After Long Wait, Microsoft's Vista Arrives

Yesterday's column features something I've only done twice this decade: A review of a brand-new Microsoft operating system.

Now just a day away from landing in stores, Windows Vista is arriving more than five years after XP shipped, and at least three years after it was once expected to debut.

(Note: That doesn't mean that XP will be retired anytime soon. Last Wednesday, Microsoft announced that it would continue to develop updates for XP until April of 2009, with security-only fixes continuing for an additional five years.)

After spending so many years researching, testing and writing about this upcoming release, Vista's here -- or close enough. It all feels a little anticlimactic. I guess the same way baseball writers feel after every World Series.

More on Microsoft's new operating system below, but first, a word about my column.

Starting this week, Fast Forward will run in Thursday's Business section instead of Sunday's. The plan is to keep Help File running on Sunday, where it will appear alongside Mike Musgrove's column. (Admit it, you all were sick of seeing so much of my byline on one day anyway.)

And that's not all that's changing in the world of Fast Forward. Beginning next week, this weekly e-mail newsletter will move into the blogosphere. I'll have more about it in my last e-letter, next Monday, or join me this Thursday for an online discussion. Instead of Mondays, I'll now be chatting on Thursdays.

Why Thursday? Aside from purely selfish reasons -- I've got better odds of making the section front on a weekday, and I'd rather have late deadlines wreck a Wednesday night than a Friday -- one big reason is simple competitiveness. Just as a lot of papers now publish their food sections on Wednesdays, much of the competing tech coverage runs on Thursdays. (Hi, Walt! Hi, David!) It's gotten to the point where tech-industry publicists schedule big product launches for Thursdays.

That puts me in a poor competitive position on Sundays (well, except on the rare occasions when other tech columnists make a mistake on Thursday, and run a correction on Friday, which I then see just in time to avoid putting the same error in my Sunday column).

By moving to Thursday, we can compete head to head. I also don't think it hurts to be able to give our $.02 worth on new tech products before the big shopping days of the week instead of halfway through them.

Thinking Inside the Box

Back to Vista ... In general, I like Vista's interface. It makes a lot of things easier and faster to do. After only a few days of using Vista full-time, I already miss the live previews of open windows you get when switching between open apps, as well as the tiny previews of documents you see in each folder's icon. Somebody at Microsoft deserves a pat on the back for creating these innovations.

But one part of the Vista interface is just laughably bad: The box it comes in.

The Vista box, about the size of a paperback book, is a roughly rectangular container of clear plastic with curves on two sides.

When I picked it up, the back cover flipped open to reveal some screen shots of Vista in action, so I immediately looked for a front cover I could open next. There wasn't one, nor was there a bottom or top flap.

I had to turn the box around and around a few times until I spotted a small red ribbon poking out the top; pulling that allowed me to swing open the interior frame of the box and reveal its contents (one CD, one slim printed manual, some promotional flyers and a sticker with the all-important product key).

That's right: Microsoft has shipped a box that looks much like everything else on the software shelf but doesn't work like any other box that I've ever seen.

Just in case this was only me, I gave the Vista box to my editor and said "open this." He spent a good half-minute in utter befuddlement, flipping the package end over end until he figured out how to liberate Vista from its plastic prison. (To be fair, maybe he would have been quicker if I hadn't been staring at him with a stopwatch in my hand and a malicious grin on my face.)

You Can't Spell Uncertainty Without U, A and C

Vista's User Account Control -- the mechanism by which the computer is supposed to ensure that no system-altering events happen that you don't don't approve first -- has me nervous.

That's not because UAC is a bad idea on principle. By getting away from the practice of having the user run as an administrator all the time, Vista tackles what could be Microsoft's single biggest security issue, one I've been criticizing for years.

But I had hoped that I wouldn't see the UAC prompt pop up as often as it did in my review. True, it's not nearly as annoying as it was in Beta 2 of Vista, where you'd get this nag just for deleting a desktop shortcut. But it also happens so often that I fear users will learn to ignore it, just as we tune out every other repetitive nag in our daily lives.

You want the "watch out, you could be in trouble" notice to crop up only when you're in some immediate danger. Mac OS X does this well. When a program asks for an admin password, it's such a rare event that you wonder what's going on. Most OS X applications never need any such high-level access, thanks to the way the operating system is so well insulated from its constituent applications.

If you run Vista, it's now your job to pay attention to the UAC dialogs, no matter how irksome they might get, and recognize those that come at odd times or in odd situations.

Microsoft's Jim Allchin recently wrote a long, thoughtful blog post on how UAC was developed and how he hopes it will work out. It's worth setting aside some time to read it.