Vista was Microsoft’s opportunity to prove operating systems still matter…
Given the time it took to develop and deliver Vista - and the money spent marketing it - I am sure that Microsoft has been taken aback by the market’s tepid reaction to it (even after the first service pack prerelease everyone said they would wait for).
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The way I see it, this shouldn’t really come as a big surprise to them. Many of Vista’s key platform level innovations - like WinFS - were dropped from the feature list, and many of the bells and whistles - like AERO - have shown themselves to be resource hogs. The delivery of Vista was plagued by poor design choices and compromises.
And it shows…
For all of it’s lofty aspirations, Vista has simply failed to deliver on it’s ‘next generation’ promise. The integration of the web still feels like an afterthought, and when it comes to core OS capabilities, Vista just doesn’t offer anything new and compelling. It is big and slow. It is way too intrusive. It feels like it is trying to police me, especially when it comes to using media files.
In short, Vista is everything Linux isn’t - and I mean that in a bad way…
To try and jump start things, Microsoft has announced price cuts of retail packages of Vista - in some markets by as much as 50%. I think this is just a fool’s errand. We have come to the end of the ‘Big OS’ phase of personal computing, and price cuts aren’t going to change that. People today may live in a few applications like Outlook or Word, but they are connected to the web through their browsers. The OS they run on is secondary, and few will directly leverage most of the capabilities it makes available to them.
This has created a dilemma for Microsoft with Vista…
Outside of security, Vista has little to offer beyond what people can get from XP. In fact incompatibilities with current hardware and applications has actually made it a ‘downgrade’ for some folks. And even Vista’s security has problems. It is implemented in such a rigid fashion that it almost becomes self defeating. It throws up so many needless dialog boxes that many people may opt to turn it off, or they’ll just habituate and simply click ‘OK’ without thinking.
These shortcomings are being reflected in marketplace apathy…
Corporations aren’t helping Microsoft this time around. By and large, they have decided to stay with XP. They’ve already learned how to deal with all it’s downsides, and Vista brings them no compelling business value to make it worth the cost of an upgrade. What they have today works.
Consumers aren’t rallying to it either. Many folks will simply buy a PC and use whatever OS comes with it. They aren’t buying a new computer system because of Vista - they are getting Vista because it comes with the new system they bought.
And that distinction is important…
Computing today doesn’t require that you have a Windows based system. If you need proof, just look around at how many more Mac’s you see these days. Despite the hype from many of the Apple faithful, this isn’t because OS X is better than Vista. They are buying Mac’s for different reasons: their ‘cool factor’, their excellent design, fewer virus concerns, or the overall simplicity of use. The bundled iLife suite that Mac’s come with is probably a more compelling draw for new Mac buyers than most of the critically praised OS level features. Apple understands this, and has bundled iLife in for free with every new Mac for quite some time.
Leopard just comes along for the ride…
The important take away here is that the operating system itself will start to matter less and less. The computing world going forward will continue the move to platform and OS independence. Mobile phones, laptops, desktops and speciality devices like Apple TV will all be peers in the computing marketplace. They will all coexist, connected through personal identity to various web services and user communities.
The next generating of ‘Operating Systems’ will be charged with tying all of these services and devices together in a secure, seamless way. They will be light-weight, distributed, and very efficient. They will be more about standards than code. They will be hidden behind the applications they connect and facilitate.
And there is a very good chance they will be open source…
What we see going on here is a tussle between the previous “PC” generation and the new “NET” generation. And like the evolutionary dead end of the Neanderthals, Vista is ultimately doomed to fade away - marginalized by smaller but more adaptable competitors that will define a new order in the computing world.
Anyone betting their business on the continued ascendancy of a PC centric computing paradigm is bound to fail.
And no price reduction will help to change that…
Good article. For me there are two aspects here.
First, Vista is simply not a good product. They botched the job. It doesn’t matter what it could have been, it matters what it is.
Second, I think PC operating systems are not going to go away. Ever. Somebody will produce them. We will use them. Right now, 90%+ use windows. This means the hardware and the software that we want is for Windows. Unless Microsoft do a very very bad job going forward, people will not switch to another incompatible operating system (e.g. Apple).
They key to a shift in the marketplace is compatibility. IBM compatible PCs were the breakthrough in the 1980s. If somebody came up with a Microsoft compatible operating system, Microsoft would be in real trouble. We don’t need anything different, anything fancy, anything much better, we just need it to work.
What I would want is the equivalent of Foxit (programme 5% of the size of Adobe Reader that does 90% of the job in 1% of the time) in the operating system world. It should be Windows compatible, 10% size, 10x speed, lower cost, possible free.
Please?!