I keep hearing this question: Does Vista matter? Preston Gralla, over on O’Reilly blogs, is the latest to ask.
OK, let’s assume that Preston is right. Let’s assume that Google has a rich Internet OS that comes out in the next year. Let’s say it does everything you want to do. Email, blogs, calendaring, gaming, mapping, searching, and all that stuff. Assume they have 100 components like Gmail that do various things.
Oh, and assume that we are not gonna work on any of these services ourselves (that’s an assumption that’s already been proven false — have you missed the videos I’ve run in the past two weeks about the new Hotmail, start.com, Virtual Earth, and other services we’re working on?)
I think such a view of the world assumes we don’t do anything better than XP. That’s clearly not gonna be true. Such a Web-oriented world will look better on Windows Vista due to AERO. It’ll perform better due to the new networking stack and new work in kernel. It’ll sound better due to the new audio stack. It’ll be more reliable due to the new driver stack. Don’t believe me, that’s ATI saying that. It’ll have better video due to the new compositing engine. And there’s a bunch of other things to come. And we haven’t really started talking about the applications that’ll come on it that’ll compete with the Web-based components. The new Windows Mail, for instance, still has a better offline story than even Yahoo’s new email system (which is nicer than Google’s, by the way).
So, go ahead. Tell me that Windows Vista isn’t gonna matter in a Web services based world. I sure don’t believe that.
Oh, and just in case you do believe that, wait until you see the video I’m doing next week with the Windows Gadgets team.
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
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