A totally happy New Year from Syntagma Media to all our uber-readers.

I hope you’ll stick with us in 2006 for Microsoft’s “year of delivery”.

Analyst firm, Directions on Microsoft, believes the marketing of Windows Vista will be Redmond’s biggest challenge in 2006, especially positioning it as an enterprise product.

Software.Silicon.com reproduces the analyst’s 10-point list. Here are five of them. The challenges for Microsoft are are:

1. Explain to corporate customers why they should buy Windows Vista without waiting to purchase new hardware first.

2. Publish a definitive set of guidelines on developing Windows applications to reduce buggy software and security flaws ~ and then enforce it.

4. Quickly distribute to developers the next generation of basic tools to support Vista.

5. “Gel” its online strategies, such as starting up a new advertising platform and clarifying these offerings to small businesses.

8. Establish its policy on product releases and show discipline in adhering to it.

These are fairly obvious points, which have recently been addressed by Ray Ozzie (MS CTO), and others, but clearly will be central to the company’s performance next year.

After a lot of dispute about the hardware requirements for Windows Vista, Dell, the largest PC maker in the world is recommending two of its models for future migration to Windows Vista for home office users.

On its website the company suggests a desktop PC priced at $1750 and a laptop at $2700, but stresses that it does not support beta versions of software. Other recomendations are made in categories, Small Business, and Medium to Large Business.

The PC is the XPS 600, specification :

Intel Pentium Extreme Edition Dual Core Processor with HT Technology
1GB of 533MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM
256MB PCI ExpressTM x16 NVIDIA GeForceTM 6800 Graphics Card
160GB1 Serial ATA 7200 RPM Hard Drive

The laptop is the XPS M170, specification :

Intel Pentium M Processor 760 (2GHz, 2MB Cache, 533MHz FSB)
1GB2 of 533MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM
256MB NVIDIA GeForceTM Go 6800 ULTRA with PCI Express x16 Graphics
80GB1 Ultra ATA Hard Drive

These specs are in line with the higher end of speculation about hardware requirements for running Vista, as reported here. As Microsoft says, though, the operating system will automatically scale with the resources it finds on a computer. At the lower end, an XP-like UI will present itself.

Anyone buying a computer now and wishing to upgrade to Vista next year, should seek something similar to the Dell specs before shelling out on an inadequate model. Microsoft is also recommending that users consider upgrading their monitors to larger, higher-resolution models.

The story of Windows Vista has been a scrappy one to date. Three years late, with countless stops and starts, plus a rewrite-from-scratch, has left public confidence more than a little shaken. However, its public release towards the end of 2006 should see the operating system back on track. Here’s a short rundown on what has happened so far:

The last two versions of Windows client released by Microsoft were the enterprise edition, Windows 2000, and the home edition, ME, both launched at the turn of the Millennium.

A new version, codenamed Longhorn, was set to ship in 2003, with a totally new file storage system, WinFS. Problems with the latter led to it being dropped from the package, while the immense complexity of the Byzantine architecture blew out the best brains in Redmond, Wash.

In 2004, Jim Allchin, head honcho at the time, burst into Bill Gates’s office and announced, “It ain’t going to work. We’ll have to start again!” A year late, and back to square one. Not a very lovely prospect for Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect. Somehow Allchin prevailed. How, we may never know. The upshot is they started all over again, using a Linux-like kernel structure, and hanging applications around it.

The current timeline is for Windows Vista to ship to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) in June 2006, so that machines can be out in time for the Christmas and holiday buying season.

Microsoft’s main objectives are to improve security, deployment, manageability and performance. The OS will ship with Windows Internet Explorer 7, which includes features to guard against spoofing and phishing attacks. “Other security features,” says VnuNet, “include Windows Service Hardening, which monitors for abnormal activity in the file system and registry, full-volume disk encryption and support for Trusted Platform Module security chips. The firewall in Windows Vista has also been upgraded to filter outgoing as well as incoming traffic.”