Posted on Saturday 21st of April 2007 at 12:24 in Software

Microsoft admit Vista is a failure

I've been thinking that the uptake of Vista hasn't been as energetic as maybe the media made it seem initially. For months everyone sang the praises of "Longhorn" as it was once called, but when it was released it seemed to be met with nothing but apathy. This week, Microsoft basically admitted it's failure.

Vista promised the world and seemed to deliver a re-skinned XP. People were excited over the new interface, Aero, a new file management system and the early-adopters seemed to be the only people who actually followed through and bought it. There were two major events this week that The Enquirer picked up on that seem to indicate an admission of failure.

#1 - Dell was allowed to start re-selling XP again
This week Dell announced that it was going to return to offering XP as the operating system on home-desktop purchases. As it happens the second that Microsoft releases a new flagship product - the vendors are then *encouraged* (in a strong strong way) to ship with the new product. Microsoft make it *very* difficult to sell the old product in the face of the new one. Well, Dell have gained permission to ship XP once again.

A classic case of a super-power losing control

Truly powerful parties don't make concessions. They don't do deals and they don't step backwards. Microsoft showed their inability to make everyone do what they wanted - possibly for the first time. Not a good sign. This indicates that Vista's sales aren't looking overly peachy.



#2 - The "$3 Student Innovation Suite"
In a desperate attempt to avoid pricing themselves out of the "third world market" (and give Linux a nice easy win), Microsoft announced the $3 Student Innovation Suite which is a low-feature bundle aimed at developing nations. This is purely in order to bring Microsoft into the running to influence "one billion of the five who are yet to experience the PC revolution". Not a strong move in my eyes - desperate scrabbling for a bigger market.

Vista has become widely known as Windows Millenium Edition 2 - which was a massive failure too

Better luck next time then?

 

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