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PC Makers Say Vista Is Not a Seller
TekkaDon writes "According to computer and component manufacturers, Vista is not the hotcake that they were hoping for. Take Acer's president, Gianfranco Lanci, who has just said that 'PC makers are really not counting on Vista to drive high demands for the industry.' Or Samsung Electronics, who now says that DRAM demand has not matched anyone's predictions based on Vista's now failed projections, something that is being echoed by the industry as a whole. This seem to agree with Ars Technica article on the 20 million Vista copies sold as a 'huge success' by Microsoft, which can be accounted for by the natural growth of PC sales over the years."
Most businesses won't buy Vista boxes until it's a bit more mature. Most consumers won't buy Vista boxes until their old box breaks. Why would you expect Vista to increase PC sales? Really, you'd expect it to decrease sales, because the price is higher than XP.
True, but some previous releases of Windows did drive computer sales and had large numbers after such a short time. Windows 95, for instance. I don't think any reasonable predictions about Vista expected the same thing, but some unreasonable ones did.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
Of course, most of the faults of linux nowadays are just poor drivers - you hear a zillion complaints about complicated installation and driver configuration issues, reviewers seldom bother to get as far as e.g. a KDE (or GNOME) Compiz or Beryl desktop, which makes vista's "new" interface look like a trabant. There's a certain hypocrisy at work: In the windows weenie world, Microsoft doesn't get the blame when hardware manufacturers supply shoddy drivers. Yet when hardware manufacturers fail to support linux, it's always "linux sux"...
All it takes, is time. It may well be that apple with parallels and in future some deeper emulation integration with windows, will drive demand for people who abandon insecure windows environments for usable OS X. As Microsoft fails to meet its own promises, people will be forced to look elsewhere. Perhaps OS X with its demanding video applications will drive the next big rise in sales.
I am not analyst, but stagnant windows platform isn't living up to its promises, people will be forced to look elsewhere. Elsewhere as in Ubuntu desktop, OS X. Whichever. It will take time.
For Macs and Linux.
/big memory or....drum roll...DRM. If not then you wait till your harddrive seems puny or you get so rooted that your faced with wiping the disk and reinstalling XP then a chain of service packs. At that point buying a new machine looks attractive.
On a more sober note. Maybe this is a testament to the quality of XP. Up until win2000 windows sucked. With win2000 the interface still sucked. XP made big strides in making the interface less sucky.
The point is that every generation of Windows (excluding Bob and ME) has not only an enormous improvement over the last, but almost at the level of an emergency repair that could not be foregone any longer. Thus it drove sales. Any idiot could see why each generation was desirable over the hell they where in.
Maybe with XP the quality finally reach a level where migrating to the next big thing was no longer an emergency. XP had sufficiently good behaviour that the operating system no longer drives sales.
So this time it's going to be the applications that drive sales. You won't upgrade your existing system till the apps start to need whatever Vista has that XP does not do well. Probably this will be some combination of 64bits/video
So Microsoft's big need is the Killer App that only runs well on Vista. You got it?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Well, that sounds like you are saying that the only people really put at a disadvantage by WGA and anti-piracy measures are honest users that weren't pirating software anyway?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Exactly. As is and has been the case with every form of copy-protection ever devised. You pay to be disadvantaged.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The difference is, however is that because Microsoft put out Vista, the drivers *will* get fixed, one way or another, and in pretty short order.
Will that happen with Linux? Eventually, yes maybe. The situation is definitely a hell of a lot better than it was 11 years ago when i started using Linux, but it's a long way behind.
Is it fair that virtually all the Linux drivers are written by volunteers, often without hardware specs? No, of course not - but in the real world, "but that's not fair?!" won't cut it. Results are what people are concerned about.
Linux really is *almost there* and once the hardware devs jump on board in a big way, it will get critical mass and start becoming more competitive. Unfortunately at the moment it's on the edge of that "chicken and eg" scenario where hardware (and commercial software) devs won't justify linux driver development for a small market, and the market is small because of driver/commercial software development.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
- Move the mouse pointer to the 'Start' button in the lower left corner,
- click,
- find the 'Programs' item,
- click,
- find the program you want,
- click.
The quick-launch bar was a major improvement but I still like the OS.X dock better because of the magnification feature which makes it easier to hit the icon you want and the fact that the dock is simply easier and quicker to use. The new Windows start menu was, if anything worse than the old one. It had some nice features but it was badly organized. My first action on an XP system is always to set it back to 'classic' lookI'm sure that all these things can either be changed by setting some radio button in a not so easy to find configuration window, tweaked with a third party utility or if all fails modified by changing registry settings but I chose to switch to something that works the way I want it to out of the box and it's into the bargain more secure but that's a matter for a whole other flame-war.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The operating system is focused on when installing/uninstalling programs and peripherals which for the average user may account for a relatively small amount of time vs. checking e-mail, surfing the web and writing documents. Therefore, most of the time, people are using applications instead of the OS. In this case, the most important feature of the OS is stability. For virtually everyone I know, XP home and professional reached a reasonable level of stability.