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Is Windows Vista in Trouble?
Ken Erfourth writes "The Inquirer.net is running a story about what they consider two powerful indications that Vista is failing in the marketplace. One, Dell has reintroduced PCs running Windows XP on its website due to customer demand. Two, Microsoft is conducting a worldwide firesale on a bundle of Microsoft Office 2007/WindowsXP Starter Edition. According to Inquirer.net, at least, these are signs of serious problems selling Vista. Are we seeing the stumbling of the Microsoft Juggernaught with the slow adoption of Windows Vista?"
With XP, there was a compelling reason for a lot of people to upgrade. For the Win2K users, it got you the gaming APIs and other things formerly only good in the Win98 branch. For the Win98 branch users, it was a huge upgrade in stability and robustness.
With Vista, there is no compelling useful feature for users, and much of the content added is particularly ANTI-user. So why upgrade?
Test your net with Netalyzr
when they slipped their release date by 3 years..
they're in even more trouble since they haven't said a word about their next version of windows..
MABASPLOOM!
I don't like Microsoft, and I gleefully read all about Vista's "innovations" and the Zune's "features" and laugh. But this article is just a little too opinionated to make worthwhile.
Did the submitter know this is /.? Plenty of us here think the answer is yes, and have been thinking that for a loooong time. I'm more interested in anone here who thinks Vista will do well, and why. So step right up and change my mind, let me know why you think Vista will eventually dominate. And I need a better argument than "800-pound gorilla".
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
The problem for MS this time around is that everyone was happy with XP. Ok, maybe not everybody was completely happy, but it's pretty stable, and does just about everything most people need it to do. People don't want to go back to having to run something that's buggy, or slows their system down. It's not like with windows 98, where we were still getting frequent BSODs. XP is a pretty good OS, and if people don't want to change, I don't blame them.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
There's this thing called a monopoly that prevents this trouble from occurring.
Windows users will buy new machines, and get Vista "real soon now." The number of users that switch will be nominal. No harm done to Microsoft.
As much as the media may want it to be, there is no competition in a market with a Monopoly.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
My friends, this is but another clever marketing strategy for M$ to sell more copies of Windows XP!
By now, the PC market is saturated and MS already has 90+ percent of it. Nearly everybody who needs or wants a PC already has one. This means that there will be little growth and the market is really based on replacement of older models with newer ones. MS already has a huge market share, so they can't grow by taking share away from the competition.
This does not mean MS or Vista are washed-up. It just means it is a mature market. MS and Vista are actually sitting pretty. They will continue to see 90+ percent of new computers running their stuff for the foreseeable future. But they simply won't have double-digit growth year over year, just a steady torrent of replacements.
Is Vista in trouble? Why wouldn't it be? Even if Microsoft gave the thing away for free, it totally ignores the fact that there's an enormous cost to upgrading. Microsoft doesn't need a fire sale, it needs to be paying people to install this thing.
Let's run down the usual suspects of people who upgrade and see how they feel:
I could go on, but you get the point. Is Vista in trouble? You bet. Add to all of the above the competition that it faces from various Linux distributions that are easier than ever to install and use, products like Mac OS, clever new projects such as ReactOS, and even its own predecessor! and it becomes clear that Microsoft should be praying that people pirate it, because that's the only way it's going to make any kind of splash when all is said and done.
Don't get me wrong, it won't die completely, any more than Windows ME is dead. But in the annals of operating systems, my money is that it will be merely a blip on the screen. If Microsoft is smart, it should be working on adding features to its operating system, making it faster and more powerful and easier to use. It should be fighting with us against DRM, not against us by crippling their software with it.
Personally, I think that Microsoft is not very smart, but who knows, I guess we'll see. At any rate, after giving it a week to try to convince me that it's not as bad as everyone says it is, I was very disappointed in it and won't be running it anytime in the forseeable future.
Microsoft is in control. All they have to do is to discontinue XP OEM licensing, or substantially raise the price. You'll get Vista with your new PC and you'll like it. If you don't like it, See Figure One.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Nobody touches it, nobody cares. It just sits there, a Dual Processor Dual Core Hyperthreaded monster and nobody thinks its worth the time to even login.
Even I don-t touch it because the fan is noisy, all that eye candy and gloss and the noisy fan outweighs it.
I'm typing this on Feisty Fluffer, no Funky Feaster, no Finkle Fungerstein, oh whatever the latest Ubuntu is called. It's far from perfect, the keyboard layout doesn't know the Spanish keyboard I have (where are those damn brackets_ and why is the question mark an underscore__). The typefaces are not as good as Windows, the status bar is too high and the icons too amateur, but so far 2 people have asked me for a copy of the disk.
So yes Vista is in trouble, big big trouble. It-s a big yawn, it's late and the stories we hear of privileges being determined by filename etc. mean I just don-t want to waste time with it.
What do you mean, slow starter.
They've already sold 244 copies in China!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Well because it has better secur...errr, I mean, the driver support is muc...well, ok, you may have me there.
