Is Vista A Disaster?

I have a friend who’s in her fifties that had her laptop stolen. The insurance was sufficient to buy her a new laptop, and naturally, it had Vista loaded. She had lots of problems with it, the most serious of which was that she couldn’t get email running. Well, she’s no techie, but she’s also no idiot. She never had problems getting email to work on previous Windows machines.

When she was telling me of her experience with Vista, I assumed she was an isolated incidence. Maybe she had not realized that she’d put a wrong value in somewhere. Now I’m not so sure. With Vista, Microsoft changed the Windows interface more comprehensively than before and this probably the prime cause of consumer frustration. It’s probably transient.

However, it isn’t the only problem. Vista is “goatware”, it eats all your resources. I guess we should be used to new versions of Windows being greedy. It’s part of Microsoft’s business plan for Windows to make old PCs obsolescent as quickly as possible. But Vista is unusually greedy. Remember that Vista was 7 years a-cooking, rather than the usual 3 years, so maybe it packs in a double dose of resource hunger.

None of this would matter much if the PC market were the same as it was ten years ago. Microsoft’s “drag along” business model would play the Pied Piper yet again and have us all marching behind it. But times have changed and PC users are not so pliable.

Microsoft has yielded to the pressure and decided to extend the life of Windows XP. But that isn’t the whole picture. Apple is making in-roads into the Windows monopoly - it now has about 17% of the US PC market (by revenue). And, finally, Linux PCs have started to emerge from the shadows. There are a number of factors at work in respect of Linux.

The primary one is that, at last, with Ubuntu, there’s a Linux distribution that is truly user friendly. There’s also the fact that the $100 PC is now in play (albeit for $200) and this will inevitably grow the market for Linux PCs. Finally, there’s a low-end PC market which cares not to pay for Windows. PCs sold through Wal Mart in the US and Tesco in the UK are Linux, with a whole swathe of open source applications loaded

So the question is whether “Vista is a disaster for Microsoft”. Certainly, Microsoft would have better protected its monopoly position if Vista had come earlier and not been so disappointing. It’s a little early to suggest that Vista has let the competition in - but it may have. We’ll see how it plays out over the coming year or so.

See also this later posting which provides a deeper technical view: 10 Reasons Why Vista Is A Disaster