Microsoft might become a victim of the company's own success, how ironic. Service Pack 3 for Windows XP is rumored to not only be a significant improvement to XP, but also makes XP at least twice more powerful than Windows Vista. Now in the past I have written about how useless the upgrade to Vista really is, but Microsoft is forcing me to work here.

The results of benchmark testing on a Windows XP system running Service Pack 3 beta and Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 beta by Devil Mountain Software of Florida were published on TechNewsWorld. The tests reveal that Windows XP had twice the advantage over Vista in performance. Both systems were tweaked to gain maximum performance. Vista fell short of its older brother.

Craig Barth, who is the chief technology officer at Devil Mountain Software, discussed the results with TechNewsWorld:
Craig Barth, chief technology officer at Devil Mountain Software, was surprised by the test results, particularly because he believed SP1 for Vista was going to dramatically improve the new OS's performance.

"We were as shocked as everybody is," Barth told TechNewsWorld. "They [Microsoft] talked up the whole thing [the complaints about Vista] saying, 'If you're not happy with Vista, don't make any comments until SP1 comes out.'"
Now with Service Pack 1 of Vista, it simply appears that Vista is becoming the Windows ME of competing technology. All this with the exception being that you can revert back to Windows XP. There is some irony hidden in all of this. It all seems like a big joke, but the catch is that this is real.

Now "obsolete" might be a harsh word to describe Vista, but all the unpleasing performance benchmarks, bad press, and failures in the public relations department leads me to question if Microsoft Vista is exactly that. Eye candy can only stand for so long before people realize what they have gotten into. Driver compatibility and performance would have been a better thing to focus on, but Microsoft just can not get this right.

Some might say that it is the fault of software and hardware developers; however, Linux is making more strives in recent times than Vista in regard to compatibility. Microsoft has no excuse, and the company can not place the blame on developers who feel that software for Vista is unreliable and unworthy of being ported to the new OS. It is Microsoft's job to provide a better experience for their users.

Things become even more dramatic when you throw in the fact that Vista is going to be replaced by Windows 7 in a few short years. Fueling the fire of the media to question if Vista is a worthy upgrade has unfortunately been something that Microsoft has done well. Windows 7 can not come soon enough to end this nightmare that is Vista, and I only hope that it is not as bad.

Microsoft has publicly announced the intent to release Windows 7 (codename "Vienna") by the end of 2009. This release is intended to be a major release and is rumored to have immense improvements over Windows Vista. Yet all of this makes me question why anyone would have purchased Vista in 2007 with this knowledge? Is Vista to blame for the early announcement of Windows 7?

Vista has many problems, and some of which that should be huge concerns:

• Windows Vista performs very poorly against its younger brother Windows XP.
• Vista has not really had the backing from game developers thus far.
• Vista is a disappointment when compared to features that were promised in development.
• There have not been any essential features added that would be useful to personal usage.
• Hardware compatibility is still not up to par when compared to XP.
• Open source alternatives to Vista are equal, if not considerably better in quality and security.

Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division even admitted to shortcomings in development, "We put Longhorn on the back burner for awhile." He further states, "Then when we came back to it, we realized that there were incremental things that we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in Vista that we couldn't deliver in one release.

There is allegedly one good thing about Vista. The system has managed to implement tighter security, but even that is being questioned. Other than that, what happened to all the other great features that Vista was promised to have?

There is only so much that can be done with Vista development. The company needs to focus heavily on either the improvement of Vista, the development of Windows 7, or the development of both to ensure that the company does not make the same mistakes again.

However, we have Windows 7 to look forward to. The details of the Windows 7 release have been sketchy. It is very likely that the operating system will include the new file system, WinFS, that was cut from Vista. I would also expect to see significant performance improvements. It would be a wise plan for Microsoft to deliver on any features they announce will be in Windows 7.

The announcement of Windows 7 was clearly put into action because of the shortcomings of Windows Vista. The company must secretly feel that they have not fully delivered with Vista's offerings and are working on a new product to make up for the failures.

This could be a wise move considering the rapid growth of open source operating systems. Microsoft certainly does not want all their future customers switching to Ubuntu, even though I believe it would serve as a great lesson to Microsoft if they did.