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Vista – There is only One choice

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Please let me understand why anyone in any business sector would contemplate moving to Vista. The biggest white elephant the software world will ever see. Ultimately it may even bring about the begining of the demise of Microsoft itself.

Large businesses will baulk at the size of the incremental hardware costs (and the cost of delivering it to the desktop. But above all the draconian licensing costs will be monumental as the product decides its on a new box every time someone conects a new mouse.

Small and medium businesses. The relicencing costs will kill them and the incremental hardware costs will be uneconomic so new PC’s will be required. As they will not do this across the board , support costs will double as support for two incompatible systems will be required, all other products will require double the deployment testing prior to roll out. Ho Ho – No Chance Oh yes and I forgot Quickbooks and a raft of other key packages will not run on Vista .

Gamester. Probably the only guy around who has the hardware to run the thing properly, (Forget MS claims it will take at least double their spec) But why oh why would this individual upgrade to give half his power to Vista , disable 65% of his games and have more driver problems than Fedex.

The good old Home PC User. Will probably need to spend around $500 on new bits so will wait until a new PC is ordered . He will be horrified at the relicencing costs after performing the slightest upgrade, and this reason alone is likely to alienate him forever from microsoft. The Home User will adopt an over my dead body approach

So the bottom line is I cannot see one single sector of the market adopting this OS. After all what do you actually get , eye candy and that is about it. Please do not bore me with the extra security debate. Most of us gave up waiting for MS to address those issues years ago. All sensible organisations, and even home users have got their hardware firewalls, and anti everything software providing the external wall around the OS.

Final assessment, it provides nothing anyone wants, the cost of initial purcahse is high, it causes performance degradation, and the ongoing cost of ownership is astronomic.

Judgement: Mr Gates you have to be joking!

Topic

Clarifications

In reply to Vista – There is only One choice

Clarifications

Come on now…

In reply to Vista – There is only One choice

You’re talking as if everybody would be phasing in Vista from the day of release, which everyone knows should never happen.

Large Businesses should have volume licensing contracts with microsoft that won’t hurt them too horribly. I don’t know of anybody running a large enterprise that even thinks about rolling out an OS before SP1. Any computers bought in the last year should be able to handle it, so with an estimated lifecycle of 4 years for a PC, after two years half of your machines are vista-ready. That would phase out XP in around 4 years, which would be about right. Where I am we just finished phasing out 2000.

All of the driver issues and software compatability issues will be worked out within 3-6 months. Remember when SP2 came out?

Most home users don’t care and stick with whatever comes with their PC. Grandma loves ’98.

Missing the Point

In reply to Come on now…

I think the level of upgrading required may not be understood. For 95% of PC’s neither the memory or the Video card will suffice. In most cases that means the motherboard as well. It is highly unlikely that any PC purchased as part of a rolling replenishment plan beyond six months ago will run this system. Conversion will therefore not start for four years in the corporate world, in the home world, which is a much bigger and more important market to Microsoft, particularly in Europe, it is unlikely to begin at all. Clearly a concept supported by your Grandmother.

Insignificant sales volumes of an OS in that timescale, will mean product abandonment. So getting Vista ready will be about as helpful as prepairing for the reurn of betamax

I think that you are missing the point

In reply to Missing the Point

Aero is not needed to run Vista. Most systems built in tha last couple of years work fine with it (a bit slow, but..). Heck, I have placed it on a 4 year old system and it ran with AV and had few major issues (other than slowdowns).
I do not plan on using Vista for some time, if at all. I do work at a large enterprise company, and they already have plans on a rollout later this year (phased of course). The previous poster is correct, I would say that XP will still be in operation for 3-4 years in Enterprise business environments. This gives plenty of time for the home adoption to take place.
If you give it another 6 months, more drivers will be available, more programs will be ported to it, and less problems will occur. The OS will also partially adapt from MS feedback on issues with it (like XP SP2).

However, I will cede that the pricing, amount of distros, and other problems will increase the Linux/Mac sectors a bit. However, I sill say that Vista will so dominate the market in a couple of years.

Dominate the Market in two Years

In reply to I think that you are missing the point

Dominate the Market in two Years. An interesting view. I on the other hand expect it to surpass Millenium Edition as the shortest lived MS OS of all time.

What I meant was

In reply to Dominate the Market in two Years

Dominate the market for new OS purchases, not dominate the marketplace of existing HW.

Domination

In reply to What I meant was

So if the OS installed base is 1 billion XP licences, and two fools buy Vista thats domination is it?

95% not Vista capable?

In reply to Missing the Point

We haven’t bought anything in the last 2 years that isn’t at least “vista capable”. I’m sure several unneccesary serivces will be stripped out, making the performance on even the lower end machines bearable. You honestly think conversions to Vista will not begin until 2011? Come on.

And retail sales of the OS aren’t what drives it. Volume Licensing Agreements and OEM’s are the big guns in that game.

There is a market beyond the US

In reply to 95% not Vista capable?

Europe is a far bigger market than the US. In the take up of home PC’s and Broadband nearly 3 times the size in fact. In europe the home or to be more specific non corporate market is king.

As for Vista capable, well do you really expect it to run in a gigabyte?

drm?

In reply to 95% not Vista capable?

I’m more worried about Microsoft locking me out when I
download a song, or got to a website that it thinks it doesn’t
like. I have been getting reports that Vista’s security is
stopping people from downloading music, even from legal
sites like Itunes, and that it locks you out if it thinks you’re
doing something wrong on the net. is that true? let me know
more.

You assume everybody will run the Aero GUI

In reply to Missing the Point

“I think the level of upgrading required may not be understood. ”

Most machines purchase within the last 18 months will run Vista in some fashion, just without the GUI bells and whistles.

Large companies often don’t run a new version of Windows even when the new computers they purchase already have it installed. They’ll continue install the previous version (in this case XP) until a new application requires them to deploy the newer OS.

complain to the government

In reply to Vista – There is only One choice

Some of the new licensing requirements were undoubtable part of the anti-trust settlement both with the EU and US government. All designed to make competing products more attractive.

Yes the Home user gets shafted. Business gets shafted. Even goverments that use Windows gets shafted.

As the non portability of Windows gets tighter and tighter, users will try to find another O/S that they can move around to their other PCs. Just like the days of Windows 9X/W2K that did not have strict control over what computer it can be installed on and how many times it can be installed.

So, that means Linux, if they can standardize, can compete and even grab the top spot with users. If Linux worked like Windows and I could install it to all my other computers without having to pay full price for each one, hell, I’d go to Linux.

But that probably won’t happen.

Of course we are getting shafted

In reply to complain to the government

That is how MS works.

I agree, I have been playing with Linux and gotten pretty good at soem things, but I still prefer XP for now.

If the Linux world could come around a bit more, I think that many people would make the switch. But I still think that MS will keep the top dog spot for quite a few years still. Most people do not adopt alternate OS’s easily or quickly, including businesses.

How many applications can be run on linux?

In reply to complain to the government

Out of 100 newest computer games, how many can be run on Linus or Mac?

I will use whatever OS come with the PCs. A couple of my old boxes are still running Windows 98.

Games

In reply to How many applications can be run on linux?

I am not sure how many of the latest top 100 games run on Linux. However the answer will be greater than zero and that is how many will run on Win98. As far as I am aware support for Directx 9.3 has never been retrofitted to 98!

Simple answer

In reply to Vista – There is only One choice

They will not untill the end of the xp product cycle when its cheaper and more reliable.

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