Adventures in home working

I don’t run Linux on a day to day basis, but I was interested to see the sparring between Joe Wilcox and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols both from eWeek both trying to make the case for the superiority of Vista and Linux respectively.  My own take, I’m with Joe – I think XP is the competition for Vista and like Joe I think Vista is improving steadily as Microsoft drip feed us updates on a regular basis.  I’m lucky though – I don’t have to wait for these updates because on my Desktop (I don’t stress my laptop) I run Vista 64 and it’s already rock solid.

For me Vista is approaching the level of reliability of an appliance, it just always works.  I’ve not had an operating system crash, or problem that forced a reboot for nearly 6 months.  Applications still crash, but they seem to crash just as often when I run Linux.

Steven has a point though, disruptions start small and at the extremes.  Linux is powering along replacing Unix Workstations and we are seeing a lot of activity in handheld, low end (kids) laptops, thin clients and low end PCs.  Microsoft need to watch these under and over served Windows user populations. 

However I’m confident that Microsoft understand disruptive innovation very well and I think it’s unlikely that they don’t have contingency plans, one example might be the re-architecting of windows to allow several different variants of windows (probably including the mobile ones) all to run off a single (micro) kernal.