You know, with the decision to make Virtual PC free, it strikes me that Microsoft could have made some bigger steps away from the path of compatibility with Vista. As it is, I’m running MySql 4.1 and Macromedia Studio from a Virtual machine running XP, which is a pain in the ass, but something I can live with. It’s a shame Microsoft didn’t take a page from Apple’s “run in Classic” or IBM/Microsoft’s OS/2 “DOS box” approach. Sure, it would have been a lot more disruptive, but in the long run some interesting improvements could have happened. Corporate users would have complained, but from what I’ve seen, there are enough incompatibilities to cause a ruckus anyway, and these companies are going to take at least 4 years to switch over anyway, by which point I would hope that most of their critical infrastructure would be web based (I know, there will be exceptions everywhere, but it seems to be the “future proofing” direction that most enterprises I know of are taking).
We’re always going to need an OS to make stuff happen on a computer, but system level dependencies should be decreasing over time. Maybe the Microsoft’s next kick at the can (which I don’t expect for at least 10 years) will be more bold.
…But enough complaining. Here’s something cool about Vista - the nifty thumbnails of applications as you hover over the task bar. They made me smile a bit when I saw them (which should be an OS’ primary responsibility, in my opinion), and when I saw the video sync, I may have chuckled out loud:
Technorati Tags: Vista, Virtual PC
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