Dell would release PCs running XP without all the other crap it might be worth buying one. Maybe...
You do realize that all that nagware crap subsidizes the cost of the hardware, don't you? All that crap is exactly why Dells are worth buying. One wipe, which I'd be doing anyways, and it's all gone.
Microsoft actually weaned me off when they started requiring "activation." So even XP isn't attractive to me — it has the same basic problem as Vista does. I run XP from time to time to verify web pages and test software, but it's in a network-free sandbox when I do. I run win98 the same way - no network - and no activation inside a sandbox (Parallels.) I don't use either one as my main OS, and I certainly have no intention of ever purchasing Vista, just to buy into the same set of risks all over again.
What happens when an XP system needs re-installation and I can't get an activation for any reason? As far as I'm concerned, if I buy it, I expect to install it, perhaps put a registration code in that will work each and every time without ever having to contact the manufacturer, and that's it. I'll grant you that it seems unlikely today that Microsoft won't be there in a few years, but will they activate an XP installation? That's a policy decision, and there's just no telling what that policy will be. I'm not hitching my cart to their policy decisions.
Whatever Vista offers, it isn't enough. I have plenty of functionality between linux and OSX, and I can run both concurrently, as is convenient. If either one ever fails, I'll just grab my install CDs and I'll be up and running in a reasonable amount of time. The rule of thumb here is (a) software on CD or DVD, and (b) registration codes, if any, sealed in the jewel case in a readable fashion.
I remember trying to re-install a screen saver (some very pretty aquarium simulation) and finding out that it wouldn't install, claiming I was trying to install it on multiple machines (I wasn't.) I wrote the company several emails about it (they were still around) and they never replied, nor would the screen saver ever work again. I was annoyed, as you might expect. But if this had been the OS instead of just a $30 screen saver, I'd have been pissed at about the nuclear level. This is exactly the risk everyone faces with XP and Vista.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That extra three years XP became more entrenched each day. Every time somebody installed a new printer or upgraded their wireless or beat their way through a software install, the compatibility bar for vista got higher. Every time someone new installed XP, the breakthrough point for widespread adoption of Vista got higher too. Each time XP gained share the leverage of having everyone on the same plan became more apparent as the pool of people you could exchange files with grew. Every time somebody bit their lip and bought a hugely expensive new program in the faint hope it would install and run correctly and be compatible with their extant setup and not be lame, the cost of upgrading to vista grew higher again. Even the negatives of some of these things forewarned people that change can be very bad and unnecessary change can be dumb when things go horribly wrong as they sometimes do over the simplest things.
XP isn't perfect and it doesn't have to be. XP works reliably enough for most people to do what they want to do most of the time. They've grown comfortable with their XP setups and invested heavily in padding their XP nests. To abandon that for a whole new Vista that doesn't have any of their expensive software or work with their expensive peripherals or just won't do what they've done each day for years or isn't quite interoperable with their friends' just isn't going to fly unless there is a compelling reason. A new desktop theme is not compelling enough for most people. For that level of sacrifice people want real change.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The Crap isn't on the windows CD dell gives you... the only change between retail and dell ms cd is drivers and a dell logo for support link
So you would wipe it with the cd dell gives you...
Two words: MSDOS 4.0.
Those of you old enough to remember, and yet who can't even recall MSDOS 4.0, will immediately know what I mean.
For those of you who are too young, MSDOS 4.0 was a tremendous flop. MSDOS 3.3 was used pretty much continuously from its release in 1987 until it MSDOS 5.0 came out in 1991, and even then, I ran into machines running v.3.3 for years afterwards. Version 4.0 was buggy and bloated while adding virtually nothing in the way of useful features, and the market reacted with a resounding yawn.
Microsoft, it should be remembered, was the dominant OS vendor in 1987, but it was not a monopoly yet. There were still plausible alternatives (then as now, technically superior). Microsoft is the dominant OS vendor in 2007, but its monopoly is crumbling, and all it will take is one gigantic screwup for competitors to move in. Vista is a gigantic screwup, just like MSDOS 4.0.
This could be good news for Linux, great news for Apple, and freaking fantastic news for ODF, especially if MS takes as long to recover from Vista as they did from DOS 4.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
No, don't try to convert them to Linux (unless they ask you to) but go help them when their computers fail. When you hear a friend or a relative suggest that they're going to buy a new PC because their old one is getting slow, go and help them out. Tell them it probably just needs a reinstall, maybe a bit more memory, a bigger hard disk... But *STOP* them buying new computers just for the sake of it.
And when you've helped them out, help them to install Firefox and Thunderbird, install OpenOffice for them and set it up.
People need to be educated properly about what it is to own a PC and what they need to do on a regular basis to keep it running relatively fast. We need to take control of our PCs - not buy every Microsoft upgrade, remove the Norton and McAfee Nagware crap that comes installed on every new PC.
