Sometimes perception has a basis in reality- not just in marketing campaigns.
By its third year 98 had evolved into 98SE (where usb support was introduced), the peripherals that people had been using before 98 now largely were supported in 98 so it wasn't to shell out gobs of money to replace all of your hardware, and Office 97 and Works were both on the market and being viewed as usable AND useful by the marketplace.
Arguably the most significant changes by year 3 of 98/98SE were not with the OS but with society. In the three years since 98 was released there was a significant increase in the percentage of households that actually had home computers. They were making the transition from novelty to necessity, and 98 was the operating system with which most home users first learned to compute. At the same time the internet, had penetrated the national consciousness, and people were emailing their friends and families on a regular basis.
XP was also significantly different by its third year. SP1 and SP2 had both been released and significantly improved security, stability, and the ease of use of some key features like support for wireless networking and digital media.
These attributes dovetailed nicely with the public obsession with digital photography, the increasing penetration of laptops into the home market, and the increasing threat of identity theft.
Vista was seriously crippled by the delay-plagued XPSP2. Microsoft pulled many of the programmers working on Vista over to the SP2 team in order to finally get it to market. Several of the key features promised for Vista were pulled during this same period, most notably the new file system and a dramatically improved search feature. Third party products took huge leaps ahead of Windows in the area of digital media/digital home entertainment- another area that had been touted as a major advance to be found in Vista.
To be fair, no OS could have lived up to the unending publicity campaign that built around Longhorn/Vista. But the Vista that made it to market appeared to many home AND business users to be nothing more than a pretty (inter)face. And very few computers will even display Aero to its full capabilities. Full Aero requires a graphics card built around Microsoft's Direct X 10- and the first such cards have only made it to market in the last two months. Microsoft has announced that SP1 for Vista, slated for release in October, is only a compilation of all of the critical updates already released by MS via MicrosoftUpdate.
I don't see the perception of Vista changing radically in its first three years, if ever. Many in the tech press have dubbed it ME2, perhaps the ultimate insult. Microsoft has given pc manufacturers permission to continuing selling new machines with XP installed for another six months, minimum. Vista appears to lack any new features that will coincide with the masses embracing some new computer-related past time. The stars don't seem to have aligned in Vista's favor. It's telling that Vista SP1 and XP SP3 (which will allow for the activation of a huge number of new XP key codes- MS was literally within months of using up every code produced by their original algorithms) are being released with in a few months of each other.
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I already hear things in my head. It's not so bad, really.
Sometimes perception has a basis in reality- not just in marketing campaigns.
By its third year 98 had evolved into 98SE (where usb support was introduced), the peripherals that people had been using before 98 now largely were supported in 98 so it wasn't to shell out gobs of money to replace all of your hardware, and Office 97 and Works were both on the market and being viewed as usable AND useful by the marketplace.
Arguably the most significant changes by year 3 of 98/98SE were not with the OS but with society. In the three years since 98 was released there was a significant increase in the percentage of households that actually had home computers. They were making the transition from novelty to necessity, and 98 was the operating system with which most home users first learned to compute. At the same time the internet, had penetrated the national consciousness, and people were emailing their friends and families on a regular basis.
XP was also significantly different by its third year. SP1 and SP2 had both been released and significantly improved security, stability, and the ease of use of some key features like support for wireless networking and digital media.
These attributes dovetailed nicely with the public obsession with digital photography, the increasing penetration of laptops into the home market, and the increasing threat of identity theft.
Vista was seriously crippled by the delay-plagued XPSP2. Microsoft pulled many of the programmers working on Vista over to the SP2 team in order to finally get it to market. Several of the key features promised for Vista were pulled during this same period, most notably the new file system and a dramatically improved search feature. Third party products took huge leaps ahead of Windows in the area of digital media/digital home entertainment- another area that had been touted as a major advance to be found in Vista.
To be fair, no OS could have lived up to the unending publicity campaign that built around Longhorn/Vista. But the Vista that made it to market appeared to many home AND business users to be nothing more than a pretty (inter)face. And very few computers will even display Aero to its full capabilities. Full Aero requires a graphics card built around Microsoft's Direct X 10- and the first such cards have only made it to market in the last two months. Microsoft has announced that SP1 for Vista, slated for release in October, is only a compilation of all of the critical updates already released by MS via MicrosoftUpdate.
I don't see the perception of Vista changing radically in its first three years, if ever. Many in the tech press have dubbed it ME2, perhaps the ultimate insult. Microsoft has given pc manufacturers permission to continuing selling new machines with XP installed for another six months, minimum. Vista appears to lack any new features that will coincide with the masses embracing some new computer-related past time. The stars don't seem to have aligned in Vista's favor. It's telling that Vista SP1 and XP SP3 (which will allow for the activation of a huge number of new XP key codes- MS was literally within months of using up every code produced by their original algorithms) are being released with in a few months of each other.