Vista Sales Expectations Too High, Office Doing Well

PetManimal writes "A comparison of first-week retail sales of Vista compared to first-week sales of XP back in 2001 found that Vista sales were 60% lower. Steve Ballmer has admitted that earlier sales forecasts were 'overly aggressive,' but at least there is some good news for Microsoft: early Office 2007 sales were very strong compared to the early sales of Office 2003, despite almost no advertising or marketing until the retail launch at the end of January."

Queue up the chair jokes!

Then let's settle into a nice discussion about how vista sucks because it's more of the same and office 2007 sucks because it's not more of the same.

Re:Queue up the chair jokes!

> Then let's settle into a nice discussion about how vista sucks because it's more of the same and office 2007 sucks because it's not more of the same.

You are coming to a sad realization. Deny, allow, or throw chair?

Are you sure you want to execute vista-jokes.exe?

*Open FireFox*

You are trying to open a web browser, do you want to open it?
[ Continue ] [ Cancel ]
*continue*

This web browser was not signed by Microsoft, operation aborted.
[ Okay ]
*click* *Open IE*

You are trying to open a program made by Microsoft. Good choice!
[ Okay ]
*click* *slashdot.org*

You are opening a port to connect to an external website. Are you sure? It might be dangerous.
[ Continue ] [ Cancel ]
*continue*

You are connecting to Slashdot.org. Are you sure you want to go there? How about MSN instead?
[ Continue ] [ Go to MSN ] [ Cancel ]
*continue*

You appear to be posting to Slashdot. Any comment you write might be read by third parties. Are you sure you want to continue?
[ Continue ] [ Cancel ]
*continue*

You appear to be posting material that is disparaging to Microsoft. This is forbidden by section 66, paragraph 6 of your Windows Vista Super Mega Chair Monkey Team Hyper Force Go! ULTIMATE Edition EULA.
[ Report Yourself to Microsoft for Being Naughty ]
*BANG* ...

For sale: Like-new computer w/Vista. Slightly shotgunned.

Re:Queue up the chair jokes!

...and office 2007 sucks because it's not more of the same.

It's also more of the same, but people haven't noticed yet because of the distraction of the Ribbon.
("Look over there - a shiny thing!" <runs away>)

Re:Queue up the chair jokes!

I personally think the reason sales are low is because not as many people are buying new computers, as they did during the 98-XP switch. The majority of Vista sales is going to be through new computer sales.

Since XP actually does a decent job of retaining speed (a reformat still does wonders), no one needs to buy a new computer. If all they use it for is web browsing and e-mail, why do they need a new computer/OS that does neither any better than XP (unless you count more flashy as better)?

Thing is...

Vista received a huge marketing campaign, but most people who kept track of what Microsoft was doing for the past 5 years know that Vista could've been much better than what it turned out to be due to the development crash in August 2004.

Office, on the other hand, was praised as something which would make life much easier for people because of the new ribbon. There's even a home and student version for people who can't afford paying for standard edition.

Re:Thing is...

Replace "most people" with "most people on Slashdot"... Most people have no idea what MS has done in the past 5 years, nor do they care. The NASCAR scandal is all they can handle right now.

I think you're being a bit unfair.....

Seriously..you assume that all non slashdotters are NASCAR fans?

I would really rip into you if it were not so busy following the Anna Nichole Smith scandal ;)

Re:I think you're being a bit unfair.....

Yesterday I sat in a coffee shop for 3 hours. I heard two groups of people discuss who they thought was the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby.

Re:Thing is...

Another biggie was an "illegal" substance in the fuel.

Damn! Even NASCAR vehicles are doping! WTF has this world come to?!?

Re:Thing is...

But the people on Slashdot are the people who buy the operating systems. The average person would never go out to the shops and buy Vista, they'd buy a computer with it preinstalled.

Re:Thing is...

Replace "most people" with "most people on Slashdot"... Most people have no idea what MS has done in the past 5 years, nor do they care. The NASCAR scandal is all they can handle right now.

Actually...you're dead wrong. You are correct most people don't pay attention to MS, but people aren't gonna go out and pay $250 (or however much it costs) for something they don't know about.

I know for a FACT that people who are clueless about computers already have the idea Vista sucks and do not want to buy it.

