Hungary. Most individual users living in Budapest think it is too costly and prefer to wait till the price value comes down. Moreover, as could be seen from the release of previous Microsoft operating systems, they always need some adjustments. In addition, the product is only useable after a few months of real testing by users.

The testing process by real users won’t make Microsoft weaker, as people opposing “going global” hope. Vista continues the path, started in 1975, in which the computer transformed from an awkward, unfriendly machine to our everyday instrument and “friend”.