Slashdot Mirror
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."
people are using Vista without Aero Glass?
/is/ possible my friends.
It
I think the OP meant DRM makers and not DRAM makers :)
It's been well acknowledged here that Vista sales are roughly only equal to XP over the same time measured. OEMs were already standardized on 1GB (not low end of the market) of ram prior to Vista and Vista does run adequately on a GB of ram. What did they think would happen? Most of the PC market has been riding the MS/PC roller coaster long enough to have a feel for the time to buy and will likely hold on to XP until mainstream support has ended.
load "$",8,1
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 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!
Twinstiq, game news
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 paid $399 for Vista Ultimate. I thought it would net me beau coup geek cred. Now everyone's laughing at me!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Nobody likes elitism....
f u nub
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!
Of course this was to happen! Microsoft showed its investors and key manufacturers that the OS release will be on par to its Windows 95 explosion, which everyone knew was not going to be the case. Times Square ads, articles, and lots of other forms of attention only brought a weak demand in the market. Windows XP was good enough, and consequential events like these show that.
However, I'm pretty sure that, as the article points out, this falling trend will reverse itself when back-to-school season starts and people need to upgrade their old machines to keep them running or up-to-date.
Since DRAM makers only "feel" the adoption obliquely (ostensibly through the PC maker demand for more RAM on newly sold boxes) this could be taken two ways:
1) Vista isn't being as widely adopted as has been declared.
2) Users are opting to buy cheaper boxes and disabling the heavy RAM features (automatically done by Vista if the system requirements aren't up to Aero Glass par).
It may even be some combination of the two. Now, I didn't go into any great amount of research as to the offerings of OOB PC manufacturers, however, I did note that Dell's website still does not offer XP in any flavor (although there was some talk of this eventually becoming an option). From this, I make the careful and qualified surmise that new Windows-preloaded PCs are getting Vista. Knowing the user base, it is unlikely that they are replacing the OS themselves.
As far as I know, most people's personal budgets are still a little tight, so it is likely that people likely to buy PCs from Dell (casual users for the most part) are going to opt for the cheaper models, which, upon a little further inspection, don't have the horsepower or the RAM to run full Vista rendering.
These really aren't "hard numbers". It is difficult to determine anything concrete with this indirect indicator.
And it just keeps getting cheaper. Pretty soon, I expect Kellogg's to start stuffing a couple of gigs into boxes of Froot Loops.
My blog
The licenses sold, claimed by MS, can be fairly accurate. After all, a sale by MS can still sit on the shelf of some retailer, or been force-fed to people buying new hardware. When it comes to licenses used, I'd rather take other factors into account. One would be hardware sales, but after all it's possible to turn off all those goodies, so I wouldn't call it the best possible indicator.
Personally, what I'd deem a very good indicator would be the sales numbers of the different licenses. I.e. how many of the "minimum" Vista licenses have been sold vs. some of the "useful" ones. We all remember WinXP Home and Pro, and how "useable" Home was. Generally, whoever got the "Home" edition of XP got it 'cause he couldn't get his PC without any license and tossing Home was cheaper than tossing Pro.
So it would be fairly safe to assume that a considerable fraction of those "force-fed" minimum licenses have been bought because there's no way to get the computer without any OS and the first command issued on the new crate was fdisk. So, pants down, how mand licenses of what level have been sold?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Haven't memory prices dropped every day since it were introduced?
In fact they have NOT. Memory is, more than any other component in your PC, a true commodity, and it can be a volatile one at that. Like the market for gasoline it can sometimes be open to manipulation in the same way, though the major players are less apt to participate in collusion as petroleum refiners are notorious for doing.
I distinctly remember an incident involving a fire at a major DRAM manufacturing facility which produced a step change downward in global production capacity--this at a time when demand continued to grow at a healthy clip. Prices spiked even faster, and with a greater magnitude by far, than fuel prices did when hurricane Katrina took out all that refining capacity (we are talking doubling and tripling of prices here). In another incident it wasn't a drop in supply but a surge in demand sparked by the first Christmas season with Windows XP-equipped PCs for sale--inventory dried up and DRAM prices doubled.
aybe this is more to do with lifespan of memory than anything, changing design and automatically expiring themselves from the market.
That can have an effect on DRAM prices actually, except that the effect is opposite to what is happening today: when new memory formats come out it usually fuels demand and raises prices. Demand instead has been flat and prices have dropped. The problem is overcompensation to deal with the release of Vista (they were trying to avoid what happened when XP came out). Memory makers are lousy commodity managers in comparison to how those who produce gasoline, grain, metals, etc and really botched up--but MS also botched up and made the problem worse:
* Vista missed Christmas--it was in limited, corporate-and-developer-only release until January. Not only did this mean the vista launch couldn't take advantage of the shopping season, it also meant that the shopping season for computers itself was blunted as shoppers turned elsewhere for gift ideas (why buy a PC with crufty old XP when spiffy new Vista will be out and pre-installed on machines within weeks?). No demand there
* Though XP needs a relatively modest increase in resource requirements compared to its direct ancestor Windows 2000, the vast majority of the first XP adopters were moving from the DOS-based line of Windows (95/98/Me) and of all things what XP wanted the most over DOS-based Windows was RAM. DOS-based windows couldn't even properly use RAM over a certain level and most machines got to a certain level and stayed there because performance was maxed out. With XP, an old Win98 box could be make quite usable for a cheap price by simply plugging in more RAM. This fueled demand, which raised RAM prices.
* XP has been out for a VERY long time, and between all the service packs, updates and the demanding games and applications released in the past 5 years the demand for RAM has increased gradually even as the base OS is little unchanged. As Vista was released the minimum requirements were already met by most PCs up to a year old. This wasn't the case with XP, where so many crufty old PCs running Win98 were not up to the task of running XP.
* Vista is not different enough from XP to matter - turn off aero glass and to the casual user you have XP with a new UI theme--not much immediately useful comes right to mind. When XP came out it was targeted at legions of 98 and Me users, and 98 and Me were great stinking piles of crap compared to XP. Vista IS meaningfully better architecturally speaking but these advantages are only understood by computer scientists and software engineers. Furthermore, in the cutthroat market of PCs most new PCs are equipped with the featureless "home basic" edition, and that is what most users see, and that edition is well served by existing memory configs.
DRAM prices are like rollercoasters--they might have started at the top and will end up at the bottom, but all these external forces introduce "waves" that go up as well as d
This is revisionist history. People did run out and buy windows 95. In fact, they stood in line overnight to get it. Let's face it; the bloom is off the rose. Things have changed considerably and no matter how you spin it, vista has been met with a lackluster reception. It's not that vista is so bad(it is but so was win95), it's that people don't care one way or another, i.e. windows is no longer cool. WinPCs are even parodied in the Mac adds as the dorky guy and everybody laughs. Believe it or not, there was a time when windows was the cool thing, at least in some circles.