Barely a day goes by when someone I am speaking to or
swapping e-mails with does not moan about application compatibility
issues with
Microsoft's Vista platform.
Worse still, we are having
Windows Vista forced upon us whether we like it or not, which
spells all kinds of problems for home users and businesses.
User concern has seen major names in the PC and laptop world,
such as Dell and HP, offering downgrades from Vista to XP.
Typically this response has been in the form of offering XP Pro
recovery discs to those who request one, which can be used to
revert a
Vista machine to XP Pro.
Although industry commentators have said this is happening
purely at a business level, if you pop into a retail store and ask
how Joe Public is taking to Vista you will find the same answer as
in the business community - they are not. The reality is that these
downgrade requests are coming from all types of users.
Looking at the bigger picture, the result is that businesses are
avoiding Vista. The situation is compounded by the knowledge that
Microsoft is now going to release a Service Pack 3 for XP in the
coming months. Ironically, this means that
Microsoft is the biggest rival to Vista take-up.
I spotted this entry on a blog site that made me laugh, but
summed up the issues as being no laughing matter: "Finally took the
plunge and installed a workstation with running Vista Business.
1. Software incompatibility - big issue.
2. Froze both of our servers (Windows 2003) - big issue.
3. Will not write to a folder even though I have 'effective
privileges' of an administrator - big issue."
However, as this is likely to be the final service pack for XP,
businesses have no option but to move to Vista if they want to
continue down the Microsoft route. In which case, what do they
do?
Moving from XP to Vista
One possible answer comes in the form of a product I have just
looked at that is designed to analyse and detail potential
migration issues when moving from XP to Vista, as well as other
platforms, such as the mysterious virtual world that is
SoftGrid.
The product is
Apptitude from London-based AppDNA. Using Microsoft's Virtual
Server, the product lets you create a virtual copy of all your
applications and install procedures - MSI-based, or otherwise, off
the shelf or in-house developed - and then, using an algorithmic
engine, it analyses the software installation and run-time
behaviour of those applications.
At the end of the analysis, both a summary overview and detailed
report is generated (you can generate these as formatted PDF
reports or use the raw data in whatever way you choose), which uses
a traffic light (green, amber, red) approach to highlight potential
migration issues. For example, these might be driver- or
registry-related.
The reports produced by Apptitude are suitable for techies or
developers within an enterprise or independent software house to
use, as well as for the financial directors to calculate the cost
of moving to the new platform.
The result, if we take an enterprise example, is that what would
take months or years in manual form - and lots of consultancy fees
- is reduced to days or weeks. Moreover, it is an enabler for
moving to a new operating system where otherwise a company might
delay that move until the last possible moment (not ideal if there
is no support coming from Microsoft at this point).
What Microsoft does next
The Vista problems remind me of a previous generation of
migration issues - when Novell introduced Netware version 4.0.
Then, the migration issues were as major as now. The result was
that an independent software supplier released a product that eased
the path for businesses to move to Netware 4, enabling it to be
adopted far more quickly than would have happened otherwise.
In that instance, it eased the path so well that Novell ended up
buying that independent software supplier and incorporating the
product into Netware 4.1. Whether Microsoft will follow suit here
is yet to be seen.