More Evidence That XP is Vista's Main Competitor

Ian Lamont writes "Computerworld is reporting that Windows XP Service Pack 3 runs MS Office 10% faster than XP SP2 — and is 'considerably faster' than Vista SP1. XP SP3 isn't scheduled to be released until next year, but testers at Devil Mountain Software — the same company which found Vista SP 1 to be hardly any faster than the debut version of Vista — were able to run some benchmarking tests on a release candidate of XP SP3, says the report. While this may be great news for XP owners, it is a problem for Microsoft, which is having trouble convincing business users to migrate to Vista."

Comments

Games

[telchine]

I think games might be the key for Microsoft to increase Vista uptake.

Vista is the only operating system that supports DirectX10 at the moment. if it stays that way and games start making use of DirectX10 features then games will have no choice but to use Vista.

There is also the small matter of "Vista only" games such as Halo 2 and the eagerly awaited Alan Wake from Remedy, the makers of Max Payne. that too will be a "Vista only" title.

Re:Games

[Anonymous Coward]

The more likely scenario is that Microsoft will give up and port DX10 to XP, or someone else will do it first.

Re:Games

[LingNoi]

Vista is the only operating system that supports DirectX10 at the moment. if it stays that way and games start making use of DirectX10 features then games will have no choice but to use Vista.

Game developers/publishers don't care about vista and DX10. They care about selling games to the largest target market. If the customer base doesn't move then game developers won't make titles exclusive to Vista, especially when code for XP runs fine on Vista.

There is also the small matter of "Vista only" games such as Halo 2 and the eagerly awaited Alan Wake from Remedy, the makers of Max Payne. that too will be a "Vista only" title.

Are you seriously suggesting people are going to purchase an OS that is over $400 just to play a 3 year old xbox game?! I could buy Halo 2 and an Xbox cheaper!

As for any other Vista only titles coming out, check how well they are selling. Shadowrun was Vista only and it sold so badly they had to close the game studio!

Re:Games

[cheater512]

Making a game DX10 only is a death sentence.
The only ones in existence are ones made by MS or ones who MS has paid a hefty amount to..

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[blake1]

The only possible reason I can see for users/corporations upgrading to Vista is if vendors start releasing packages that are dependant apon features that XP does not include. For instance, if/when hardware manufacturers and game publishers only release DX10-compatible versions, or if Installshield upgrades their packages to require you to suffer the annoyance of UAC before confirming that you are certain you know that you want to install whatever software... companies still use them instead of MSI's right?

Dear MS ...

[Ihlosi]

... for your next operating system, please use Windows XP as a benchmark and starting point. Create a product that beats Windows XP in relevant categories (note that "amount of eyecandy" doesn't count - usability, speed, resource usage and security do). I'm sure you will have no problem selling that.

Bad news for XP owners

[Potor]

While this may be great news for XP owners

I would have thought that this is bad news for the owners of XP (i.e., M$) but good news for the licensees of XP.

Re:Bad news for XP owners

[Rich0]

It is actually debatable whether people who buy software own it or are licensing it. Sure, the EULA states that you don't own it, but whether that is binding with respect to that statement hasn't really been well-tested. Traditionally the way copyright has been handled in the courts was to treat a sale as a sale - you own it, but you can't copy it. When one person hands money to somebody else in exchange for a box, the normal way of handling it is like any other sale.

Now, if you're talking about complex multi-million-dollar licensing deals or anything at a corporate level the law would probably change views. However, when you're dealing with consumer products the courts usually apply consumer-oriented law. In the same way the recourse available when company A sells a highrise to company B is different than what might be available when somebody buys a single family home to live in (the law protects consumers more than it does corporations, since the latter is expected to perform more due-diligence).

Basically, the only reason that software vendors haven't gotten clobbered in courts regarding the sale-vs-license issue is because they don't push their luck - they generally don't try to restrict consumers from doing stuff that a sale would normally permit them from doing. If a major software vendor tries to greatly restrict what users can do with the software that they've paid for they could end up facing a class action lawsuit regardless of what the EULA clearly states.

Think of it like buying a house. I put a clause in the agreement of sale stating that I'm not responsible in any way for anything that happens to the next owners regardless of my knowledge / ability to prevent / etc. We both sign it. Two weeks after you move in a kid gets killed by a faulty wiring problem. It can be proven that I knew about the defect and didn't disclose it. If I reach a settlement with the new owner then the clause in the agreement of sale will escape court scrutiny, but if I try to point to the clause and get out of it then there is a good chance that a court will void that clause. There are a number of circumstances that would make a court lean either way, but in general you can't use an agreement to limit liability for serious safety issues unless there is clearly informed consent and some kind of consideration.

And I'm not a lawyer - so don't just take me at my word. The bottom line is that just because you put something on paper doesn't make it stick.

boredom is Vista's main competitor

[petes_PoV]

(yawn)

If you already have a PC, you'll run XP (or in my case W2K SP4) 'cos it just works. If you buy a new PC, you'll run Vista.

