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Story: Government agency tells schools to shun Vista

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Vista and Office - interface changes

As an IT professional in industry, at present I can see no reason for a business organisation to move to Vista. There simply isn't any unbiased and tangible reason to do so. All much of us have heard is MS rhetoric. Time is needed to see how it plays out.

As for the education establishment, where computing is concerned, I still consider a solid education in the principles and concepts of computing is paramount. New interfaces and gimmicks can be learned easily by students as part of their ongoing experience through education and beyond.

Office is a little different - MS have moved everything around, but besides the front end, it's largely the same package. Sure there are more new features and abilities to integrate office with other parts of the MS dominion, but these are still under utilised and hardly core to the broader IT usage education. Especially when considering that most businesses (in my experience) stay away from the "bleeding edge" and rather wait for less considered IT departments (or those with money to burn) to find all the faults and problems first. A great many "revolutionary" features of the last MS Suite are massively under utilised at present anyway.

Vista and Office 2K7 are market push. Should we be pushing students towards immature and what may be products that are not even needed so soon? I don't think so. Maybe 2008 is too late. Maybe not.

But by the time many have graduated, office 2010 will be out along with "Microsoft Universe" or similar, and we'll all be back on the learning curve for products that we don't really need all over again.

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