You know why? They ask US for advice and we tell them it sucks. I can personally think of 5+ accounts of average users asking about upgrading to Vista and a horde of geeks respond with a resounding NO! These are some of the things I've heard average users say about Vista...

1. "It's riddled with anti-piracy locks, why get Vista when my pirated copy of XP works fine"
2. "XP works great, why should I get Vista?"
3. "I heard it won't run on my computer"
4. "Unless your computer is brand new it will run like crap"
5. "It sucks for games. If you want to game man, stick with XP"

So don't say people have no idea about Vista, that is simply untrue.

Re:Thing is...

Vista had a lot of marketing among the technology industry, but it also had a ton of bad press from beta testers reviewing it (You are posting a comment critical to Windows Vista, confirm or deny?). The mass media marketing did not really get into gear until fairly recently, and by that time anyone who was familiar with technology was already spreading the news that Vista was not very much different than XP except that it broke a lot of things that work under XP without providing a well-known mechanism for backward compatibility (even XP's broken Win95 emulation mode was better than nothing).

When faced with a new product that works almost the same as the old product except that existing software doesn't work very well on it, I don't see why it's such a shock that uptake has been so slow.

Certainly the case with us..

Our internal web site uses the DHTML Edit control - which doesn't work with Vista (for no good reason). So we've let all our staff know not to upgrade, at least not for now. We've investigated a number of workarounds, but they're all going to be work for us to implement, provide less to the user, and make development more complicated. This one feature means Vista is a stiff downgrade for us and will keep many of our users off of it at home and at work.

MS's general legacy of good backwards compatibility is the only thing that's kept us with MS over the years. If they continue to break that, we're not going to stick with them on the desktop. It's that simple. MS needs to understand that the features they push us to use in 2002 don't just have to work until 2006. We have to have some confidence that the feature we use today will be available in 10 years (or longer) especially if there's no real reason to remove it.

Anyways... just needed to vent a bit there.

Re:Certainly the case with us..

Seems like there was a good reason [msdn.com] to remove the control from Vista. Also, it appears there are solutions [microsoft.com] for desktop apps that use the control.

Re:Thing is...

I'm not surprised at all either. Vista offers nothing substantially new that justifies the price of an upgrade. Sure, it has a fancy new interface and supposedly better security, but at the end of the day it's just a little bit of more of the same. There's only so much you can squeeze out of a desktop system - after all, it's only the bones of the system. The meat is in the applications. If your OS is already quite good enough and does everything you need it to do, why shell out for an upgrade?

However, Office 2007 at least supposedly offers a revolutionary new way to use the application. It seems that this promise has enormous appeal for people. For instance, I'm having a harder time than ever debating the merits of OpenOffice. It seems Microsoft could have a winner there, loath as I am to admit it. Doesn't change the fact that I'm sticking with OO and Linux, but still ...

Re:Thing is...

I was in a "forced" to upgrade to XP situation recently. But that's like 5 years after XP was released. It was one of those situations where the software probably didn't really require anything specific to XP, but the installer did an OS check and wouldn't install on 2K. I can see this from the software company's point of view; 2K is no longer supported by MS, why should the software company waste resources supporting it? Still, they could have just said "it'll install on 2K but we'll only provide support if you have problems on XP."

Anyway, it was recent enough that MS offered a free upgrade to Vista when it was released. So now I have a free Vista upgrade that I'll hold onto until I run across an application what won't run on XP. So, that'll maybe be five years from now, when a lot of the bugs in Vista have been worked out and a lot of the opressive DRM has been disabled, I'll run across some app that wants Vista and I'll have it.

Or, if Linux developers can manage to keep up, I'll be able to do what I want in Linux without needing a PhD in Linuxology. I still use Linux for most of my work. Games and video editing are on Windows. That's just the way it is right now.

Re:Thing is...

2K is no longer supported by MS

You should consider informing Microsoft that they don't support Windows 2000 any more. They themselves seem to be under the impression that it's supported until June 2010.

Is anyone surprised?

confirm response, accept or deny?

Vista bugs me too much. I killed it.

Re:Is anyone surprised?

I'm not remotely surprised. XP was a huge upgrade from Win 98. In comparison Vista's more like Win Me

Re:Is anyone surprised?

Vista, however, is so rushed and incomplete that SP1 is actually coming later this year.

