Why Vista matters

With Windows Vista coming under critical fire, most would ask why would Microsoft push this monster on the computing world. Especially if the majority of the current computer specifications can't meet the minimum hardware requirements. Though its hard to argue against the performance issue, it is something that will go away over time. The big reason for pushing Vista has very little to do with the consumers but more so the developers.

For years Microsoft has been trying to fade out their Win32 API, this API is one of the most powerful API's on Windows and is also one of the biggest problems. In fact a great deal of the security related problems were related to the Win32 API's design, it wasn't design with Security in mind. So with Vista Microsoft is trying harder to branch away from this API and it seems that they're trying to replace it with their .NET framework. All of this is an effort to move more developers into the managed code philosophy. They've event extended it providing more media focused interface layers that are meant to provide the ground work for future third party applications. This is why Microsoft wants Vista out there but it seems that their commitment to managed code is starting to bite them where it counts. Even though there is a lot they can improve on and maybe .NET is not the answer for Win32. The idea of going into a completely "managed" environment, is very compelling and definitely reason enough to push out Vista to the world.

There are lots of reasons to move to managed environment most of which is to reduce (if not eliminate) problems such as memory leaks and pointer problems. The only thing that gets sacrificed is the unlimited access to everything, which isn't entirely a bad thing. That being said, there is also the possibility of introducing the ability to have your code be more portable, since managed code is interpreted it can (theoretically) be but on a different platform and run with out having to recode. So in theory Microsoft is creating a tremendously powerful platform for developers, as long as they can get Vista into the hands of users. Unfortunately its the users that will have to sufferer through this performance issue transition.