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."

Comments

Why would it drive demand?

[jibjibjib]

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.

Re:A month and no success?

[gravesb]

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.

Re:poor drivers = poor customer perception

[Anonymous Coward]

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"...

Rubber demand curve

[zoftie]

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.

Oh it's driving demand all right

[goombah99]

For Macs and Linux.

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 /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.

So Microsoft's big need is the Killer App that only runs well on Vista. You got it?

Re:Oh it's driving demand all right

[shaitand]

'With win2000 the interface still sucked. XP made big strides in making the interface less sucky.'

Less sucky in what way? Anyone who knows how uses the classic start menu and control panel. The only thing that really leaves is the theme and anyone who is at all concerned about performance uses the windows classic theme.

What sucks about the Windows UI?

[Savage-Rabbit]

Less sucky in what way? Anyone who knows how uses the classic start menu and control panel. The only thing that really leaves is the theme and anyone who is at all concerned about performance uses the windows classic theme. My gripes with the Windows 2000/XP interface...

• To say it was ugly is going to far it was more like mind numbingly dull. XP helped a little.
• I never much liked the start menu:
  1. Move the mouse pointer to the 'Start' button in the lower left corner,
  2. click,
  3. find the 'Programs' item,
  4. click,
  5. find the program you want,
  6. 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' look .
• The Windows UI behaves in a way that I find infuriating, especially the way that applications steal the focus. This didn't change much with XP. It can be tweaked though.
• Endless reboots. XP was an improvement because it decreased their frequency.
• The endless OK and Apply buttons are annoying. Somehow OS.X and some Linux desktops and even Windows Mobile seem to manage without them.
• The ceaseless stupid questions about whether or not I am sure I want to do this that or the other thing are annoying. I'm not saying they are alwasy unwanted but it would be nice if Microsoft were to reduce their number.
• Having to click one's way through endless configuration app windows to perform simple reconfigurations is annoying. I can modify system preferences in OS.X with far fewer mouse clicks than I can in Windows 2000 or XP.
• When you have a large number of windows open in 2000 and XP finding a particular one is not easy. They tried to solve this in XP by grouping buttons for a particular app. It helped but it wasn't a good solution. I haven't used Vista, but judging from demonstrations of the 'Rolodex' feature they added in to trump 'Exposé' it looks like a huge improvement.

I'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.

Re:What sucks about the Windows UI?

[dabraun]

The quick-launch bar was a major improvement

For those who don't know, the quick launch bar was introduced as part of IE 4.0 in 1997, it is by no means a win2k/xp/vista feature. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was disabled by default in XP (but enabled by default in win2k and vista). I believe that in XP microsoft thought the 'recent apps' addition to the start menu replaced the need for quick launch, but by Vista the realized that it did not ...