Adventures in home working

I long thought that Microsoft should have focussed more on making Windows the best possible platform for the delivery of applications, regardless of whether they were developed on the Microsoft platform or not.  That’s what enterprises want, we think of the desktop largely as a way to get applications to users – why doesn’t Microsoft?  So I was pleased to see Microsoft striking a deal to include Flash LE and Acrobat Reader LE on Windows Mobile.  Hopefully this pragmatism will extend to Windows as well.  Why doesn’t Windows ship with and maintain:

1. Flash
2. Acrobat Reader
3. ICA client
4. etc

In particular if Microsoft took more seriously this key role for Windows, enterprises would have a lot less integration and testing to do when they develop their standard environments.

In my home lab I’m always flipping between VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server (and clients), with the announcement of a new version of VMware server it looks like another flips on the horizon.  Probably when I update the lab hosts to Windows Server 2008. 

Windows Server 2008 is looking very cool for a home lab,  with the ability to publish terminal services sessions over HTTP to the Internet, Seamless terminal server windows, multi-volume disk encryption (finally a secure home environment).

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.