Robert Pogson

Last week, M$ announced that it had made tons of money, thanks to the high price and huge numbers of sales of Vista. They state 88 million Vista licences were sold. That is a lot, unless you also consider how many PCs are sold each year…

According to IDC and others, more than 250 million PCs will be sold in 2007. Three quarters of that would be 187.5 million. What was on the other 100 million PCs? Not Vista. Pretty shocking when you consider how many naked PCs are sold these days. Pretty shocking when you consider that many businesses buy a PC with an OS and over-write it with their favourite image of XP. XP, GNU/Linux, Solaris and MacOS are likely candidates. Could competition be knocking at the door? We have seen in the last year M$ cut prices in Asia, pay the price in Korea and EU, and now they cannot force folks to install/buy the latest and greatest OS. If they were Ford or GM and they sold only half new models and half old models from inventory, what would the world think? The last days of empire.

A further complication is that there exist close to 1000 million PCs, almost none of which will run Vista. 88 million is less than 10%, about the same number that are scrapped each year. At that rate, it will take many years for the glorious days of monopoly to return. They plan to kill XP next year. Good! They will cut off their right hand so the left can work harder. GNU/Linux and others can fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the empire. The only thing that can save Vista and M$ is a miraculous repair job on the spaghetti code so that it works and a doubling or trebling of PC output. That is not going to happen. They took six years to produce Vista. They cannot fix it. PC buyers are not going to treble. People who have a machine P3 and later probably are content with it. Only a few gamers/M$ fanbois will queue up to throw money at M$. Moore’s Law spoiled the game plan. Existing PCs can do the job but they cannot provide enough resources for Vista.

Personally, I have seen two copies of Vista running. One was demanding to phone home or it would not play. I heard the owners found the installation CDs and appeased it by typing in a code. Another was turning off features randomly requiring stuff to be constantly re-started. No sound? Re-start the programme. Files gone? Re-start. The owner of that system is going back to XP. It may not be as flashy but it is predictable, the hallmark of digitial computing. I actually touched a running Vista. It was not user-friendly. Nothing was in the same old place. I could not get there from here many times. I had to close windows and re-start things to be in a known state. I was lost when an app was in full-screen mode. I am used to pushing “F” on my Debian GNU/Linux system.

I imagine hundreds of millions of M$ lovers will seriously back up their XP systems and block phoning home one way or another and hang on for a few years. I once bought a car from a company that did not stand behind their product. They lost me as a customer forever. How many of hundreds of millions of users will cling to XP or avoid buying anything from M$, ever? It could easily be tens of millions, giving GNU/Linux and MacOS a real boost. Thanks, M$!