Trilight Zone

[tricore]

When Microsoft announced that it was ready to roll out Windows Live OneCare Version 1.5 to coincide with the general release of Windows Vista, it omitted one important fact: The product will not support Vista x64 or XP x64.

I received an e-mail this morning from a reader telling me that the OneCare v1.5 beta would not install on his Vista test machine, as it was just for 32-bit systems. "It would be nice, now that 64-bit Vista is set to go, to specify if the software will run properly in 64-bit," he said.

"Has this changed in the final release? It would be nice to know as I have OneCare on all three home PCs, and plan on upgrading all of them to 64-bit Vista," he said.

So I asked Microsoft, which confirmed that, indeed, OneCare v1.5 will not run on Vista x64 or Windows XP x64 for that matter, "although it will support 32-bit Windows on x64 hardware," a Microsoft spokesperson told me.

The spokesperson was also pretty noncommittal about the possibility of x64 support going forward, saying, "We continually evolve OneCare to meet customer demand, though we have no further specifics to share at this time around potential support for x64 in the future."

My colleague Joe Wilcox spoke with Gina Narkunas, the lead product manager for Windows Live OneCare, this evening from London. She told him that "it wasn't a business priority to support 64-bit" because there is "no consumer demand" for a 64-bit version right now.

Narkunas wouldn't give a specific timeline for delivering a 64-bit version. "We're looking at that in the future," she said.

The fact that OneCare v1.5 does not support Vista x64 is interesting, especially given the commitment by company brass to only offer 64-bit versions of its products going forward.

In fact, at the IT Forum in Barcelona in late 2005, Bob Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president for server and tools, announced that the next version of Exchange, its upcoming Windows Server "Longhorn" Small Business Server and its Centro infrastructure solution for midsize businesses would only be released as 64-bit and optimized for 64-bit hardware.

Earlier that year, Chairman and then Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said, "We are going to see the adoption of 64-bit computing happen quite rapidly, especially on the server side."

Microsoft last year also only released a 64-bit version of its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 product.

What are your plans for 64-bit computing, and thoughts on Microsoft's play—or lack of play in some respects—on this front?