That's the *PROPER* way to make Vista fail...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
No, but average consumers don't know that. The "Cost of Vista" article points out some fantastic ways in which functionality is effectively being taken away from consumers. Here's an excerpt close to the front of the article:
In other words, a consumer who has high-end audio setup thinking that they're going to be able to listen to the latest and greatest in A/V home theater technology will be sadly disappointed. The discs aren't broken, the hardware isn't broken, and no AVI files have been infected, but the end result is the same: Functionality that the user has paid for and reasonably expects to work doesn't. It's been taken away.
You're missing the point. What if "Susan" says "no, you can't have a code?" You're shit outta luck, that's what!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Dunno where you pull that "info" out of, but I remember it quite differently.
When 95 came out, people were literally storming the stores. There were geeks camping outside like it's some sneak-rare-midnight-preview of Star Wars 7. There were people buying it that even didn't have a computer 'cause it was supposedly SO cool you had to have it.
98 was originally more a downer, even though it did add new features and fixed a lot of problems. And the "SE" of it surely showed that it was superior to its predecessor and soon became the clearly superior system to 95.
ME was a desaster. For many reasons. First of all, it was essentially Win98. Second, pretty much all the new gadgets that separated it from 98 were buggy, flawed or simply useless and nobody wanted them. Most had all 3 features. And finally, 2k was around the corner.
2k was a definite improvement, over both, WinNT4.0 and Win98. It was the merge of the simplicity and compatibility of 98 and the stability (you there, stop that snickering, will you?) of NT4. It certainly was a key cornerstone in the development of the Windows platform and was received as such. Geeks, gamers and businesses alike loved it.
XP already had to deal with a problem: What for? 2k was already the "perfect" system. It had everything you wanted to have. There was no really compelling reason to upgrade, and it would have been far from impossible for MS to add the features (like WiFi and other support) to the core of 2k if they would have wanted. Of course, they wanted to sell XP, so that was a no-go option.
And Vista now is suffering from the same problem. Why upgrade? We might see some reason in a few months or years, when some new fad or feature picks up that MS doesn't even dream of supporting in XP, so we'd have to switch to Vista to benefit from it, but so far, we're at the same point where we were with the introduction of XP: Why upgrade?
XP is "good enough". In some ways, it is even "better" than Vista. We will eventually see the reason why we'll have to get Vista instead when MS refuses to support some essential hardware, but the way you put it is simply and plainly wrong.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And for each person who complained, how many did not, but just took their business elsewhere? Personally, I did both.
Dell is smart enough to know the relationship between complaints and lost sales. Hint: it's not a one-to-one relationship.
I'm pretty sure microsoft will have to keep their XP activation servers open for a long time. If they turn them off in even a decade, they will be wide open for some very nasty, very easy lawsuits. The windows licenses don't have an expiration date, so MS would have to demonstrate the the customer had violated the terms before they could stop activations without breaching contracts left and right.
Microsoft's alternatives would include giving all remaining XP users a refund (not feasible, even for them) and setting up an automatic approval server or other mechanism that would allow XP to be activated without troubling them. Unfortunately, that would make piracy even more trivial, and XP will continue to be usable (if a bit insecure) for years to come.
Yes, that sounds good, doesn't it. It's difficult to think ahead years at a time. However, I've already been down the road. I've got win98 machines, no longer networked, that are doing various things. They work fine, no particular need to fuss with them. Microsoft stopped supporting them - meaning no security updates, no nothing - fairly recently. In 1998 that didn't seem like much of a threat. Today, it means they can't safely be on the Internet. There's no recourse other than upgrading them, but if they fail, reinstall requires no interaction with Microsoft.
Having gone from brand new win98 install to "no longer supported", I tend to think in terms of "what happens?" when the latest and greatest thing of today is discarded, as win98 was. It'll happen; you can count on it. As I said in the original post, since activation is required for a reinstall, and activation, even today, is based on Microsoft policy, you are tying yourself to the whim of whoever sets that policy a few years down the road.
Do you think in five years, when Vista's been out all that time, that they'll re-activate copies of XP? They might, but where is the certainty? And then when Vista is 10 years old and HooHaOS is the latest and greatest, will they reactivate Vista? You seem to think so, while I observe that the fact is I'd have to guess. In the end, I'm not willing to tie the continued functioning of my computers to a guess about Microsoft's future policies. To be frank, I don't trust them.
OSX will work for me as long as the computer does and I keep track of the install disks. Linux will work for me as long as the computer does and I have disks. Hell, I've still got a couple of machines running AmigaOS, and Commodore is long since nipples-north. XP and Vista will work as long as Microsoft lets it, and as long as they are around to let it. After that, one crash, and you're dead in the water -- you must migrate to something else, regardless of what compatibility problems and other inconveniences (like spending money) that may cause you. See the conceptual difference?
Activation is literally Digital Rights Management, where the concept is, you don't have ANY right to reinstall your software. That right belongs to Microsoft and is entirely subject to Microsoft policy, as well as their existence. My reaction to that is unprintable.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.