Conventional wisdom on the Internet says that, so far, Windows Vista has been a flop. But you know what they say about conventional wisdom. In its recently released quarterly earnings report (which we alluded to earlier), Microsoft says the company division where Vista resides saw a 67 percent increase in sales over the previous year. Of those who bought Vista, a full 71 percent opted for the higher priced versions of the operating system. Further still, Microsoft says that 85 percent of all Windows sales are Vista sales, which beats XP’s numbers from the same time period.
In other words, Vista has hardly been a flop.
While some businesses still may be afraid of making the jump to Vista, it certainly looks like Vista is doing just fine.
Vista Pays Off for Microsoft [BusinessWeek]
Did Microsoft say what percentage of these figures were attributed to them basically ending the sale of OEM versions of XP to computer manufacturers, and forcing everything over to Vista?
Cue the PS3 comments…
What’s with all the negativity? are people really this afraid of change? EVEN IF it might be a change for the better (IMHO)?
So this is CrotchGear.
Lets not fool ourselves VISTA is a CPU,GPU, RAM hog! More bloat then any other OS. I like XP I dont like VISTA. I have a dual core AMD 4GB DDR2 RAM with a nvidia 7600GT 256MB DDR3. I did use / upgrade to VISTA for a few weeks you know to get the feel of it. Nope dont like it. I like my rocket fueled XP!
“What’s with all the negativity? are people really this afraid of change? EVEN IF it might be a change for the better (IMHO)?”
A change for the better in your HO, thank god I don’t take advice from people like you, and actually research what I buy.
Vista’s added features are far outweighed by its added bugs and problems. Vista has also been pushed to market in a far more aggressive manner than XP ever was. Where you could still easily buy copies of older versions of Windows and machines with said older versions as XP was starting to roll out, the day Vista was publicly launched, almost everything was changed over. I know one person who went to the store to buy a laptop one day many months ago, and when he got there, EVERY SINGLE LAPTOP WAS GONE. He said to the salesperson: “I want to buy a laptop.” The salesperson said, “You can’t. They’ve all been taken off the shelf so we can put Vista on all of them.” The guy wanted an XP-based system, NOT a Vista-based one, but the choice was stripped away faster than we could blink. While Dell is keeping XP around a bit longer due to huge demand from customers, the trend has been to offer Vista and ONLY Vista, and refuse to sell ANYTHING with XP.
The problem with the statements “Vista is a flop” and “Vista isn’t a flop after all” is that it discusses the Vista flop syndrome in a general fashion. Vista is NOT a flop if OEM sales are included in the equation, because all the major OEMs moved to Vista and dropped XP with amazing speed. The problem is that such OEM sales lack choice, and are therefore forced upon the buyer: “you can’t have a computer at all unless you get one with Vista!”
In terms of RETAIL SALES, where a customer CHOOSES to purchase Vista and install it…Vista has been crap. XP is still in high demand. Enough said. Check this out:
http://apcmag.com/5835/vendors_in_no_rush_to_ditch_xp_for_vista
Quote: “Computer makers have been told they’ll no longer be able to get Windows XP OEM by the end of this year, despite consumer resistance to Vista and its compatibility problems. By early 2008, Microsoft’s contracts with computer makers will require companies to only sell Vista-loaded machines. “The OEM version of XP Professional goes next January,” said Frank Luburic, senior ThinkPad product manager for Lenovo. “At that point, they’ll have no choice.” Despite Microsoft’s relentless promotion of Vista, manufacturers are still seeing plenty of demand from customers for systems preloaded with XP, especially in the finicky SOHO market.”
It’s time for the people who work on Linux/BSD software to unify and make these free and open source distributions truly easy to set up and use. It’s time to get away from proprietary operating systems, because if Vista is indeed the direction things are going, I’ll have nothing to do with it. Any operating system that requires 536,870,912 bytes MINIMUM of memory to function with any reasonable speed is too bloated. Norton/Symantec and McAfee products are problematic for the same reasons. Code quality is ignored in Microsoft, Symantec, and Network Associates software, in favor of ridiculous feature expansion and hasty production to try to meet the ever-extending release timetables. The bloat is getting insane, and I’m sick of it.
People were saying the same thing about XP 5 years ago. And now look, people want to trade their Vista back for XP. The hardware will grow faster, the bottlenecks will be dealt with. In time. MS has a big steamroller and can pretty much get their way with your computer. And besides, if MS is putting out their own numbers about Vista acceptance world-wide, how were these numbers gathered? Of course, no one will report numbers that hurt them, but you can spin doctor just about any statistic to make just about anything look good.
