Jokes

When Steve Ballmer launched the consumer version of Windows Vista in January, he boasted that the highly touted operating system was compatible out of the gate with hundreds of software applications from major independent software vendors. Consumers could rush out to their nearest Best Buy or Circuit City, buy a Windows Vista PC, and expect to run all of the latest productivity and entertainment programs without a hitch, Ballmer said. What the Microsoft CEO failed to mention, not surprisingly, is that absent from his list of Windows Vista-friendly ISVs were the makers of some of the world's most widely used and important programs. Some products made by Adobe, IBM, Symantec, and a number of other high-profile developers were absent from the list of applications that Microsoft says are either fully certified for Windows Vista or will, at the very least, run relatively trouble free on the new OS.
Despite the omissions from its list, Microsoft officials insist that Windows Vista isn't suffering from a compatibility gap. They maintain that the current number of applications certified for the operating system is about what should be expected for a product that has been on the market for nearly three months. In addition, more applications are being added to the list all the time.
"You have to remember that our ecosystem includes hundreds of thousands of applications," said Dave Wascha, the company's director of Windows client partner marketing. "When we look at our internal metrics, we're way ahead of where we were with Windows XP at the same time," he said.
To emphasize the point, Wascha noted that Microsoft first started reaching out to ISVs whose applications would need to run on Windows Vista back when it was still just a gleam in the company's eye -- as far back as 2003, when Microsoft kicked off the first of what would be hundreds of strategic design reviews on the technology. "We highlighted what changes we were planning, and how we may have to work with partners to do some of that [compatibility] work," said Wascha.
Throughout the Windows Vista development process, Microsoft invited software engineers from hundreds of key application makers to Redmond for formal and informal meetings. There, visiting programmers would gather daily in a building about 100 yards from where Windows Vista was undergoing production. "There were engineers going back and forth between buildings, impromptu whiteboarding sessions were held, whatever was required," said Wascha.
Microsoft also did its own, automated testing of Windows Vista for compatibility with 1,200 to 1,400 major consumer and business applications, performing as many as 35,000 tests per week in the run-up to the product's January launch. "The end result is a couple of million automated tests over the development lifetime," said Wascha.
The stats are impressive, but also beg the question: With such an extensive compatibility program in place, why are some key software programs still not fully certified for Windows Vista?
It turns out that updating applications for Windows Vista is a significantly more complex a task than what faced ISVs when they needed to revise their products for the move from Windows NT and Windows ME to Windows XP in 2001. The most challenging problem, according to ISVs and Microsoft officials, is to create applications that will work well with Windows Vista's advanced security features, such as the User Account Control. UAC is designed to prevent business desktop users from making changes to their system images without approval from an IT administrator. The feature operates at the kernel level within Vista and, among other things, can impact the way third-party applications, including antivirus software, work. "Our customers demanded that we make security a top priority," said Wascha. "But what that means is that there are vendors whose products are in the security space that are going to have to do some more work" to attain Vista certification. One of those vendors is software developer Symantec, publisher of the popular Norton line of antivirus software. A spokesman for the company confirmed that upgrading applications for Windows Vista was more difficult than updating apps for Windows XP. "It's no easy task, it's a much different process" said the spokesman, who added that Symantec continues to work with Microsoft to obtain Windows Vista certification.
But it's not just security software vendors that have been a blt late to the game in terms of having fully compatible Windows Vista applications. Key products from IBM and Adobe Systems, among others, also lack Vista certification. Officials at those companies blame the situation on bad timing.
Windows Vista's debut will have preceded the unveiling of major new versions of Adobe's Photoshop, InDesign, and Dreamweaver digital publishing products by just a few months, noted Caleb Belohlavek, director of the Creative Suite group at Adobe. As a result, Adobe has decided to concentrate its development resources on ensuring that those new products, and not its current line of digital publishing software, are fully Vista compatible. "We made a decision, which was a hard decision, to focus on making our next set of products the best products for Vista," said Belohlavek.
The products, part of Adobe's Creative Suite 3, shipped in mid-April.
Adobe's decision isn't sitting well with some users of the current versions of its products, who will have to spend hundreds of dollars to upgrade to CS3 if they want applications that are fully Windows Vista compatible. "Blame! We want to know who is to blame for this disaster!" said Grant Simmons, president of the Simmons Group, in an e-mail to InformationWeek.
