Windows Vista - Implementation Challenges of a Business Software System - Case Study Example

Windows Vista: Case Study of a Business Software System 2009 Abstract Windows Vista, the operating system launched by Microsoft Corporation in 2007, has been criticized by practitioners and experts for having compromised on its main promise – enhanced security and content protection – while also raising costs and CPU and device resource use. Many software, particularly high-end audio and video content is not compatible with the security requirements of Vista. The intricate coding and protection means that the hardware requirements are much more because of real time monitoring of protected areas. Introduction Microsoft Corporation, world’s largest software company, launched Windows Vista, a line of operating systems for personal computers worldwide on 30th January, 2007 (Microsoft, 2007). The Windows operating system has undergone various changes and complexities since the launch of Windows 95 in 1995 (which had 15 million lines of code), Windows 1998 (with 18 million lines of code) and Windows XP in 2001 (with 35 million lines of code) (Lohr and Markoff, 2006). The release of Windows Vista, which is aimed to make the operating system more secure, has greatly increased the complexities of codes. However, Vista has not been as successful as Windows XP. Since the Windows operating system runs on 330 million computers worldwide, the drawbacks of Vista have affected the environment of business software critically. As business software, Vista has become the target of criticism and negative press throughout the blogosphere and IT media in terms of additional cost requirements, software compatibility and security concerns. This paper aims to discuss the major critical issues that have been raised with regard to Windows Vista. In the following section, I will present the literature review on the various criticisms of Vista. The next section will discuss relevance of the criticisms in the business perspective that affects Microsoft and the final section will present the conclusion of the study. Literature Review Increased CPU and hardware cost The CPU cost is higher for machines that operate with Vista because of the rigid specs of the OS. Gutmann (2007) notes that in order to make the operating system secure, the Windows Vista driver requires the OPM (Operations per Minute) certificate in order to encrypt or authenticate all communication flows. Besides, Gutman (2007) also finds that, in order to prevent active attacks, the CPU runs in a complex manner, requiring the device driver to check the status of the underling hardware every 150 minutes for analog outputs and every 30 minutes for digital outputs. Hence, even when the driver is not being operated, it has to work about 30 times in one second for security reasons. Installing Windows Vista has a higher system requirement than Windows XP does (Fritsche, 2007). Yet, Vista runs slower than XP (Gutmann, 2007). Vista requires the content and the hardware to be extremely robust, which means the adaptation of Vista would necessarily call for upgrade or replacement of hardware that is more expensive than the customer had previously used. For example, Vista requires a specific layout of boards and thermal specs rather than only electronic specs that all other operating systems required. This is particularly crucial for high and medium end video cards, which means that not only the computer manufacturers but all related industries like the TV and other video content providers would need to incur additional hardware costs imposed by Vista (Gutmann, 2007). Vista has imposed additional costs also on account of the requirement to license Third-party IP. Since much of the content protection are licensed to third parties, the use of Vista calls for the otherwise avoidable third-party technology licensing (Gutmann, 2007). Unnecessary CPU and device resource consumption In order to receive content from Vista, devices are required to implement AES-128 encryption. This has to be done via a hardware decryption engine on the graphics chip. As a result, a GPU rendering pipeline or two would thrown away to make space for the AES engines. Moreover, the AES key with the device hardware requires further cryptographic such as a 2048-bit Diffie-Hellman key exchange (Fritsche, 2007). Consequently, programs run slower on Windows Vista. Vista also consumes CPU resource unnecessarily. This is because, on account of Vista’s drive towards content security and to prevent in-system tampering of communication, all codes are encrypted and authenticated only after which they are transmitted to the video devices. Besides, to prevent active attacks, the underlying hardware are polled by the driver devices on a regular basis. This process not only greatly complicates the process but also use up CPU resources unnecessarily. This also leads to the result that content that cannot be decoded, like for example high-end audio and video content released by gamers who aim at saving CPU resource and coding requirement, cannot operate under Vista (Gutman, 2007). Software incompatibility Compared to Windows XP, the incompatibility issues are significantly more frequent when Windows Vista shipped. These applications consist anti-virus programs such as Symantec and Sophos, CD burning tools such as suite from Nero and basic disk management tools likes Paragon's Hard Disk Manager; even Firefox and Adobe Photoshop CS2 can not fully compatible to Windows Vista (Spring, 2008 & Gutmann, 2007). The increased protection of “premium content” by Vista has meant that many such software would either not run on Vista or the speed and quality of operation would be less than on other operating systems. This is typically the case for high density data from HD-DVD and Blu-Ray sources. Vista’s content protection disables many functionalities of some software. For example, Vista disables the Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format from audio content because of its lack of content protection even though this is the most typical interface for most high-end audio content these days. This is also the case for high-end video interface, like component (YPbPr) which is disabled for the purpose of security. In addition to the direct disabling of content format, there is also indirect disabling of interface by Vista. For example, voice communication that depends on echo cancellation so that communication through loudspeakers and headphone are not interfered by a microphone nearby runs into a problem with Vista that disables echo cancellation. There are other drawbacks of Vista that reduce playback quality, eliminate open-source hardware support eliminate unified drivers, deny service through drive-device revocation and reduce system reliability (Gutmann, 2007). Customers of audio and video content would be unaware of such technicalities so they blame the non-functioning of their audio and video content on the non-compatibility of the operating system. The encryption technique of Vista also means that it reduces the performance of wireless