According to Forrester Research, Vista’s biggest obsticle to adoption isn’t Linux or even OS X, it’s Windows XP. And they’re right.
Vista still isn’t ready for desktops. Or servers. Or, well, anything. It’s a bloated OS, there’s no doubt about it. Sure, it’s got a pretty face, but an OS needs to do more than look good, and there really isn’t anything Vista can do that XP can’t with some tweaking.
The supremecy of XP isn’t just about Vista being new, though: there are still many, many specialized apps that won’t run on the newer OS. That, combined with the fact that most of the hardware people have already invested in won’t run it well enough to be useful works against its adoption. In short, it’s ahead of its time, and not in a good way.
While we honestly think that Vista is a step in the right direction for Windows, we think Microsoft is missing the point. Windows needs to get slimmer and easier, and Vista, at least from an XP user’s standpoint, is not that.
Windows XP is ‘biggest rival’ to Vista [VNU net]
Comments
I was an XP power user - my main machine could stay running for weeks without a reboot. I customized and upgraded, supported co-workers and family. I was fairly happy. Then I need a new PC for a west coast office. I was on my motorcycle and didn’t want to schlep a big box, so I took a chance on a Mac mini. I used Parallels to run XP, I didn’t know from the Mac OS side.
As time went on, I used XP less and less, and now…never. I was forced to buy two Lenovo Thinkpads with Vista, and, I an tell you this:
Vista is, without a doubt (and this comes from a dyed in the wool XP man, now a Mac man), the worst abortion of an OS I have ever used. Period.
I would rather struggle with the new incarnations of Ubuntu.
>there really isn’t anything Vista can do that XP can’t with some tweaking.
You know, from my experience so far there isn’t anything Leopard can do that tiger can’t without some tweaking. In general, innovation in the OS space is just dead.
I guess I’m the only one that thinks Vista is better than XP…
I mean seriously, it’s an improvement. You can say it could’ve been better, but it’s still an improvement over XP.
Microsoft’s biggest mistake with Vista, is continuing to sell XP. If they stopped selling XP right away (or at least a couple months over Vista went retail), what could people do? Nothing. People are just choosing XP because they’re familiar with it. Now, if you couldn’t buy XP or get it on a new computer, people would have to give Vista a chance. Not just throw it aside and choose XP because they’re familiar with it.
@Matt, This has nothing to do with the old interface, this has everything to do with what is running underneath the new one.
I can’t seem to find this info anywhere - maybe you can. I assume that Microsoft staff run Vista. What percentage might that be? And what would be the average machines? I am especially interested in noteboooks - what is MS buying to run Vista effectively? MSMarketing wants us to think it is easy, but 90% of the notebooks I see have a WindowsExperienceIndex in the 3’s - and perform drastically worse than XP.
Maybe MS’s “eat our dog food” is a little emperor’s new clothes?
Leave Comment
Commenting Options
Create an avatar that will appear whenever you leave a comment on a Gravatar-enabled blog.