5 years in development, and over one and a half years in Beta (that's three seperate complete releases of Ubuntu in the time Vista's been in beta), and you're calling it rushed? You can accuse Vista of being many things, not all particularly complimentary, but I don't think rushed is one of them.

Re the SP1 thing, IIRC from what I've read that's a combination of bringing Vista up to date with the by-then-released Longhorn Server and pacifying the "Don't upgrade till SP1!" crowd; but I could be wrong.

All I can say is:

"Wow."

...

And now I feel dirty...

But then again perhaps the lower sales reflect a consumer base more accustomed to the failures of Version 1.0, or, for those with more technical experience, are aware that much of Vista's development cycle seemed to consist of stripping out features, such as WinFS and whatever else it was.

It could also, of course, represent a level of success with the still-competent Win XP.

...I know this is /. so I'm hoping, at best, to modded funny for that last sentence, there's still no dumb-ass mod, right..?

Not Surprising

Having had access to the Vista RTM for several months through my MSDN subscription, Ive had a decent amount of friends and family asking me if they should upgrade. I always tell them thats its a fairly nice OS but its not worth the money. Take it if its free, but otherwise stick with what you have. There aren't enough feature updates to justify spending $100+.

Re:Not Surprising

The price is the key issue. The cheap versions are of confusing fuctionality, and the cost of the full version, often bought by people who don't need it, but hate to buy limited versions, are astronomical. The cost of the OS is now more than the computer it runs on(And don't say that good PCs are $1000, because that is the cost of Apple, and we all know that Apples are at least twice the price of the PC).

OTOH, cost may only be half the issue. When XP came out, MS did not have a mature mainstream OS. Many were able to NT, but many other were still on 98, or, even worse, ME. Only a limited number of people were on 2000. When XP was released, the market was desperate for an OS that just worked, and, after a couple years, XP did mostly just work. Only the die hards stay with 2000.

If we go even deeper, we know that Vista should be an inferior product, if not a total failure. MS does come out with consecutive reliable OS. Perhaps Vista 3.11 will meet expectations, but not Vista 1.00.

Not surprising

People rarely talk about just how viral Office updates are. You save a doc in 2000 format, and suddenly 97 can no longer open it. Save it in 2003 and 2000 can't open it. And so on. A customer/vendor/friend sends you a doc file, and you can't open it. Time to upgrade!

Re:Not surprising

Why? Is saving as "Word 97-2003" document difficult?

Also, folks using Word 2000 and later can use the new formats with a compatibilty pack [msdn.com]

Re:Not surprising

Yeah, when you have hundreds or thousands of documents.

The poster I replied to mentioned he had to install office to "send some documents". I'm pretty sure that "send some documents" does not mean that he wants to convert and send "hundreds of thousands" of documents. For this user I am quite sure that the "save as" function would have worked quite well, and he admits as much in a followup message.

Compatibility pack?! You're killing me. You have to install an extra in order to make MS Office compatible with MS Office?

Is it that unreasonable to have to update older versions of a product to consume newer versions of file formats? I mean if I grabbed a copy of mosaic from 1990 I don't think it would do a very good job of displaying PNG files, would it? Or CSS. Or modern HTML. (much like the IE of today, HAHA). It would require a *gasp* update.

Re:Not surprising

You save a doc in 2000 format, and suddenly 97 can no longer open it. Save it in 2003 and 2000 can't open it. And so on. A customer/vendor/friend sends you a doc file, and you can't open it. Time to upgrade!

You're misinformed. All versions of office from 97-2k3 can open each others files with no need to do anything special when saving or loading.

Re:Not surprising

Someone I Know bought a laptop with Vista on it. She then installed Office 2003 on it, since she already owned that (and the Office EULA specifically allows you to install it on a second portable machine). What happened was that although it runs just fine, Vista throws up requesters every time she starts an office app telling her that she's not using the correct version of Office for running under Vista.

My guess is that a lot of the Office 2007 sales are due to this -- Microsoft makes it hard for people to continue to use old versions, even though they work. So they give up and buy Office 2007 whether they need it or not.