That's basically it. A few people will have bought a Vista upgrade - maybe they're ahppy with it, maybe not. If not, they'll either live with it or revert. It's not to do with competition, it's to do with a saturated market.

The only story here is: people sometimes buy new PCs.

Until there is a killer app that only runs on Vista, I can't see why most people whould make the change.

obligatory Linux snippet in the end of the article

[LingNoi]

FTA

But Gray said he was convinced Microsoft will win out in the end, if only because it has virtually no competitor worth the name in the enterprise market. "Linux and Mac have 1% or 2%, and in some cases, such as Europe and the largest corporations, they don't even register," he said. "Microsoft owns this space, and I don't see that changing."

He couldn't resist taking a jab could he?

Of course the enterprise market isn't moving to Linux they're ass slow to move to ANYTHING. These companies are so huge that it takes years to change the way they work.

What I want to know is the made up (because you know what stats are like) figures of Linux growth in the Small to Medium businesses since they make up a larger majority of businesses then a couple of giant mega corps..

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[petermgreen]

Home users will have little choice but to migrate as and when they buy thier next new PC, buisness users will be slower but some manufacturers are already putting out machines that are very difficult to find XP drivers for.

vista will replace XP just as XP replaced 2K, it will just take a bit of time.

I wish they'd get their act together...

[CFBMoo1]

I've been sitting on Vista since it nearly came out on my home PC. The primary reason was because of my job repairing computers. I knew that users would get machines with Vista pre-installed. I've wanted to switch back to XP and just live with that but I managed to talk myself out of it not because Vista is better, it's because most everyone that goes to the store will buy a Vista machine.

If the manufacturer of drivers are the problem then those people need to get their acts together. Either way I'm tired of having an OS that is suposed to be newer and better then XP but is anything but up to sub-par to XP. Get the damn thing fixed, jeeze people pay enough for that thing.

One last thing, take the dang confusion out of the 7-9 different flavors. Have two like XP and don't relabel everything just cause it's NEW. I still have a hard time finding Add/Remove Programs.

Vista Business/Enterprise offers a lot

[cybrthng]

Its just going to take time to implement, integrate & upgrade everything to support it. You would have to be kidding yourselves to think MS just made up vista without regard for its core customers. The business version includes encryption, AD, GPO, security, performance, reliability that business users demand and to think Vista isn't an upgrade over XP or 2k in these regards is simply foolish. Auditing, Reporting, Authorization, Policy Management and Manageability have all increased 10 fold if not 100 fold over xp "out of the box" - THAT is what Corporate America wanted - and got! Lord knows They will have to implement the hardware to support it as they would with any other demanding project but that isn't a fault of MS or windows. There isn't an out of the box linux distro within ear shot of a Vista Business & Windows 2008 in end user support & management - everything would be left to 3rd party systems, agent based management and user trust.

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[tommertron]

To be honest, I don't understand the hate for UAC. Ubuntu asks me for my password before installing software or even updates, or doing a lot of other tasks like editing system files. How is this any different?

Re:Was it like this when XP came out?

[Cro Magnon]

There was one big difference between XP then and Vista now. Most XP users upgraded from Win9X. Win9X was total crap on stability. If you went a day without a reboot, you were doing well.

XP is pretty stable, and SP2 isn't a total disaster on security. With Vista, you have all of the growing pains that XP went through with few reasons to "upgrade".

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[Calinous]

Just to know: most of the Windows applications you would use (especially corporate applications) would run just fine on an Windows 2000 Workstation.
      Vista-only applications are a long way in the future

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[TheLinuxSRC]

I realize that I can disable the UAC, but that is supposed to be one of the big selling points of Vista; it now has "enhanced" security etc... It seems that disabling the UAC defeats one of the major reasons for having Vista in the first place. I was trying to give the OS a fair shake and disabling the features that are supposed to be selling points is not really doing that. I mean, I could also enable the administrator account and just log in that way too with (mostly) the same effect.

I have tried aftermarket sound drivers for the soundblaster live! -- they work excellently until I reboot and Vista restores the pos MS driver. This is besides the point that drivers are available for this card for every other OS I use (with the possible exception of Solaris). Just because Creative decided to EOL support for the card doesn't make it not work and I refuse to spend $50+ to "fix something that ain't broke".

I guess my point is that I see no reason to use an OS that spends more time getting in my way than just letting me do what I use my computer for. That being said I will stick with XP (for the very few times I use Windows) for the time being. It is very rare that I need to boot into Windows for anything and I spend 95% of my time on Linux of one flavor or another (currently Gentoo, Kubuntu Gutsy, Slackware 12.0 and CentOS 5.0 w/rpmforge repo). The remainder of my computer time is spent pretty much evenly between OpenSolaris NV86, XP and FreeBSD.