local area network in terms of throughput and response time. Because of the degree of degradation in Vista’s encryption mechanism, throughput and response time is lower than in other Windows versions (Narayan et al, 2008). Security issues Vista aimed at making the most secure operating system. However, many of the additional features of Vista has introduced challenges for digital investigation. For example, features like recovering shadow files from Restore Points, identifying the Bitlocker in a system, the use of recovery keys for Bitlocker encrypted volumes and the User Access Control come in the way of digital investigations (Hargreaves et al, 2008). The existing Windows Vista network is less stable than the earlier Windows XP due to amount of freshly written codes despite various new features like the User Access Control that have been introduced to enhance security (Conover, 2008). The User Access Control, which was introduced in the beta version of Vista released in 2006, operated through the Protected Administrator that ran with minimum privileges. When the process is run unrestricted, it grants full privileges to the user. The process could also be run by the user account without administrative privileges that were already available on Windows XP. Hence, the introduction of the User Account Access gave only a limited security addition to the operating system (Conover, 2008). However, this feature was rectified in the final version of Vista released in 2007. Even in the final version, Vista has the same privilege brokering system that attempt to prevent malicious software from stealing user credentials (Lamb, 2006). The new codes have resulted in different types of defects. It has been found that “Windows Vista is vulnerable to several historical packet-level attacks against the TCP/IP stack” and “Implementation-specific behavior of the new Vista stack allows an attacker to create ambiguous traffic that may be improperly interpreted by a passive intrusion detection device” (Newsham and Hoagland, 2009). Ray and Shultz (2007) notes that the User Account Control raises more security concerns than those it solves. A user can unknowingly download malicious software from an infected website or may open an infected attachment sent through email and install the malicious software without knowing. He can also use a removable drive or install a new hardware without the knowledge of the presence of a virus. If the User is given limited access control, the system can get infected in the process of the user performing administrative tasks. Microsoft claims that Windows Vista does not require any additional antivirus to be installed as all security concerns have been taken care of. Besides, Windows Defender protects Vista against pop-up ads, slow performance, spyware, adware, keyloggers and other software (Ray and Schultz, 2007). However, although Windows Defender monitors the protected areas of Vista real time, it is not as robust as anti-virus. Defenders is only complimentary to anti-virus software that will need to be installed additionally. Discussion The look and feel of the Vista is much enhanced from the earlier versions of Windows. This has been done through the graphical user interface that includes three-dimensional animation and translucent effects (Lamb, 2006). This has provided Vista with improved visual effects, improved desktop search functions and a new version of media player (Ray and Schultz, 2007). However, the main purpose of Vista is not to present an operating system that is more user friendly or looks better. On the other hand, it aims to make the operating system much more secure. In the process, it has become an extremely complicated operating system. Windows Vista is not a fresh new operating system but an update on the previous versions of Windows hence it carries a lot of baggage from its earlier versions. Therefore, even though the release had been advertised for long, the actual release was postponed a number of times because Microsoft developers needed to rectify more and more problems that they came up with. As a result, competing companies like Apple developed their versions of operating systems thereby capturing much of the market (Lohr and Markoff, 2006). Despite the complexity of Vista’s huge number of codes, however, it is not a fool-proof system. Fritsche (2007), for example, has found that while users access the folder of a currently downloading item, a temp file is created by the system that Vista will try to read even after users have accessed the folder and the CPU has maxed out totally. Users cannot delete the file via Windows. Industry surveys show that because of application compatibility and resource requirements, many businesses have shied away from Windows Vista. Just for an example, those firms had bought QuickBooks 2006 Premier accounting software for $400 already, however, only the 2007 and 2008 editions of QuickBooks is compatible for Vista, so, organization must pay another $375 to receive a vista-compatible edition (Paul, 2007). Conclusion The much-hyped Windows Vista, which is an extension of the Windows XP involving a large number of additional codes, has been found to have failed the promises. Vista claims to have made the most secured operating system. But, various studies have pointed out that the security and protection against threats are not as robust as other operating systems. On the other hand, it has increased the CPU and other device requirements, raising costs not only of the operating system but also of related devices that will all need to be differently configured to be compatible with Vista. Works Cited Lohr, Steve and John Markoff (2006), Windows is So Slow, But Why?, The New York Times, March 27 Fritsche, G, D 2007,‘Windows Vista: Implementation Challenges’, User Services Conference: Proceedings of the 35th annual ACM SIGUCCS conference on User services, pp.113-117. Gutmann, P 2007, ‘A cost analysis of Windows Vista content protection’, University of Auckland, Viewed 10 August 2009, . Paul, M (2007), ‘Microsoft: Vista SP1 Won't Fix Compatibility Issues’, InformationWeek, issue 1167, p. 10-10. Microsoft New Zealand, (2007),‘Microsoft Launches Windows Vista and the 2007 Office System to Consumers’ Presscentre. Viewed 10 August 2009, http://www.microsoft.com/nz/presscentre/articles/2007/jan07_windowsvistalaunch.mspx > Newsham, T, Hoagland, J (2008),’Windows Vista network attack surface analysis: a broad overview’, Hargreaves, Christopher et al (2008), Windows Vista and Digital Investigations, Digital Investigations, Issue 5, available at www.elsevier.com/locate/diin Lamb, Stephen (2006), Security Features in Windows Vista and IE7 – Microsoft’s View, Network Security Ray, Edward and E Eugene Schultz (2007), An Early Look at Windows Vista Security, Computer Fraud and Security, January Narayan, Shaneel et al (2008), The Influence of Wireless 802.11g LAN Encryption Methods on Throughput and Round Trip Time for Various Windows Operating Systems, paper presented at the Communication Networks and Services Research Conference, IEE Computer Society Read More