Regards,
--
*Art

Not worth it, either

Microsoft replaced a hundred menu items with a dozen toolbar buttons. Granted, buttons change with context, but on the other hand, 12 100 and there is no way to see all the program's functionality in one place. They should have just kept a menu bar, then it would be a clever innovation. In IE7, which uses a similar trick, there is no easy way to open a local file rather than an HTTP URL without re-enabling the menu, which is not an option in Office. In Media Player, its totally baffling that the default screen has a huge visualizer, but they couldn't find place for a little menu bar.

Reminds me of Lowered Expectations

Look, the reality is at most 10 percent of business even wants WinVista (remember WinMe?), and the consumer interest is even lower than that.

Most of the sales of Microsoft Office will probably be for people using MacOS - where Microsoft makes the highest return per unit sold - but here we'll only buy an Office upgrade if it runs on XP, as we have no interest in the video and speech aspects of WinVista - we're doing serious research, and the idea that someone can walk in to an office and have our computer do things by talking to it is just nuts.

Imagine if people actually had a choice!

A comparison of first-week retail sales of Vista compared to first-week sales of XP back in 2001 found that Vista sales were 60% lower.

And of those who did buy Vista, most didn't even want it!

I've helped four friends/family/FOAFs out so far who just bought a new PC and wanted to know how to get rid of Vista (the major OEMs no longer even give you a choice of XP).

They all, without exception, had the same set of complaints... They didn't know where to get at all the normal Windows tools, and despite having "upgraded" for a faster computer, their new machines, it felt significantly less responsive (I've translated a bit, and removed the streams of obscenities).

Short of piracy (or actually buying XP), I explained to them how to make Vista as XP-like as possible. Still not perfect, still a CPU and memory hog, still moved quite a bit around from the XP layout, but at least they could then use it.



Pathetic. If Microsoft wants to offer a new OS, fine. But they've gone out of their way to make it almost impossible to get a new, legal copy of XP, just so they can boost Vista's market penetration.
what OS they want?

The reasons are obvious

People upgrade to keep current and compatible. I find little to no software that doesn't run on Windows 2000, forget about XP and Vista. They have XP because all the computers they bought came with it. Little incentive really came into play to upgrade to XP just as little incentive exists for upgrading to Vista.

People upgrade MS Office to ensure that when they are doing business with people, they will be able to open up the documents sent to them. MS Office is probably the ultimate achievement when it comes to viral marketing. (Or maybe I'm not using the term correctly?) But what I'm trying to say is that it has nothing to do with new features or new UIs and everything to do with supporting new file formats. And while end-users don't understand that it's a practice that is abusive to consumers and the marketplace in general, they understand that if they don't upgrade, they will run into problems such as not being able to open documents critical to their business activities.

Hardware?

Could it be that no one has the hardware to run Vista with all of its features turned on, and to make such an upgrade after purchasing Vista would invalidate the license, forcing another purchase of Vista?

People will wait until they need to purchase a new machine that it comes with Vista.

Things have to *work* first....

My mother in law saw Vista on my laptop, saw me searching, using the start bar, and using Office 2007. She was very eager to upgrade, and she asked how she could do that.

I explained that she could buy the disc at a place like Office Depot, Best Buy, or wherever else she likes to get software (she's always just stuck with the OS on her machine from birth->death), but I also warned that she should make sure that the software she wants to run on her machine will run without problems before she bothers to do a big upgrade.

Quickbooks, some realtor software, and something her office uses have notes about compatibility problems with Vista. She stopped looking after that.

This is the first Windows release that I've used in which roughly half of the things I install have had some compatibility issues, noted in advance or discovered by me. It doesn't keep things from being usable in the general case, but it's more than just media FUD at this point.

They/we will fix it with OS/software updates over time.

No surprise

A new OS is a much bigger commitment than a new Office suite. You generally are going to have zero compatibility problems with old documents and that's all you really need to worry about. If you end up not liking it, it's also not a big deal to replace it with your old version. A new OS is much more serious, and there are many more compatibility issues to worry about. It's not the kind of thing most want to rush in to.

I've been testing Vista at work and it's a good OS, but not ready for deployment yet. It's not Vista itself, it's apps and drivers. There's still plenty of hardware with drivers that aren't up to snuff, and a number of apps need to be updated to work on Vista. It's not the kind of thing I'd recommend most users walk in to yet. In another 3-6 months I'll probably look at deploying it to some of our labs.

