From the Editor

About this time of year folks make their predictions about what's coming up in the New Year. Not to be left out, here's mine, along with my thoughts on what these events will mean for you.

Vista
I expect to see a rather slow adoption of Vista. Home users purchasing new machines that have sufficient hardware to be "Aero compliant" may come with Aero features enabled. But home users purchasing "Vista capable" (i.e., non Areo compliant) machines won't have Areo enabled. I imagine that business customers, particularly those from large enterprises, will generally opt to have XP installed on new machines until they are ready to do an enterprise-wide migration to the new operating system. Even when they are ready for such a migration, I expect it to be largely (except in those business cases where higher graphic features are required) a migration to the non-Areo version. This would be primarily because their installed base of older machines would most likely include some or perhaps many machines that are not capable of supporting Areo. That is, many businesses might migrate to Vista to take advantage of other features of the new operation system, such as improved security. However, in order to reduce support complexity, I imagine that many large enterprises would opt not to support Areo immediately.

What does this mean to PowerBuilder developers? The key issue is that new Microsoft operating systems generally mean new presentation styles for the applications running on them. Windows XP gave users the option to render applications in either a "Windows XP" or a "Windows Classic" style, but there was essentially no difference in the hardware requirements for either style. So the new style was widely used, and once we reached the point in which Windows XP had been adopted broadly enough to be the predominate operating system, there was a corresponding demand within the user community to have applications running on those operating systems support those styles. Hence the pressure on Sybase to include support for the new visual presentation styles in PowerBuilder 8.0.3. Windows Vista brings its own set of new presentation styles. However, many of those (e.g., the glass interface) are dependant on Areo. We will eventually see demand for PowerBuilder to support such presentations, and Sybase should be working on that now. What will determine how rapidly that demand grows will depend on the adoption rate for Areo, which I expect to be slow over the next two to three years. Primarily, that means Sybase has some time to introduce it; they don't need to include it with PowerBuilder 11. But they do need to introduce it by the next major version. On the other hand, Sybase is looking to support such new features by supporting XAML and the WPF. WPF is not a Windows Vista-only option; it will be made available by Microsoft for some older operating systems. The question remains as to whether WPF would need to be installed on older operating systems for newer versions of PowerBuilder to run, regardless of whether they take advantage of some of the new presentation styles.

Office 2007
I also see adoption for the newest version of Office to be significantly faster, but not because I see anything compelling about the release. Frankly, I haven't seen an office upgrade since Office 1997 that I thought was particularly compelling. I did eventually upgrade to Office 2003, but that was for the following two reasons:

1. As an editor, I found that the revised method of displaying changes to a document was better.
2. I needed to purchase additional licenses, and they weren't selling Office 1997 anymore.

The main new feature of the latest Office is the new user interface, which is a double-edged sword. Many of the existing user base (myself included) are basically still using Office in Office 1997 mode, regardless of the version we are actually using. There may be several dozen nifty new features (though I doubt it), but in any event we aren't using them. What we learned to do in Office 1997 still works the same in the later versions, and it still gets the job done for us. That's no longer the case with Office 2007, and it may act to impede the adoption rate among existing users. On the other hand, earlier versions of Office will soon be hard to come by, so people looking to purchase additional licenses will soon have little option. New machines with Office pre-installed will come with Office 2007. Different versions of business software are easier to support than different operating systems, so I expect large enterprises will simply introduce the new version as they obtain additional licenses and/or upgrade to computers that come with it pre-installed. For an interim period, the users of the newer versions would just be requested to save their documents out in the older Office format so they can be shared with users who are still on the previous version. However, I expect enterprise migrations to the new version to be some time off in the future, partially because of the retraining of the end user required with this new version.

What does this mean for PowerBuilder developers? Like operating systems, new versions of Office introduce new styles of user interfaces that many end users come to expect all other business software they work with to imitate. In particular, it was the contemporary toolbars and menus of newer versions of Office that drove demand for similar features in PowerBuilder 10.5. Somewhat ironically, the major new user interface feature of Office 2007 is the Ribbon, which essentially replaces the contemporary toolbars. I expect that as Office 2007 is adopted, we will see a growing demand for PowerBuilder applications to support a Ribbon-like user interface object. Note that the Ribbon not only supports a different method of presenting toolbar options, it's also context sensitive, displaying only those options that are valid for whatever context in the document is active. Also somewhat ironically, another major new user interface feature is the "Office button," which essentially replaces the contemporary menus. I haven't used it yet, but my first impressions of it are not positive. This latter feature may be one that is short lived in Office, and one we won't have to have support for within PowerBuilder.

That's all I have space for this month. Next month I hope to look at a few other technologies, predict where they are going, and look at the impact on us as well. Until next month...