'Infoworld' loving Windows Vista

While many commentators are busy burying Microsoft because Google has a better search engine and cooler offices, it's worth keeping in mind that Microsoft still has, uh, a few other other lines of business that bring in a buck or two once in a while. One of those is powering massive enterprise-wide computing networks, the kind of operations that aren't likely to start using Google Spreadsheet and Writely anytime in the next few quarters.

Thus it's interesting to note that this week's Infoworld, a long-time must-read for enterprise IT managers, has several stories under the heading "Longhorn: More than Just Hype," subtitled "For Windows IT managers, Longhorn is a must-have upgrade."  Infoworld is generally not a mouthpiece for Redmond -- the magazine's editors follow and recommend open source solutions very astutely and there's also a regular Mac presence in the magazine (laudable when you consider how small Mac penetration is in the enterprise market.)  And Infoworld writers have been merciless in pounding MSFT over the past few years regarding the Longhorn/Vista delays and spec changes. So I was surprised to find (in fact, I checked to make sure I hadn't picked up the April 1 issue by mistake) that the experts at Infoworld found a great deal to like in Vista, from an enterprise point of view (with the caveat, of course, that they're still looking at a beta).