Office, on the other hand, we are installing for anyone that orders a new copy. The volume keys are valid for either 2003 or 2007 so we are installing 2007 and will revert to 2003 if they don't like it. So far, nobody has asked to revert. There's just not really any technical issues. Yes there's a new interface and all, but all your documents open and that's the real concern.

This is not a foot race

Thing is, MS has the legs in terms of cash to wait for Vista to mature into a market force, even if all of us wait for Vista to mature into a better OS. People howled when XP came out, and now people don't want to give it up. When Win95 came out, it sold very well despite all the Win95 = Mac 88 jokes. Within three years expect Vista to the dominating operating system. Today's expensive hardware required to run the fancier parts of Vista will be next year's cheap hardware. The drivers to run everything will come and DX10 games will eventually show.

I will wait until I need to/want to upgrade, but I expect Vista will grow in usage even if I never adopt it. Whatever adoption rate regarding Vista is happening today, don't expect it to stay that way. Also don't expect MS to be crying that everyone isn't picking up a copy today.

Amazing!

It's almost as if the crappy product with very little innovation is selling poorly, while the well thought out product that has some innovative features is doing nicely. Who woulda thought.

Summary is misleading

Ballmer didn't "admit that previous sales forecasts were 'overly aggressive'".

The implication of that statement is:
- Ballmer/Microsoft issued a sales forecast in the past
- They were pressured on the accuracy of said forecast
- They admitted that their forecasts were overly aggressive.

However, that's not what happened here. The sales forecasts in question were made by external analysts. In this case, it's Ballmer and Microsoft disagreeing with the forecasts. The word "admit" implies that you are conceding something that you tried to conceal before.

Why does Slashdot need to spin every story to try and make it sound even more negative than it is?

still running 2000

and i see no reason to upgrade - even to xp

Why would anybody want Office-2007?

Unless you need more than 256 columns for excel, why on earth would anybody pay for such a worthless "upgrade" ? I suppose, eventually, you will get office-2007 docs that you need to open, but that will not happen for time yet.

Why office 2007 sales are better?

The reason Office 2007 is selling better than Office XP at the time is that Office XP was a step back in terms of usability compared to Office 2000. Office XP is too cluttered and un-intuitive. Now people are hanging to anything offering a different alternative to Office XP.

Can't find XP on the low end anymore

It's interesting that Dell doesn't sell XP on the low end machines but it's still available on the mid and high end. Their consumer calls go to India and business calls don't. Are they turning the home users into a large beta test group using the cheaper support resources?

They also have a laptop for $499 which they haven't had in quite a while. It's only available with Vista. Maybe M$ is giving it away (or almost giving it away) to Dell to infect the market?

A quick check of the HP site doesn't seem to have any XP options even on the high end.

Just wait a while...

Because of the nature of Vista (Graphics Hardware acceleration being one), it's unlikely for us to see a lot of OEM/Upgrade copies of Vista. I think most people wanting to try Vista will either already have a powerful computer (a minority among most people), or will have Vista packaged in with a new PC.

I'm a Mac guy, and personally don't see anything compelling about Vista at the moment and am happy with dual booting into XP, but I think it's too early for people to claim that Vista is a failure.

What surprises me

What surprises me is that XP has been almost completely removed as an option for consumer-level machines. In the past, such as when XP came out, you could often still get machines with 98/ME or 2000 during a transition period. Some even had both on the disc (and dual license keys on the sticker.) With the exception of business machines, XP is rapidly disappearing from retail machines.

This is surprizing

Were I work, we found out that we can't even buy XP anymore (we buy openlicense stuff through dell). To run XP on a new machine, we need to purchase Vista and downgrade. Given this kind of push, the disappointing numbers are surprising and even worse news for MS.

Testing Both

I've been using Vista RTM and Office 2007 for a while, and at work we've deployed them to 20 or so systems in a computer lab to let the typical end-user (i.e. the people the software *should* work for) try it out. My (technical) experience: "Wow, Vista is more secure. And slower." Office 2007 kicks ass." (That said, I don't use XP almost at all any more, a couple of the tiny UI changes have won me over) The general user experience: "Hmm. Windows looks prettier. And I don't know where any of the tasks from the file menu went." The next 6 months are gonna be rough for people who need to relearn the interface to do their jobs. But after that, everything will be a lot better, as Office will be easier to learn this way. When people ask me about the new software, I tell them that Vista is cool, but not worth paying to upgrade from XP. And I tell them about how cool Office 2007 is.

