Microsoft Vista cannot be regarded as the most successful operating system ever produced. Its launch, since 2001, has been controlled not by Microsoft but by the most incredibly savvy advertising by Apple. “I’m a Mac,” and “I’m a PC” will probably go down in marketing history as one of the most influential, and profitable, campaigns ever to be run. If anyone ever tells you that advertising doesn’t work, this is a prize example to deflate that notion. (It certainly worked here at EN-Genius where needed hardware changes last year scared us off Vista and into the clutches of Steve Jobs products – without changing my opinion of the man’s use of “adult” language.)
That it has taken its toll is now confirmed by the fact that Microsoft is giving computer OEMs another
six month extension (to July 31, 2009) to load XP instead of Vista in their consumer delivered PCs. Enterprise IT is not affected by any such decision because volume licenses mean that XP is going to be loaded anyway for maybe another five to ten years in corporations; it works, it is secure, there is no need to upset the OS boat.
The OEM installation of XP instead of Vista is considered by Microsoft as the
downgrading option, but the Apple advertising has made the potential users’ opinions of Vista something that they dare not approach for fear of applications and hardware not operating correctly. The
Mojave ad campaign – rather more successful than Bill Gates and Seinfeld shopping for shoes – clearly showed that even Microsoft knew they were on the bad end of the proverbial stick.
Microsoft has put Windows 7 on an accelerated track (that usually means bad news for the performance of released product from this particular company) for potential deliveries in 2010. Perhaps, by then, they will have woken up to the original marketing model that they had conceived for the future of software…
In a planning meeting at CMP headquarters on Long Island some very long years ago I put forward the notion that the future of both OS and applications would be to get them out of the computer and into a central area of download, to be available when and as needed. It would have the advantages, I proposed, that users would only access an application when they really needed it, would always have the latest and greatest version available, and would reduce the memory requirements on their computer to the size needed for their data files only.
I was shot down by management and I made not a single further suggestion for the rest of the day.
Maybe Microsoft was a fly on the wall that day because XP was supposed to be the first OS that was to be made available by online subscription. But Microsoft was just unable to work out how to make it all work and the system ended up in their standard, market-assured Circuit City packaging. The confirmation on line sign-on for the OS was there, but the annual payment process never made it to the real world.
The real problem for Microsoft has always been software
bloat. It has been as if the various internal functionality of all their OSs have been written in total isolation from one another so that the final tying together has cost an enormous amount of code. It has been said that XP had about 35 million lines of code when it was released. With revisions, security issues and the like that has now risen to a little under 40 million lines of code. The first release of Vista had over 54 million lines of code. How do you spell slow…
It is so massive, in fact, that portables, laptops, PCs for developing countries, will not have enough memory to process Vista. The choices? XP, Linux or, God forbid, a return to a Windows 95 – or even DOS? This is a market that is going to dramatically increase and Microsoft seem poised on the cliff of losing it unless they re-embrace XP (named for Experience) and run with it. Vista has been the disaster that Apple made happen.
The city of
Vista in San Diego County, California is only forty-five years old, seven miles from the Pacific, a new “shining city upon a hill.” (If Ronald Reagan had actually written that final
speech to the nation I would be in awe of his memory.) But maybe the city should accept that rebooting with a new name is in order: Winthrop XP.
