As a marketing exercise, Vista has been a failure.\u00a0 We see lots of sales figures but these are totally distorted by how Microsoft sells Software Assurance and uses SKU’s, e.g. by a copy of Windows Server 2003 today and the EOpen site shows a W2008 purchase.\u00a0 The same applies with XP and Vista.\u00a0 If a corporation with SA buys a desktop CAL for an XP deployment, they have bought a Vista license with downgrade rights.\u00a0 And talk to people on the street … they either hear that Vista is bad or they don’t like it.<\/p>\n
It’s one of those damned if you do, damned if you don’t things where MS had to "fail" at some point.\u00a0 Do you keep 100% backwards compatibility or do you just have a cut off and say anything for XWP or W2K no longer works on Vista?\u00a0 MS chose neither and got caught in a mess.\u00a0 There’s an argument that we should blame 3rd party software developers for incompatibility issues.\u00a0 I’d agree with that to a fair amount.\u00a0 The customer just doesn’t care about that; what they care about is that they can’t use their LOB applications on Vista because the OS changed.\u00a0 We can discuss application compatibility toolkits but they just add more complications and difficulty to admins.\u00a0 MS fails to recognise that admins struggle to keep up with most IT challenges.\u00a0 Not everyone is rocket scientist or has time to decipher poor documentation or incomplete online examples.\u00a0 Software virtualisation would be cool.\u00a0 However this is only an option for bigger businesses and, again, is only available to SA customers.<\/p>\n
Businesses also wonder why they should adopt Vista.\u00a0\u00a0 What is in it for them?\u00a0 How does it improve on XP?\u00a0 Collaboration … pfft!\u00a0 You need Office, SharePoint and Exchange for that.\u00a0 Security?\u00a0 Somewhat but the "killer app" was BitLocker which was witheld from most purchasers by only putting it in Ultimate (1 in 1000 machines on a network allowed to run this) or Enterprise (which on SA customers can use).<\/p>\n
We were expecting that in just over 1 year we should expect Windows Vista R2 and in 1.5 years we would get Windows Server 2008 R2.\u00a0 Those who disliked Vista were also saying they’d wait for Windows 7.\u00a0 Here’s how MS has reacted.\u00a0 R2 is shelved.\u00a0 Windows 7 has been accelerated and will be the next OS release from MS.<\/p>\n
Don’t expect things like UAC to disappear.\u00a0 Some changes will not be undone.\u00a0 MS’s challenge is to give business a reason to want to upgrade.\u00a0 Personally, I see some reasons to go with Vista and W2008 but those aren’t enough for many customers.\u00a0 I think MS also has to step out from the basement and listen to customers who aren’t USA Fortune 500 companies.\u00a0 Not everyone has 1000’s of IT staff and limitless budgets.<\/p>\n
Oh – hiring Jerry Seinfeld to talk about shoes with Bill Gates in a very unfunny advert won’t fix Vista’s marketing woes.\u00a0 Even people fired from the BBC’s Apprentice have learned that mentioning the product helps an advert work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As a marketing exercise, Vista has been a failure.\u00a0 We see lots of sales figures but these are totally distorted by how Microsoft sells Software Assurance and uses SKU’s, e.g. by a copy of Windows Server 2003 today and the EOpen site shows a W2008 purchase.\u00a0 The same applies with XP and Vista.\u00a0 If a … Continue reading “Microsoft Reacts to Apparent Vista Failure”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}