Hello, Microsoft? It’s Vista: The sky is falling!

I just got through reading yet another “Microsoft must abandon Vista to survive” scare pieces at a competitor’s web site. Talk about your lightweight content! This guy didn’t even try to provide any sort of hard data. He just spewed his anti-Microsoft bile all over his blog page. And while I’m by no means a Windows “fanboy,” I simply have to respond to some of the more common bullet “points” that seem to keep cropping up in this type of journalistic flatulence:

1. Fewer users are upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista than from Windows 9x/Me to Windows XP, hence Vista is a failure.

Answer: This one’s easy: Windows 9x sucked. It crashed all the time. It had ridiculous system resource limitations. Multitasking was a joke. Windows XP was, and still is, a quantum leap beyond Windows 9x, primarily because it moved the user base to the far more robust NT kernel. The XP-to-Vista value proposition simply doesn’t carry as much weight. XP is already a pretty good OS, and it’s much harder to motivate customers to upgrade when they’re still generally satisfied with what they’ve got. If/when these users get tired of missing out on latest and greatest from the software and hardware worlds, they’ll upgrade. Otherwise, they’ll just wait until they replace their PCs and get new ones, most likely with Vista pre-installed.

2. Vista’s user experience can’t stand-up to OS X “Leopard” and/or Linux, hence Vista is a failure.

Answer: Ignoring for the moment the fact that “Linux” isn’t a product but rather a bunch of source code that’s compiled and redistributed by various 3rd parties, I challenge the Linux elite to show me a UI environment that’s more productive than explorer under Vista. Ditto to all the Mac heads out there. With Vista, I’ve got an integrated search mechanism that blows the doors off either of these “competitors.” The “Stack by” feature alone has literally revolutionized the way I organize my data. From the breadcrumbs in the address bar to the context-sensitive toolbars, Vista’s UI is both powerful and extremely flexible/configurable, and this is true with our without the flashy “Aero Glass” effects. I actually hate it when I have to go back to Windows XP or jump over to Ubuntu for testing purposes – their UIs are so primitive and counterintuitive, it’s hard to be productive.

3.Vista’s hardware requirements exceed the specs for most installed systems, hence Vista is a failure.

Answer: Microsoft is a forward thinking company. They rarely target hardware that is current when they design an OS. Rather, they design for what they believe will be current when the OS ships. In this context, Vista hits the mark. Even low-end PCs have dual-cores these days, and the 1GB of RAM Vista needs to run well (with Office 2007 installed) is also fairly standard. As I recall, there were a lot of legacy PCs that couldn’t run Windows XP very well when it first shipped. However, the “Wintel treadmill” keeps on rolling, Moore’s law keeps on being relevant, and we all keep on upgrading every 18-24 months. It’s a small price to pay for the privilege of reaping the rewards of technology most of hadn’t dreamed of just a decade ago.

Of course, much of the above is moot when the discussion turns to enterprise customers. Volume licensing and mandated hardware refresh cycles have taken all of the drama out of the OS upgrade experience. In the end, I’m sure Mac OS X 10.5 will be “wildly” successful – which in real terms means it might help Apple to creep a few points closer to that elusive double-digit market share. However, don’t think Vista users are going to be abandoning their PCs in droves just because Mr. Jobs says it’s cool. Ditto Ubuntu, Linspire, SUSE, and the myriad other “distributions” with version numbers that extend into the 3rd and 4th decimal places. It just isn’t going to happen.

P.S. – If Apple ever gets smart and decides to de-couple OS X from their hardware, then we might finally have a race worth watching. Until then, OS X is nothing but worm bait.