Sharepoint

I hate MS as much as anyone (I'm a Mac Fanboy if ever there was one) I have to say, though, the new features in Sharepoint 2007 are good enough to perhaps entrench microsoft in the coming onslought of office products from Google and others. It's a solid collaboration tool. The new slide library tool is going to be a big hit with office like mine that have about 2,000 slides to manage. Sharepoint may be the only MS product I've ever been excited for.

office speak

I think it's funny to hear these exceutives couch their phrases behind action packed verbs!!!

Replace "Overly agressive" with "too hopeful" to get back to a normal person.

Needs network effect from preloads

Microsoft would be nothing without the preloads. But they have the preloads. Anyone who thinks Vista sales won't take off, must have forgotten this.

Just be patient. As brand new machines are sold with Vista on them, the number of Vista users will grow. Then people can start running apps that only work with Vista. Then those people will want to exchange information with people who aren't running Vista yet. And then people will start to "upgrade," even if they're not buying a new machine.

The reason Vista's numbers are down is...

Xp actually is proficient at what it does. If it isn't proficient in the last 5 years someone has produced an add on to it. Let's not pretend Vista is doing better or worse on it's own merits. The PS3 sold out the first week so even if something is flawed it can sell X amount of copies if the need is there. There was a need for 98, 2000, XP, you can even argue there was a need for ME (that wasn't filled). But there is yet to be a need for Vista.

I Knew it!

Vista is just a Microsoft marketing ploy to sell XP!

But 30% of those buying boxed Vista want Ultimate

There is something to be said for reading the fine article:

First-week retail sales of boxed copies of Windows Vista were almost 60% below sales of boxed copies of Windows XP in the week after its 2001 release

Retail sales of PCs, virtually all of them sporting the new Vista OS, were up 67% over the same week in 2006. While that is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison -- many stores were clearing out their XP inventory in the weeks leading up to Vista's launch -- "it still reflects a fair bit of growth"

The good news for Microsoft: Consumers who are upgrading to Vista on their older machines are opting for pricier, higher-end versions of it. The average selling price of Vista was $207.13, up 66% from the average selling price of XP. That was due in part to the fact that more than 30% of the copies of Vista sold were the Ultimate version, which lists for $399. Early boxed retail sales of Vista down nearly 60% compared to XP [computerworld.com]

One might, of course, have expected boxed sales of Vista to be somewhat depressed by the distribution of free upgrade coupons distributed with PCs sold over the holidays.

marketing?

You must be kidding.

90% of the huge companies ( most of the MSO market ) are on those damned molp plans, so they automatically get the upgrades, even if they dont want them. ( and eventually they have to install them, again even if they dont want them )

Hell of a way to skew your numbers.

Liars.

Activate much?

Maybe because Vista requires activation [informationweek.com] and (last I heard) needed an extra server to handle activation every 180 days, and Office 2007 doesn't? This could matter to a significant number of IT groups in the corporate world.

I tried addressing this in the above article

And the Redmooninites crawled out to scold me for claiming that not every PC made in the last 5 years is perfectly able to run Vista.

So - if this is how the deluded marketing minions of MS work, I guess we can expect them to blame US for not buying enough of THEIR software. Which BTW I'm fine with. A few weeks ago I commented here that I was happy to have finally sold my last batch of MS stock only to be laughed at by the PR flacks that it's the greatest stock on the planet. Well it took a HUGE hit today so the joke's on you PR interns.

Why Upgrade?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

this goes to show...

Microsoft is king in the application development (Office) domain. They really oughta stick to that.

