Joe Wilcox says Vista is failing (again)
In this morning’s article, Windows: A Monopoly Shakes, Joe Wilcox paints a grim picture for Windows. Apparently, about 90% of surveyed enterprises adopted Windows XP in 2007, and about 6.3% adopted Vista, mainly taking away from Windows 2000 adoptions. I don’t know about yours, but my boots are shaking.
Is anybody really surprised? Enterprise IT isn’t exactly a new thing, and this isn’t the first time Windows has shipped. These guys refresh their PCs in cycles. Lots of all-Windows 2000 shops who never started rolling over to XP are now beginning their early rounds of rolling out Vista boxes. They’re in more of a hurry, since Windows 2000 is pretty ancient. So much so that it originates from a time when we appended “2000” after product names and thought it sounded cool and futuristic.
The Windows XP guys sticking with it through 2007 doesn’t shock me. Most of the XP-based enterprises I’m familiar with are in the pilot stages for moving to Vista. Lots of them have been working closely with Microsoft to make sure that updates like SP1 and Windows Search 4.0 address their deployment issues. This is just how it goes.
Some number will even decide to “skip” Vista. I’m sure it’s not a prospect Microsoft likes to acknowledge, but just look at how many companies held onto Windows 2000. Throughout the entire (long) lifetime of XP!
Joe says that Windows adoption on the whole declined 3.7 percent over the course of the year (98.6% in January to 94.9% in December). I have no idea what that means. Is there some comparison to the year before that might put those numbers in context? Or are we saying that all months of the year are equal? Did anyone consider that the impending release of Vista SP1 might have led some Windows-based companies to hold off purchasing for a few months?
I don’t mean to belittle the apparent gains made by the Apple and Linux camps in the last three months of 2007. I just think it’s silly to make a big deal about three months of “decline” for Windows in light of those other factors. Joe says that “Vista is in real trouble.”
And yet it looks like last year more companies bought Vista machines than Macs and Linux PCs combined. I’d say that’s pretty darn good for an OS that was released at the beginning of the year.
Well, that’s my take anyway.
Agree 100%. Funny thing is, I recently moved to Vista, and I have to be honest, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. I find it an enjoyable OS to work with. Yeah I needed a new PC, but my PC was ancient and falling apart anyway (It actually died FORCING me to get a new one).
Quite frankly, I didn’t feel bad about spending the cash. I have a system that doesn’t seem to have load times for the work that I do. It looks nice, it’s stable and has a lot of changes to the interface that I really like.
Also, the install was pretty much unattended, it just wanted to know what language I spoke. XP is forever asking questions 🙂
Keep the Faith! 🙂
That Windows Watch ought to be called Windows Bash. I’ve also installed Vista SP1 on a new machine. It installed with no issues and it performs just fine. There have been a few small glitches with some apps and a driver, but I can’t say if any of them are related to Vista or the new hardware. Certainly nothing worse than any new OS starts out. All my day-to-day apps are working normally.
I also installed XP. XP has served me very well over the years, but it is getting old. I’m going to relate some issues just to provide a counterpoint to the “Vista Sucks/XP Is Great” routine that’s been going on. To install, I had to make a special boot CD because I have no floppy to supply an F6 driver and my SATA controllers are in ACPI mode. Then XP got confused because I was shuffling disks around as I moved data from my old machine – it complained of a drive not ready every time I booted – I reinstalled to fix this. Next, my sound drivers wouldn’t install. I had to research this – it need an MS KB for the HD audio bus driver. That KB didn’t install properly – I had to manually update the driver for the device. I haven’t done nearly as much with this XP install as with the Vista install, so it hasn’t had a fraction of the opportunity to break.
I read Joe Wilcox’s article yesterday. After finishing his article, I removed him from my RSS feeds. The article was pure garbage. I think some of these so-called Vista experts get more Web hits (and paid more) for slamming Microsoft and Vista. Some companies may be holding back on deploying Vista because they still have not modified all their home-brew Windows programs, to play nice with Vista. There are lots of legacy Windows programs that assume the user has admin rights to run and modify files in the system folder and registry.
too funny Phil, I did the exact same thing. I’ve been debating deleting his feed for the last couple of weeks, this one was the proverbial straw on the camel’s back.
In my case, I bought a new laptop (because I had to) and it came with Vista (no other OS choices). I didn’t, however, buy any other new gear and none of my current gear (most of which is several years old but still operates just fine) works with Vista due to lack of drivers (and, since the gear is several generations old, no manufacturers have provided updated Vista drivers, and probably never will). In addition, some of the key software applications I regularly use were not Vista-compatible in the versions I had. They all have Vista-compatible versions now, but the upgrade to these versions is not free.
Needless to say, I had no interest in buying all new gear (printers, scanners, etc.) and paying for (unnecessary) software upgrades just so I could use Vista. All of my gear and software worked fine with Windows XP. So, I ended up wiping the hard drive clean on my new laptop and replacing Vista with XP. I really wanted to stick with Vista, but it just wasn’t practical or cost-effective.