Does it sound like MS is encouraging large corporations to deploy it? That’s where the money is. Large companies (even resellers, to some extent), doing large scale deployments.
Long live dos 6.22 and bbses
hey guys I think vista woulndn’t of got its ass beat if he were . Cause the so called ‘playboy of magic’ baloon tricks thinks he’s the filipino dream but he’s 33 years old and lives with his parents in markham because he didn’t graduate mcgivney high school. He also drives his dad’s mazda protege and the clutch is burned out cause he can’t drive standard for 2 shits. You can usually find him trying to get in an import car event by guestlist with his XL1 camera or STOLEN PD150 Sony camera from International Academy of Design on Friday or saturday nights at any asian club (Tonic, republik, inside etc). He wears a big fat silver chain from the pet store and a black baseball cap backwards to hide the receeding hairline. If you ask him straight up where the film footage is going he won’t say anything but he jacks off to it every night while fingering his sister in the basement.
I know that these numbers don’t mean much but “XP flop” has 1,200,000 hits on Google, of which many derive from entries about Vista and “Vista flop” gets 1,800,000 hits. At least many people WANT Vista to be a flop and I can understand that: Until now, nobody could explain me what justifies doubling the hardware resources for Vista, what the *real* benefits and innovations of Vista are. The only real improvement – improved security by consequent user access rights administration – could have been achieved without the need for a new computer. Everything else is just gimmickry, a drawback or one more step towards incapacitation of the user. Furthermore, due to the expected distribution of Vista, the added security aspect will vanish into thin air by the time.
An operating system is an interface to an application, which is at best invisible behind this application. Applications are the reason why we use computers, not operating systems. If the OS grants a stable operation of the wanted application, people’s demands are satisfied. Microsoft made a big mistake with XP: It actually fulfills these demands instead of promising that only as usual. Now the hype around “new functionality” of the successor is the usual bogus marketing blabber again. That doesn’t work out well for all not completely brain-damaged non-MS-believers. Windows Me flopped for the same reason – hogging resources for nothing.
Do you work for Microsoft ? It must be. If you were a real expert you would’n t even go there.
Everybody knows that Vista is a flop. It just doesn’t work. If there is an increase it is becasue people are OBLIGED to get the damm thing with their new PC.
Maybe it is worth to spend some extra money and use a mac , buy XP or get linux for free. Problem is not very many people are good in computers to install all their drivers etc. Vista is simply criminal, so is Microsoft.
I’m currently examining the aptitude of Vista for music production/Digital Audio Workstation software. This sheds some light on what’s it all about Vista:
XP – being a non-realtime OS – does a surprisingly good job on realtime audio processing. Audio professionals all over the world actually like XP for its good multitasking, stability and a wealth of stable hardware, drivers and applications. Back in 2001 we needed only new interface drivers, got them fast and all the latest audio software ran just fine out-of-the-box, better than ever before. XP conquered the music/audio scene within weeks!
This is all brutally different with Vista. With Vista being out for almost one year now, at least 50% of all audio interfaces still don’t have Vista drivers. Some hosts refuse to work and if they run, quite some of the plugins won’t.
Most of the major products are not certified for Vista yet and in other words, a whole (and extremely computer-heavy) industry is ditching Vista in favor of XP and MacOS. People not invoked in audio/music software may think “that’s not Vista’s fault, the driver/host/plugin coders are just lazy/dumb/whatever”, but they’re certainly not and I guess they’re hesitating for good reasons:
An extreme small minority of users, which have the right combination of “Vista-ready” interface/drivers, host software plus plugins, experience often that Vista eventually gets problems at higher CPU loads – while you can push your CPU to 100% load on XP, Vista starts to suck by audio artifacts and application crashes at merely 50% load. So the suspicion may arise that the (forced) realtime capabilities of Vista are crappy beyond repair (1 year!) and that’s the reason why porting drivers and stuff to it just doesn’t make much sense. If you want to hear actually entitled cursing about Vista, visit your local recording studio or ask a homerecording musician.