Now if we could just redo Windows Vista and turn it into a UNIX-based OS with a nice windowing GUI... :)

My Upgrade Experience

With Vista released, I started seriously evaluating the upgrade options for my home machines. One of the machines (a 3 year old P4 HT) had XP, so the choice was easy. I upgraded that to Vista. The upgrade went smoothly. There were a few compatibility issues in the first couple of weeks, which were addressed by software vendors quickly. Next, there was the dilemma of what to do with the laptop (5 year old P3). It is running XP alright, and I needed a new laptop. First, I thought about installing Linux on it. So I installed Ubuntu, and rest of the night was a nightmare. The wireless card didn't work. The options to configure wireless card in the UI suck big time. I enabled the card, the dialog box showed me it was enabled, but it didn't work and the next time I opened the dialog box, it was shown as disabled again. Then I discovered that I had to manually configure the security options using command line tools. Guess what, all these things get auto-detected on Windows (Vista and XP) and get configured without any hassle. Even my Windows Mobile phone can do that. Yes, Linux is free if your time has no value. So later in the night, the machine got back to XP. And did I mention that Linux doesn't support my native language (which is supported on XP since ages), doesn't run any of the professional audio/video/image processing software out there and doesn't like talking to my Xbox 360? The penguin better stay with the servers, but Windows 2003 Server is a strong contender there. Back to the upgrade of laptop, I was seriously considering MacBook. I needed a fast laptop with a small footprint. But Apple thinks that it would be below their dignity to give a decent graphics card and 7200 RPM hard disk on the 13" MacBook. So, I went back to the PC world, and got myself Dell XPS M1210 with Windows Vista pre-installed. This laptop is blazing fast, runs Vista very smoothly and all of my old hardware (including Pro Audio stuff) and software works fine on it. Regardless of what people here say, I am going to stick with Windows on my primary machines. And now I am thinking about buying some used machine and putting Windows Home Server on it to complete the ecosystem.

I'd buy it... but...

The problem is Vista Home Premium is the only version that is worth getting, and everyone knows very well that full install, not an upgrade, is the way to go. In Canada, that comes to over $300 with tax. It's just way too much money for an operating system.

Why would people upgrade?

"A comparison of first-week retail sales of Vista compared to first-week sales of XP back in 2001 found that Vista sales were 60% lower."

If you think about it, when Windows XP came out most people were running Windows ME or Windows 98 (which I kindly refer to as the random blue screen operating systems). Windows XP was a significant upgrade from 98 or ME.

Windows Vista doesn't offer much over Windows XP beyond eye candy. Just about anything you want to do with your computer can be done with Windows XP. On top of that, Windows XP is stable. There just doesn't seem to be much reason to upgrade to Vista if you are already running XP. And money is always a good reason not to upgrade.

What? No Outlook in Home & Student Version?

Information week reports

This time around, however, Microsoft has dropped Outlook from the Home and Student version. The email client was available in the comparable version in 2003. In dropping Outlook, Microsoft is apparently giving consumers a reason to upgrade to the Standard edition. "It's a matter of time before we see if that actually works," Swenson said.

It is a matter of time before Microsoft loses the inbox to the likes of Google. I don't quite get the logic of not giving away Outlook the way they give away IE. Winning mindshare of a "function" everyone needs and that is available for free in rather mature forms would seem a no-brainer to me. But then again I am not a marketing genius.

The huge Fortune 500

Company that I work for won't be "upgrading" to Vista until 2009 according to our inhouse IT department. Personally, I just don't see the point. PCs with XP are fast enough for Internet/Media/Photos/Tax/Letters/Games. The last private OS switch that I made was to OSX, mainly because I got fed up with dealing with anti-virus SW, I don't play FPS games and because I like the integration and the HW (looks - I am shallow). The last work-related OS switch that I made was to Linux, because I am working on embedded Linux for cell phones. Vista? Doesn't offer anything that would justify switching; here I totally agree with our IT department. I am therefore not surprised that Vista isn't a sales hit.

Can't remember where I said this originally...

...but Vista was dead on arrival, and such was entirely predictable. Microsoft need to come up with an alternative, and fast...if they don't, they're going to be in serious trouble soon.

You left out...

"Dim-Witted" and "Money-Grubbing"

{ please, discuss among yourselves }

Re:Slashdot Readers

Anonymous Coward is mumbling non-sense, accept or deny?

Why can't ms fan boys ever be specific?

>>Vista is, in fact, an amazing OS

In fact? Okay, what "in fact" is so amazing about Vista? What "amazing" thing can I do in Vista, that I can not do in XP?

Re:The long run

Haven't used Vista myself but I've seen it posted that you can go up a (or many) folder level just by clicking on the name of the folder in the path. So there is your single click to go up any amount of folders. Sounds like an improvement to me...