By Claire Ayles
When Steve Ballmer comes jumping out of a cardboard cake on November 30th to herald the arrival of Microsoft Vista, will anyone actually care?
Well, if you ask most European businesses, the answer is 'not really'. According to market analysts at Forrester Research, a minuscule 6% of European IT managers intend to ditch their existing operating systems in favour of Vista within the next six months.
Why are European businesses so underwhelmed by Vista?
Maybe it just galls us to yet again line the pockets of a company which has a turnover that rivals the GDP of most countries - we'd rather make Microsoft sweat a bit before handing over our hard-earned cash. But more likely it's because we need to be convinced of the benefits promised by Vista before making the switch.
Of all Vista's new bells and whistles, the most hyped relate to security. Indeed, Microsoft has gone to great lengths to illustrate how Vista can keep networks safe and secured from hack and malware attacks.
Until now, Microsoft and security have gone together like peaches and wasabi, so it's sensible that it wants to plug the holes and stop the worms that have been a constant menace to users of previous Microsoft operating systems ie. nearly all of us.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, it has absolutely no track record of developing secure platforms, and neither does it have a strong heritage of offering more specialist security services, such as anti-virus scanning. In short, the folks in Seattle are asking us to take a massive leap of faith if we're to believe that Microsoft has suddenly become the guardian of business networks.
In the end, it's doubtful that Microsoft's new security features will make or break the ultimate success of Vista; eventually we'll all upgrade because we always do. However, it's open to debate about whether businesses will rely on Vista's in-built security features to protect their networks.
Microsoft faces a hell of a PR re-positioning task if we’re ever to believe it's up to the security job – still, it’s going to be interesting to see them try...
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