Time To Jump Ship?

The other day it came to me that sooner or later, I’m going to have to face it.

I’m doing all my development work on Windows XP SP3. It meets my needs just fine. But at some point in the next couple of years, I’m going to need new hardware, and by then, I’m going to be faced with Moving On.

I’ve had some pretty snide things to say about Vista in the past year and a half. It amounted, more or less, to saying that Vista is the work of the devil. My issues with Vista came partly from adopting it too early, when it was plagued with flaky drivers, and I’m now convinced that the new hardware I was using had a flaky memory controller that was contributing to the general chaos. Even so, I remain convinced that Vista is an obese, dysfunctional stain on the soul of humanity.

But I figured that by the time my hardware cycle pushes me forward, Windows 7 will be past its shakedown cruise, and surely the “version 1.1 effect” will kick in.

In the past few days, though, some reviewers have gotten an early look at Windows 7, and early word is not encouraging. In fact, InfoWorld’s Randall Kennedy was so bold as to label Windows 7 “Vista with a new coat of paint”. Still slow, still baroque, and still proud of it.

Kennedy even advocates giving some serious thought to cutting and running. He thinks the enterprise should be taking a good hard look at Linux and OS/X. Microsoft’s recent baffling ad campaign for Windows wasn’t exactly a confidence builder, either.

I have to confess that the main thing that keeps me in the Microsoft camp is the development ecosystem. Visual Studio, the Common Language Runtime, and everything in its orbit rocks. And I have lots of demand from paying clients to build solutions with that platform.

My guess is that Microsoft is sitting more or less where the British Empire was in 1895 or so. It’s an interesting parallel: the Brits controlled a quarter of the planet’s surface area and about the same percentage of its population. It seemed unassailable. Yet, it was coming apart at the seams just a few years later. It had become an international pariah for its bone-headed, arrogant, and tone-deaf handling of the Boer War. Within a couple of decades, World War One bankrupted the British Empire, effectively ending its reign as a world power.

Does a similar fate await Microsoft? I hope not, but some days I wonder. Personally I think they should clean house on the OS side, put the development tools in maintenance mode for a couple of years, and put Scott Guthrie and the rest of those geniuses behind Visual Studio to work on building a new OS from scratch.