I’m pretty sure that the moment XP support is discontinued is the moment I buy a Mac. Maybe Vista gets better with that over the years, but I think there never was a more blatant example of bananaware and I wouldn’t use it if it were the best or last OS in the universe. Even MS-haters thought that MS finally understood some things when XP came and now Vista destroys all that sympathy. So Vista pissed off the gaming industry + gamers, the music industry, musicians and music lovers (DRM) and a bit of each other application genres, hardware owners and real computer enthusiasts by now. In other, only slightly exaggerated words, Vista is at least partially degrading PCs to hyper-bloated typewriters, ineligible for anything else than office work like the first PCs in the 80’s and I’m almost sure it won’t even survive XP’s planned death in 2010…:)
We’re too much reliant on microsoft to give it up, especially to companies when their accounting system is running microsoft sql server. and their software vendors are writing code that can only run on windows. while most may be able to shift a bit to open office it’s still a long way due to the many other microsoft technologies that support microsoft and many people are unable to shift away from.
Since Vista forces you to migrate your system, you might as well migrate to something decent. Cue the desktop unix distributions. Check out PC-BSD, http://www.pcbsd.org
Yes, it’s a journey. So is Vista. But at least with a unix disktop you’ll end up with something that works. And is secure. And robust. And has bugs fixed frequently And runs on old hardware. And is completely configurable. And is outrageously powerful and flexible……
Drivers, yes an issue, just like Vista, try dual-boot first of course. Creating a spare partition? A walk in the park… but this pain is worth it. Vista will force this pain in any case. Might as well make it worthwhile.
Linux, anyone? That’s been my solution for a long time now.
I’m pretty sick of hearing about how bad Vista is. It’s pretty lame when the biggest software company on Earth can’t generate a decent operating environment. Maybe Windows Server 2008 will be different…
The only people that love Vista are:
1. Microsoft stock holders
2. Authors that love writing fiction about Vista
Anyone need a proof that Vista is a flop?
Go do a driver download site like softpedia.com and have a look on a new driver version:
http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/SOUND-CARD/REALTEK/
V1.95 Vista: 6,066 Downloads
V1.95 XP/2K: 11,745 Downloads
1,5 years after release of Vista still only 1/2 as much people were stupid or ignorant enough to install it. Most of them were forced to by buying a new computer which came with Vista. Every day another big company announces to skimp on Vista, having decided to postpone upgrades till a less disappointing successor hits the market. If that doesn’t happen, they will think about ditching MS at all and many do that already. I won’t claim that this is the end of Microsoft’s reign but Linux has become very mature for workstation/SOHO/whatever range of applications and that coincides very badly with releasing crap like Vista prematurely.
The second big mistake is pissing off performance-hungry gamers. Now if only the open source community had the power to get chip manufacturers like nVidia and ATI on their side to make Linux a gaming platform. That would be the death blow for MS.
Vista is THE biggest advertisement for Mac’s I’ve ever seen. Forget all those insipid goofy commercials, Vista will finally turn the tables for Apple. And all thanks to Billy and his gang. Way to go… stupid!
When I read these type of pro Vista articles my stomach turns. The profit for Microsoft goes up because of their monopoly, and, this article is simply spin. People have to buy this flop (Vista) when they get a new computer(and P.C. sales have yet to “not increase”), they also have to pay more for the O.S. than the one before it (hence a profit and increased sales.) Add in the fact that older users do not have the wherewithal to learn another O.S. and Presto! you have a slam dunk!!! Microsoft releases another fat, bloated, confusing software and claim it is “the next great thing” and spin doctors back it up out of fear or ignorance.
Get real and don’t buy this, or Vista. Vista is a slow fat flashy flop. Microsoft (hopefully) will gt it this time. Fix what you have forced on the end users and stop selling new flops. Live up to your advantage by releasing real software that works on today’s computers, and stop selling me beta software. I don’t want to buy a new PC just to use your beta software. This is not anger or negativity, it simply is what I am forced to live with. I swear, there is nothing worse that a arrogant geek telling me I don’t like it because I don’t know how to use it, when I paid my money for the only option I can get and it is cryptic and unstable.
I get 250-500 people a week bringing me their pc’s/laptops to strip vista from it and install xp/linux . I dont see vista as anything other than a criminal/flop . They should let the older OS die off as the public stops using them . I have tons of older games that will simply not work on anything but their original OS . I’ve been gaming on pc since I first paid $389 for my 14.8k modem as it was the fastest thing on the market at the time .
All this BS they try to force onto people nowdays is criminal , the goverments should step in and do some arm twisting and stop these nasty fugnuggets from being allowed to anally rape the public with sheer crapsticks .