Anybody who's tried to hook a new "Vista" laptop into an existing local area network ("LAN") knows that Microsoft has lost it's way in making networking easy.
In LAN history Microsoft has gone from "no network" to grudging acceptance of the early Novell on through to its "cake or death" (thanks Eddie) embrace of the concept with NT and MS-LAN Manager. Happily it didn't take them long to understand the importance of the internet protocols and to, sort of, get in line with the rest of the world.
By the time they got around to Windows XP sanity reigned and LAN Manager did not. Hooking up an XP computer to a LAN and to the Internet could, in many cases, be fully automatic and totally friendly and easy. Dude.
In fact; by the time that Windows XP's LAN stuff got around, Apple actually got to learn a few friendliness tips from Microsoft. Dude!
But now comes Vista. Very pretty and, in many parts, very easy to use. But over all; a huge incomplete miss. Much of it is actually harder for non-tech's to figure out than XP. But even if we set that aside as, possibly, just a reaction to change we're still left with how much of it is incompatible with existing Windows systems.
An example (one only, of many): There are uncounted scores of printers that will work with XP and backward and that, separately will work with Vista. But if the printer is attached and shared on an existing XP oriented LAN then there's a real good chance that Vista won't be able to use it over the LAN.
Say; you have a small law office with a half-dozen XP desktops and a handful of XP laptops all working together like clockwork. Now you try to add a laptop that came loaded with Vista. Guess what; the new guy may not be able to print. Really. It may actually crash when it tries to print on the XP shared printers!
What the heck is this?
Say you have some software that works beautifully on your XP machines but then need to add a new PC that comes loaded with Vista. You'd better be sure that it works FIRST. This isn't the old days when compatibility was either assured or could be turned on as in XP.
This is something that Windows could learn from Apple. If you want to be incompatible to encourage change -- as between System 9 and OS-X? -- you should at least let the old software run painfully slow.
It's astounding. A huge faux pas on Microsofts part.
There was a time when you could count on Windows working. It took a looooong time for Windows to get there in XP-SP2, but it was pretty close to achieved. Now we're back to the dark ages of 1980 incompatibility -- excep it's all inside Microsoft and Windows!
OS-X works better with XP than Vista does.
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