Doug Dineley

The old-fashioned PC paradigm has run out of gas. Conventional Windows systems are too hard to manage and pose too much of a security risk -- and sales are declining. For lack of a better alternative, you may need to live with Windows for the foreseeable future. But now that the sins of Vista and the antiquarian vulnerabilities of Windows XP have been corrected by Windows 7, what could possibly induce you to upgrade to Windows 8?

The answer may lie in the latest build of Windows 8, where Hyper-V 3.0 can be found in Control Panel (see Peter Bruzzese's post "Windows 8 and Hyper-V 3.0: Revolutionary benefits await admins"). Hyper-V is Microsoft's Type 1 hypervisor -- that is, a virtualization layer that runs on bare metal instead of as a guest of the operating system. Until now, Hyper-V has been available only as part of Windows Server. Making it the foundation underneath the next desktop version of Windows changes everything.

We suppose it happens in families too, where one twin seems charmed from the start while the other lives under a shadow. Certainly that's the case with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, the one almost universally heralded and the other widely snubbed. Still, isn't it odd? How do two operating systems, born together and sharing so much DNA, arrive to such different fates?

According to InfoWorld Test Center's Tom Yager, the reason is simple: Microsoft got it right when it listened to the customer and got it wrong when it didn't. Windows Server 2008 is everything that IT buyers asked for, while Vista is the product of an older Microsoft design paradigm: "You'll know what you want when we show it to you."