This question is -- by far -- the most frequent one that we are asked these days. Why doesn't Dragon support Windows Vista 64? There has been a lot of chatter about this topic in blog postings all across the Web. I have heard a pretty broad range of comments, but the general sentiment usually falls into one of the following categories:
1) "Wow, these guys must be really stupid..."
2) "It's really easy to support Vista 64, why don't they just do it?"
3) "Dragon doesn't work on Windows Vista"
4) "It is some kind of evil conspiracy to withhold this capability from us"
That last one is my personal favorite. The bottom line is that there is quite a bit of misinformation out there about Dragon support for Vista 64, so I would like to take the opportunity to set the record straight. I can't promise a very interesting story, but at least it will be accurate.
From the very early planning stages, we had identified support for Vista 64 as a critical requirement for Dragon 10. At the time, most experts who track the adoption of operating systems predicted that only a very small percentage of new computers would ship with Vista 64 at the time the Dragon 10 was launched. Nevertheless, we know that many Dragon users are early adopters of technology, so we decided that it was an important thing to do. As we scoped out the effort to support Vista 64, it was clear that it would be a significant effort -- unlike many other Windows software products. Dragon has some special complications because it is so deeply integrated with the operating system and with the user interface layer of other programs. In fact, those other programs turned out to be the trickiest part of 64-bit support.
As we got closer to the end of the development period, it became clear that the way Dragon was integrating with other programs in Vista 64 was causing some instability. We had to make a choice. We could either delay the entire Dragon 10 release, ship the 64-bit support with some instability, or defer the support of 64-bit Vista until the first point release. In the end, we made the decision to defer the 64-bit Vista support until our first point release. We made this decision based on the best information we had about the projected adoption of Vista 64 operating systems among our user base. It turns out that the experts who project consumer technology adoption were pretty severely mistaken with their numbers. Instead of a very small single-digit percentage of new systems, Vista 64 now ships on almost 1/3 of all new computers at some retailers. It turns out that one of the features that 64-bit Vista offers consumers is the ability to support larger amounts of memory -- and this was very attractive to consumers. For business users, it is a very different story. Most medium and large businesses are still using Windows XP because they are IT organizations and other systems do not yet support Windows Vista. But consumers and small businesses have adopted Vista and Windows Vista 64 much more rapidly than larger companies.
So that's how we got where we are right now. I'm sorry that that probably doesn't satisfy the conspiracy theorists.
The good news is that we are very close to releasing our support for Vista 64. We are in the testing phase right now and expect to release this capability sometime in the second quarter of 2009. (Please note that I wrote "expect to release..." just in case there was some unforeseen problem with the release that is found in testing.)
Peter
Posted
02-01-2009 12:52 PM
by
Peter Mahoney
