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Vista Sales Expectations Too High, Office Doing Well
PetManimal writes "A comparison of first-week retail sales of Vista compared to first-week sales of XP back in 2001 found that Vista sales were 60% lower. Steve Ballmer has admitted that earlier sales forecasts were 'overly aggressive,' but at least there is some good news for Microsoft: early Office 2007 sales were very strong compared to the early sales of Office 2003, despite almost no advertising or marketing until the retail launch at the end of January."
Could it be that no one has the hardware to run Vista with all of its features turned on, and to make such an upgrade after purchasing Vista would invalidate the license, forcing another purchase of Vista?
People will wait until they need to purchase a new machine that it comes with Vista.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
My mother in law saw Vista on my laptop, saw me searching, using the start bar, and using Office 2007. She was very eager to upgrade, and she asked how she could do that.
I explained that she could buy the disc at a place like Office Depot, Best Buy, or wherever else she likes to get software (she's always just stuck with the OS on her machine from birth->death), but I also warned that she should make sure that the software she wants to run on her machine will run without problems before she bothers to do a big upgrade.
Quickbooks, some realtor software, and something her office uses have notes about compatibility problems with Vista. She stopped looking after that.
This is the first Windows release that I've used in which roughly half of the things I install have had some compatibility issues, noted in advance or discovered by me. It doesn't keep things from being usable in the general case, but it's more than just media FUD at this point.
They/we will fix it with OS/software updates over time.
A new OS is a much bigger commitment than a new Office suite. You generally are going to have zero compatibility problems with old documents and that's all you really need to worry about. If you end up not liking it, it's also not a big deal to replace it with your old version. A new OS is much more serious, and there are many more compatibility issues to worry about. It's not the kind of thing most want to rush in to.
I've been testing Vista at work and it's a good OS, but not ready for deployment yet. It's not Vista itself, it's apps and drivers. There's still plenty of hardware with drivers that aren't up to snuff, and a number of apps need to be updated to work on Vista. It's not the kind of thing I'd recommend most users walk in to yet. In another 3-6 months I'll probably look at deploying it to some of our labs.
Office, on the other hand, we are installing for anyone that orders a new copy. The volume keys are valid for either 2003 or 2007 so we are installing 2007 and will revert to 2003 if they don't like it. So far, nobody has asked to revert. There's just not really any technical issues. Yes there's a new interface and all, but all your documents open and that's the real concern.
I was in a "forced" to upgrade to XP situation recently. But that's like 5 years after XP was released. It was one of those situations where the software probably didn't really require anything specific to XP, but the installer did an OS check and wouldn't install on 2K. I can see this from the software company's point of view; 2K is no longer supported by MS, why should the software company waste resources supporting it? Still, they could have just said "it'll install on 2K but we'll only provide support if you have problems on XP."
Anyway, it was recent enough that MS offered a free upgrade to Vista when it was released. So now I have a free Vista upgrade that I'll hold onto until I run across an application what won't run on XP. So, that'll maybe be five years from now, when a lot of the bugs in Vista have been worked out and a lot of the opressive DRM has been disabled, I'll run across some app that wants Vista and I'll have it.
Or, if Linux developers can manage to keep up, I'll be able to do what I want in Linux without needing a PhD in Linuxology. I still use Linux for most of my work. Games and video editing are on Windows. That's just the way it is right now.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Someone I Know bought a laptop with Vista on it. She then installed Office 2003 on it, since she already owned that (and the Office EULA specifically allows you to install it on a second portable machine). What happened was that although it runs just fine, Vista throws up requesters every time she starts an office app telling her that she's not using the correct version of Office for running under Vista.
My guess is that a lot of the Office 2007 sales are due to this -- Microsoft makes it hard for people to continue to use old versions, even though they work. So they give up and buy Office 2007 whether they need it or not.
Regards,
--
*Art
Our internal web site uses the DHTML Edit control - which doesn't work with Vista (for no good reason). So we've let all our staff know not to upgrade, at least not for now. We've investigated a number of workarounds, but they're all going to be work for us to implement, provide less to the user, and make development more complicated. This one feature means Vista is a stiff downgrade for us and will keep many of our users off of it at home and at work.
MS's general legacy of good backwards compatibility is the only thing that's kept us with MS over the years. If they continue to break that, we're not going to stick with them on the desktop. It's that simple. MS needs to understand that the features they push us to use in 2002 don't just have to work until 2006. We have to have some confidence that the feature we use today will be available in 10 years (or longer) especially if there's no real reason to remove it.
Anyways... just needed to vent a bit there.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.