Vista Sales Expectations Too High, Office Doing Well 320
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."
Thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Is anyone surprised? (Score:2, Insightful)
Vista bugs me too much. I killed it.
Re:Thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Thing is... (Score:4, Insightful)
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... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if people actually had a choice! (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:I think you're being a bit unfair..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:2, Insightful)
That being said, Vista is a larger upgrade than Win98->WinME or Win2k->WinXP. But not nearly large enough to justify the price. Businesses don't seem too enthusiastic to switch over either. I imagine Vista will gain market penetration through Dell and its ilk rather than people going out and buying licenses.
Re:Thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:1, Insightful)
This is not a foot race (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:3, Insightful)
We've come a long way since "Abort, Retry, Fail?", haven't we.
Re:The reasons are NOT obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
In short, I'm arguing that history already shows us what to expect. There are no apps that induce upgrading to Vista and Vista itself is not motivation enough.
Re:Can't find XP on the low end anymore (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Imagine if people actually had a choice! (Score:3, Insightful)
Secondly, you claim that Vista is a memory hog. Do you know why it's a "memory hog", as you put it? Because it pre-loads data you might need, based on historical usage patterns. Any good OS *should* be using as much RAM as possible. That way, it doesn't have to be loaded from disk upon request. If an app requests RAM, I guarantee Vista will flush out part of it's pre-cached data. So in other words, the RAM is still available to applications upon request. Point being, the high RAM usage is a good thing.
As far as being a CPU hog, I generally do agree with this one. I've noticed my CPU usage is generally higher than it was with XP. I think this is largely due to things like background file indexing, DreamScene, Aero, etc. But for all of these things, I've noticed that Vista is usually good about stopping those "nice but not necessary" background processes when other applications need the CPU time, when you go on batteries, etc. So it hasn't really been anything more than an annoyance for me, and the benefits I reap from things like lightning-fast search, in my mind outweigh the generally high CPU usage.
As far as the responsiveness, I guess I've been running it for a month or so now and I haven't had any problems. Initially it was a bit slower, but as time goes on I've noticed an improvement in response time. I'm guessing this is likely due to the adaptive/learning "Superfetch" memory manager (see above paragraph). In fact, I would even go as far as claiming that as of now, Vista is slightly more responsive than XP was, on this 1.5-year old laptop. For instance, even when I have a lot of stuff running in the background, Word takes all of 0.25 seconds to load from scratch. That never happened with XP.
As far as XP availability, I'm guessing that's more a function of companies like Dell or HP not wanting to sell XP. While Microsoft may have certain incentives for doing this, there are also real benefits to moving people to a new OS. The sooner XP is no longer sold, the sooner companies won't have to offer support for multiple OS versions. That sort of multi-OS support has a real cost associated with it, I wouldn't blame companies for trying to minimize it.
But even beyond that, why wouldn't Microsoft want to promote their new OS? Although I probably would not justify people paying for an upgrade (I got mine from MSDNAA), there's really no good reason not to get it on a new PC. At the user level, there aren't huge changes beyond maybe Aero. But under the hood there's quite a few things that are drastically improved (IPv6/whole new network stack, built in anti-spyware, UAC, a *far* cleaner user interface API, DirectX 10's hardware standardization, etc.) I look at Vista as a whole TON of minor, incremental updates that together make for a decent upgrade.
Needs network effect from preloads (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Queue up the chair jokes! (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Things have to *work* first.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Do you want a pourus operating system that does everything as administrator by default, running apps that are designed to run as administrator by default.
OR
Do you want a secure operating system that does everything with a privledged account, running apps that are designed to run on a privledged account.
OR
Do you just want to bitch about Microsoft and pat each other with your whitty jokes and sarcastic responses with no consideration for reality.
Those bits have compatibility problems because they are designed to run as admin. Not because Microsoft broke Windows.
Re:Not Surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Things have to *work* first.... (Score:2, Insightful)
QuickBooks is a perfectly example. It does not follow proper security and assumes that the user can write to any location of the file system or the registry on the workstation. Intuit's support even states that you must be at least a Power User to run this application. I am not at all surprised that this program does not work in Vista.
MS has usually bent themselves over backwards to attempt to ensure that all legacy applications work. There are actually shims built into the OS that permit stupid crap to happen without fail for specific applications. For example, there was a known bug in Sim City where it would attempt to reference a memory address shortly after the process released that block of memory. In Windows 9x, which did not enforce process memory spaces, this did not cause a problem. Under Windows NT/2000 it would cause a GPF (synonymous with a SEGFAULT), but the Windows team specifically built in a shim that if the binary is Sim City that it would permit the program to rereference a recently deallocated block of memory, just to keep the application working. There are thousands of such shims, and if they were willing to do this for a game imagine what they did for business applications.
Truth is that Microsoft cannot fix the OS without breaking applications. For a very long time they fought this but realized that they can't.
Yes it sucks, but if the eventual goal is a stable and secure system, I don't care how many crappy programs they break.
Re:Queue up the chair jokes! (Score:5, Insightful)
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)?
Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Is anyone surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Thing is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Because people still uise 2000. I still use 98. It is when you are willing to spend hundreds of dollars to run new operating systems in order to run _A_PROGRAM_ that the world has turned upside down. In real life, you produce a product that fits into the way people are doing things.
I work for a software developer that does both Mac and PC software. Our next release cuts off Panther support, and I don't think we've supported Win2K since the last version. Our installer does check for it, and will deny install if your OS doesn't meet your specs.
Why? Because there is a cost related to proper quality assurance on any platform. We cannot in good conscience release software that has not been fully and thoroughly tested, and to be honest, we'd rather not have the support calls when users run into these inevitable bugs. In a perfect world if you follow the API docs everything will be hunky dory, reality is much less ideal. Testing on more platforms means more machines and more QA testers, the latter of which cost a LOT of money.
This is not to mention the fact that as we develop and add features in subsequent releases, we start utilizing API calls and OS features that only certain versions support. I myself was just implementing something with Carbon API calls in OSX that are only available in OS 10.3 and later. Can we hack a way around it? Sure, but it'll be messy, and it'll break interoperability with other parts of the OS.
So the sad reality is, OS support does need to be cut off at a certain point, both because we start using features that aren't available in older OSes, and because the cost of support and QA becomes unfeasible. Note that as a software company we are not suicidal - we don't lock you into XP or OSX Tiger because we feel like it or because some vendor paid us off. We only lock you in after we are convinced that the *vast* majority (and we're talking VAST) are running on that platform. We are not stupid, we're not going to cut off support for an OS if a significant number of people are still using it. Honestly, I find your claims of developer kickbacks to be ludicrous, laughable, and at least a little insulting. Take off your tinfoil hat, there's no big conspiracy between MS and your common app developers (and our app is VERY large in the industry) to make you upgrade!
As for the installer issue. Here's the deal. It costs us time and money when a user calls our support line. Believe it or not, if you present the "Warning: There is no support if you proceed!" dialog box, people will still call, and they will still demand support. When they do not get it they will get their panties in a bunch and tell all their friends about your horrible customer service (said friends are also likely to believe them). Hell, if someone calls up the support line and says "when I open window X and then window Y, the program crashes!", we immediately assume the user has discovered a bug, it may in fact never come out during the support call that the user is running Win98. This wastes our time and money.
In other words, we cannot trust the user to totally grok what it means to not be supported.
Re:Thing is... (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally, I run 100% Linux. (ok, IsiloX in Wine) Win2k was the best OS MS ever produced, and the last MS OS I'll ever install.