Adobe's CS2 products can run on Windows Vista, but users may face some performance problems. Photoshop CS2, for instance, requires users to register the software each time it's launched on a Windows Vista PC, even if it has already been registered. Dreamweaver 8, Adobe warned, will crash on some Vista computers when users browse for files. InDesign customers, meanwhile, may get a false error message indicating they don't have enough available disk space to run the product.
As for IBM, it's taking a position similar to Adobe's in terms of updating some key products for Windows Vista. While its ubiquitous Lotus Notes e-mail and messaging products run on Vista, they aren't officially certified for the operating system and users may encounter some glitches. An IBM spokesman said the company has no plans to issue a patch, instead preferring to focus developer time on ensuring that the forthcoming Lotus Notes 8 -- due out this spring -- is fully certified for Windows Vista. "It's a matter of priorities and what we can do with the resources we have," said IBM's spokesman.
Microsoft said it supports those decisions, even though they could cause some potential Windows Vista buyers to forego, or at least delay, upgrading to the new operating system. "Certification [for Windows Vista] presents a very high quality bar," said Wascha. "It's not reasonable for people to go back and do that level of work for their old applications." Windows Vista is selling well, despite the lingering compatibility issues. Microsoft recently said it sold 20 million Windows Vista licenses in the first month of availability -- more than double the number of Windows XP licenses that were sold in the first two months after XP hit the market. But some analysts noted that the PC market itself has more than doubled since Windows XP debuted, a fact that makes the official sales numbers not as impressive as they might seem at first blush. The fact is, compatibility issues have initially caused some large potential customers to think twice about moving to Windows Vista. The Federal Aviation Administration, for instance, may pass on upgrading its 45,000 desktop and laptop computers from Windows XP to Vista in part because of such concerns. "We're exploring the cost to deploy this in our environment, but when you consider the incompatibilities with previous versions it needs a lot more study," said Dave Bowen, CIO of the FAA.
Among other things, Bowen said a number of the plug-ins that the FAA uses to open attached files from within Lotus Notes don't appear to work properly on Windows Vista-equipped systems.
Meanwhile, other government agencies are discovering that some of their key applications suffer performance problems on Windows Vista. At the Environmental Protection Agency, tech staffers have found that backing up files from the agency's Cameo (Computer-Aided Management of Emergency Operations) program is problematic if the program is stored in Windows Vista's programs folder, according to a memo issued last month by IT staff at the EPA.
In addition, a tool called EZ GPO created by the government's Energy Star program -- a joint effort by the EPA and Department of Energy -- to allow network administrators to automatically adjust the power consumption of computers on a network won't work on Windows Vista, according to an internal Energy Star bulletin seen by InformationWeek.
Microsoft officials insist that such early hang-ups are normal and won't hurt Windows Vista's sales in the federal government market. "These are some of the biggest enterprise customers in the world," said Curt Kolcun, Microsoft's federal sales director. "We're fully confident they'll achieve standardization [on Windows Vista] over the next several years."
But it's not just government agencies that are skipping Windows Vista out of compatibility concerns. A $350 software bundle that engineering students at Virginia Tech are required to purchase for their upcoming fall coursework isn't Windows Vista friendly. As a result, the department is advising students not to bring Vista-based laptops to class when they show up later this year.
No doubt there are many other such examples to be found within the private and public sectors. Should Microsoft be worried? In years past, maybe not. During previous releases of new operating systems, the company could afford to be nonchalant about compatibility issues, knowing they would be resolved over time. After all, what choice did customers have? The only real competing PC platform until recently, Apple's Macintosh, has perennially suffered from a far worse shortage of compatible applications.
But the game has changed. New competitors are emerging. The FAA, for instance, is considering moving to Google's new online Google Apps package to escape compatibility problems that may arise from combining Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows Vista on older desktops. Meanwhile, Dell Computer has announced that it will begin shipping some PCs with a version of the open-source Linux operating system pre-installed instead of Vista.
If temporary Windows Vista compatibility issues lead customers to alternatives, even as a stop-gap solution, Microsoft faces the risk that they might never return. Business professors like to call that the "thin edge of the wedge" phenomenon -- competitors with a foot in the door are sure to try and kick it down altogether.
Still, Wascha remains undaunted. "The coverage we have today is outstanding. Every time you try to bring an entire ecosystem around to a new product, you are going to have some speed bumps," he said. Microsoft hopes those bumps won't become big potholes.