We’re probably going out on a limb here when we say Vista’s Interface is little more than bloated server software and a glorified set of web scripts. The reality could be far from our initial suspicion. But in all honesty, we can’t help but wonder if our suspicion holds some kind of water, even if that water barely fills half a cup. At the very least, our suspicion prompted us to write about what we’ve observed in this operating system and we’d like to share what we’ve found. In the end, we hope that our feelings encourages discussion (if not a curious investigation into the matter) because at $239.00 USD a pop, Vista has got to be the most expensive scripting any of us have ever seen!

Our analysis begins with Windows Vista Home Premium Edition installed onto a Compaq Presario F700 Notebook PC. (We have not looked at Vista Ultimate, Vista Home Basic, Vista Business, of Vista Enterprise.) And it all started when a particular program loaded slower than usual.

We can’t remember the program in question, but this Windows application requested user information through the typical window form: a text input box, a text field, and a push button. It’s a pretty simple interface that really wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow if it hadn’t been for its slow load. For a split section, this “form” resembled the old 90’s web form — complete with 3d shading and the gray, ms sans serif text button. Then right before we could press ‘Print Screen,’ the Vista interface showed up – complete with the transparent title bar, the shiny see-through buttons, and the flat, gradated backgrounds. AHA!

UPDATE: The program we described above is Windows Mail. We just caught the same behavior we described above again, today!

My friends, we’ve seen this behavior before – only it wasn’t on an expensive, brand new computer. It was on an old Windows 98 machine attempting to load a modern website with a dialup internet connection instead. On such a machine, it’s almost impossible to load a CSS-rich website without catching a glimpse of its natural HTML code load first. It’s not a frequent occurrence, but ever so often, we’ll catch it. We logically attribute this behavior to a slow processor and internet connection. So, when we witnessed the same behavior on a brand new computer that wasn’t trying to load a website, but one of its own applications instead, we obviously wanted to know why in the world a brand new Vista machine would emulate old Windows 98 machine behavior.

In other words, what would allow us to witness the Vista interface load upon an older, dated interface? We concluded that despite what caused the glitch in the first place (a lack of sufficient memory?… a conflict of resources?… who knows), both old and new machines run the same type of software: server software and scripts. Our old machine obviously runs scripts on a remote server, but since we caught this behavior on a new, non-connected computer, we believe that Vista runs the scripts on its own internal server. And we believe the entire operating system is a server/web-driven interface rather than a hard coded API. In addition to our witnessing the aforementioned event, here are 10 additional reasons why:

Making a Case For a Server-Driven Operating System

1. We noticed that Vista is awfully dependant on usernames, passwords, and permissions. It’s almost impossible to access the interface without identifying ourselves while we’re consistently asked permission to do this and to do that –to confirm this action and that action. Folks, this is networking behavior and you don’t need to be a networking guru to understand why this identify/permission-interaction is integral to security. Networks just don’t allow anyone to haphazardly delete files or install programs. And neither does Vista – that is, not without permission. While this isn’t a bad thing, it’s annoying and it furthers our suspicion that some of Vista’s core processes are server driven.

2. Vista was designed to replace Microsoft’s Windows 2003 Server. In beta-development, it was known as “Longhorn.”

3. In his article, “How Vista will interact with Longhorn Server”, Brien M. Posey writes “…the best reason for running Windows Vista and Longhorn Server together is that they are essentially the same operating system.”

Making a Case For an XML Script-Driven Operating System

4. Much of Vista’s interactivity can be accomplished with web scripting. ASP, PHP, AJAX, Java, Perl, or a host of any other scripting languages can do what Vista does (and more). That includes generating dynamic menus, writing and saving files, accessing and even integrating remote data.

5. We can see a significant XML relationship within the Vista interface. Microsoft’s XML Core Services (MSXML) provides for XML-based applications – that is, applications written in JScript, VBScript, and Microsoft development tools. And by XML, we’re talking about XML 1.0 as well as other XML-related technologies. So what we have at our disposal is any number of ‘programs’ written with XML technology and designed with CSS! MSXML 5.0 shipped with Office 2003 and Office 2007 — two programs in which we can see Vista’s emerging style. And MSXML 6.0 is shipped with Windows Vista (and XP).

6. In an article published in 2005, C|Net.com’s Matt Hines described Microsoft’s “move to replace Microsoft’s traditional binary file formats with XML-based versions as the default in Office 12.”. The end result of this ‘move,’ we believe, is the Vista interface, released in late 2006 for businesses and early 2007 for consumers.

7. Just like with the Office 12 binary files described above, much of Vista’s eye-candy can be accomplished with scripting. What’s significant about XML is that it lets Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) define the way XML based applications look and behave. There probably isn’t a single component of Vista’s GUI that can’t be emulated with crafty CSS code. This of course includes Vista’s transparency, mouseovers, thin outlines, and everything else makes this operating system look like Microsoft’s latest effort.

8. We found over 600 XML scripts installed on our Vista machine. (Search C:\Windows to see how many you have installed.) We did not find a significant number of relevant CSS files installed (only 30), however we noticed that a lot of XML files referenced settings in the Windows registry. Of the 30 CSS files, we found 8 relevant to Vista’s calendar, clock, contacts, and notes program. We couldn’t determine what the remaining “settings.css” pointed to, however all of the CSS files prohibit their use on other non-Microsoft UI (user interface) elements and product components.

9. Another one of the tell-tale signs that Vista is (in our opinion) Server Software and Scripts is its own indexed file search. Remote online file searches are nothing new, but when they’re indexed onto an individual computer and they allow users to embed keyword tags into its own database, we suspect again, a server-script relationship.

10. Vista’s Sidebar displays internet accessible applets and its Desktop displays internet accessible Gadgets via XML technology. These are just two obvious examples of Vista’s XML scripting in use. What people may not know is the number of other ‘programs’ that use the same. (See #8 where we introduce calendar, clock, contacts, and notes XML references, and of course #5 and #6 where we note XML technology in Microsoft’s Office.)

Is our standpoint clear? What all of this means may confirm something to some of you, mean nothing to a select few of you, or cause many of you to fall down in a fit of maddening laughter. Our whole point in presenting the above is to question Vista and ask if it’s worth the cost. After all, our first impression of the thing suggests little more than well-designed server scripting. What if we’re right? What if we paid $239.00 USD for something we could have written ourselves on a low end Pentium machine? At this point, we believe we could have!

Note that we don’t for one minute – suggest that Vista is inferior or as simple as we suggested above. We’re quite sure that Microsoft was careful to build a very complex product. (eye roll)