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

Not a hotcake?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course not, it's a waffle with a side of Spam.

Re:Not a hotcake?

[HangingChad]

Spam, spam, eggs, spam and Vista.

Spam, eggs, Vista and spam.

Spam, spam, spam, Vista and spam.

With apologies to Monty Python and brought to you by the Department of Silly Walks.

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.

Balmer

[rasputin465]

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.

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?

hmmm

[smash]

As someone who's currently got a dodgy copy of Vista running at home (30 day grace period... yeah, yeah, i'm going to buy it when i get home this week), i can see why it's not *currently* selling well for most people (this will change of course when you can no longer buy XP easily).

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.