DRAM Makers Suffer Due to Lackluster Vista Adoption

quixote9 writes "We've heard conflicting estimates of how widely adopted Vista has been. Now comes some hard data. DRAM makers ramped up to meet the huge expected demand for more memory needed by Vista. Except the demand hasn't materialized. Now they're suffering. Alternatively, maybe everyone's cleverly hacked their Ultimate Aero Glass Vista to fit on their old PCs."

Comments

Or maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

people are using Vista without Aero Glass?

It /is/ possible my friends.

Re:Or maybe

[Grishnakh]

Most of microsoft's money comes from corporate license agreement for Server level OS's, Exchange type stuff and the legions and legions of other business productivity software.

Huh? I thought most of Microsoft's money came from Windows and Office. With Windows, I thought most of that money came from license sales on desktop platforms, both for consumers and businesses. With consumers, most probably comes from OEM sales (Dell, etc.), and with businesses, most probably comes from site licenses.

MS is well-known to have a monopoly on desktop OSes, not server OSes. It would stand to reason that they make the most money, then, in desktop OS sales.

(On a side note, am I the only one blown away by the fact that Apple can get a way with saying that the iPhone is a revolutionary devise? The thing costs nearly as much as a laptop and the only "unique" function that I can see is the digital rotary dialing system....).

We'll see. After all, the original iPod wasn't received with much enthusiasm here on Slashdot, and look at where it is now.

Personally, I don't think it's going to be that much of a success (at least here in the USA), for the same reason mobile telephones in general aren't much of a success here (what I mean here is yes, everyone has one, but people don't bother with the premium features that much; they just get the cheapest phone available, myself included). The reason here is the locked-in nature of the cellular providers; you usually can't use your phone with different providers, the phone is locked in so you can't use all the built-in features, you have to purchase everything (ringtones, MP3s, etc.) from your provider at astronomical rates, etc. Because of this, Motorola actually is taking a big hit in their business, as is my company which is a supplier to them. Sure, the cellular providers are all doing fine, because people want/need cell phones, but anyone trying to make money on cellular technology (i.e. more powerful embedded processors, flash memory, etc. needed for premium features) is having a hard time since everyone is just getting the cheapest, most basic phone they can.

Re:Or maybe

[daeg]

XP SP0 ran fine with the computers at the time. In fact, XP Pro runs perfectly fine with 512 MB of RAM and Outlook + OpenOffice + Firefox (with things like browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers set to be very memory conservative). The problem comes in with drivers and other packages that users feel the need to install: overambitious virus protection, spyware detection, image editors, etc -- most of which have features the traditional home or office user don't use or don't need.

HP drivers, for instance, are notoriously gigantic to the point that at least a few people refuse to buy HP printers -- on the order of several hundred MB just to print. The standalone drivers are often incomplete. The HP package insists on installing an auto-updater, too, because if anything needs a 12MB resident program to check for updates, it's your printer.

Re:Or maybe

[BlueStraggler]

Crikey, it's just unix. Can you imagine saying that it's not possible to do real POS or finance on unix? You'd be laughed at. That stuff was being done on unix before Windows had any presence in the business world. The first unix system I ever saw was a Xenix POS system. Our good friend SCO specialized in POS systems.

Maybe you can't find any commodity small-business applications in these areas for unix platforms, but don't pretend that your bargain-brand applications are "real" and the unix ones are non-existent. If you want a real POS system that runs on the unix of your choice, I know of two, and it's not even my field. You can expect to pay 5-6 figures, though. If that's not real enough for you, just phone up IBM tell them you want to pay 7 figures for some Websphere monstrosity. They'll fix you up with something so real your eyes will bleed.

Re:Or maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possible that OEM's aren't equipping PC to the hilt? Consumers look at the cheapest price for a machine; hence most OEM's are going to equip the systems with the bare minimum. They don't want to loose a sale to their competitors for a cheaper machine. Is it Vista? Or is it the OEM's?

This wouldn't be a good measure of Vistas success in the market place. Personally, I don't believe that Vista is breaking all that many sales records.

Re:Or maybe

[sootman]

GOOD! Serves those price fixing bastards right.

I cried almost as much when I heard that lackluster SUV adoption was cutting into oil company profits.

Re:Or maybe

[RadioSilence]

Honestly, I think if you are selling them on dual booting, you may have won the battle but lost the war. They may do it for a week or two, but will quickly come to see it as a major hassle, eventually returning to Windows full time, with Linux being a memory of "that thing that couldn't run any of my software."

Lower prices?

[PixelSlut]

If the RAM manufacturers are building up stocks of RAM that nobody is buying then maybe they'll start pushing the prices down further to make it more attractive. Then those of us who are using Linux benefit again from Vista's lack of adoption. :)

Maybe

[HalAtWork]

Maybe the people care more about doing work than how they look doing it? Eye candy is nice, but it's not necessary. It's not going to make or break a purchase in the way that productivity enhancements would, and even then, people make do with what they have. The more versions that get released of whatever software, the less incentive to upgrade as it gets closer to "it works", and less people will care about improving the software the further along it gets. Throw money in and then people have even more reservations!

Re:Maybe

[brkello]

Oddly enough...you could almost write the same thing in an Apple thread and get modded flamebait :)

It will come, don't worry.

[mlts]

I'm not saying this is good or bad, but DRAM sales may lag now, but eventually people will be moving to Vista when it becomes the sole option on new machines.

RAM getting cheaper is always a good thing, mainly because on 95% of most people's machines, the biggest performance bottleneck is RAM (or lack of) forcing apps to swap.

I'm sure people haven't stopped buying computers

[Luft08091950]

And almost every new computer comes with Vista. I bought a new laptop and it came with Vista and only 512Mb of RAM. Man was it slow. I suppose I could have gone out and put a couple of Gig into it but I just wiped it and install Ubuntu. It's real peppy now!

Re:Par for the course

[SparkEE]

I'm not the type to defend windows, but.....

I don't think it's fair to look at the RAM utilization of an idling box and declare that using x% is bad. What would be the point of the OS not using the RAM that's sitting there? If I were writing an OS and knew I had RAM to spare and was idle, perhaps I'd be pre-loading the most used applications into RAM for faster startup. I think a good OS would almost always be using the RAM available in some way. It saves nothing to let it sit there.

OTOH, I have no idea if windows RAM utilization is due to the OS being smart of dumb. I simply don't like to see the idea of idle RAM usage propagate as a valid metric of an OS.

Re:Par for the course

[Chris Burke]

OTOH, I have no idea if windows RAM utilization is due to the OS being smart of dumb. I simply don't like to see the idea of idle RAM usage propagate as a valid metric of an OS.

I know that part of the "problem" is Vista using large swaths of RAM as a file cache, meaning that just like with Unix people see all that RAM being used and think it's the system but it's just a cache that will be dropped on the floor as soon as an application needs that memory.

The part that bothers me is that this "problem" only started showing up with Vista. Maybe they just changed how the counted 'free' RAM. Or maybe, and this is the worrying part, Vista is the first Microsoft OS with built-in file caching?! I had just assumed that XP had this feature. I mean, I may knock Microsoft, but I also granted NT and progeny "modern OS" status and figured file caching was part of the package.

Re:Par for the course

[Charcharodon]

Nothing wrong with a car analogy, it's just that you used the wrong one. Super Fetch is more like having magic gnomes that are constantly putting stuff in the trunk of your car that they think you might want to take with you, but they'll instantly take it all back out if that turns out to not be the case.

See car analogys can be good, but you have to have magic gnomes to make it work.