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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."
Of course not, it's a waffle with a side of Spam.
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
Well maybe if Steve Ballmer went this crazy more often more people would be interested in Vista.
...or maybe that could go the other way too.
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.
No, it's nothing to do with the DRM, which the average user is totally oblivious to.
It's the fact that there is currently no compelling reason to upgrade, from a "general use" perspective. Really - other than flip3d (and very few "normal users" i know even use alt-tab) and the new start menu, it's the same old shit, only with more irritating user access control. The fact that for most people's current PCs, performance will be significantly worse, and driver support just isn't there yet doesn't help.
As an aside - a major issue at the moment is the changes to DirectSound. Unless you've got an X-fi soundblaster and run creative's "Alchemy" software which translates Directsound into OpenAL, you're not going to get any EAX support in any games, and the sound support you do get is often scratchy and clicky (eg, neverwinter nights 2)
That said, I'm buying Vista - which is a drastic change in my attitude from 3 months ago. Why? Becuase Win2k is no longer supported, XP *really* is a steaming pile of shit, and Linux just isn't there yet for me to run exclusively (though i've been a user since 1996). I spend all day at work doing admin stuff - on my home pc all i want to do is run some games (and Falcon4: Allied Force, for example, will not run under Cedega), browse the net and media related stuff. From my testing this week, Vista is "good enough" for the tasks I ask of it (nwn2 had minor issues, F4:AF runs fine), and it's a currently supported product.
Also, it's inevitable that I'll have to support it at work sooner or later, so I may as well get a head start on the issues it has.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Sure, the big vendors would love to sell Vista only. They thought that about XP, too... until several major corporate customers told them where to go. Then, suddenly, places like Dell were still selling Win2K and Microsoft was extending support for older business OSes.
Given that it tooks several years for XP to overtake Win2K, and a very significant proportion of businesses have never made the switch, I'm afraid your/Microsoft's theory that everyone will just move sooner or later may or may not hold. And that's before the big scare stories about how "your computer can be disabled remotely" and so on start really freaking out the big CIOs...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
- 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
Every time some issue like this comes up, someone writes about how they wish Dell sold naked PC's. They have -- for years. Dell's naked PC's are called the n-Series desktops. They're listed as "open source desktops" on the Dell website. They only contain a minimal FreeDOS installation for legal reasons, which is meant to be wiped clean by your favorite OS installer. And from what I've seen, they're the same price or less than the Windows models.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems