Text 20730, 117 rader
Skriven 2006-09-08 12:06:10 av TOM WALKER (1:123/140)
Ärende: Interesting Opinion on VISTA
====================================
A reality check for Vista
A day late and a dollar short, the software giant's new Vista operating
system won't have anyone standing on line to buy the first copy.
By Owen Thomas, Business 2.0 Magazine online editor 
September 8 2006: 10:31 AM EDT


SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Judging by the grief that
Microsoft is getting over delays in the release of Windows Vista, and the
buzz surrounding the price it plans to charge for the next generation
operating system, you'd think we were all hankering to get our hands on
this hot new piece of software.

Don't believe the hype: There won't be lines around the block at midnight
when Vista hits store shelves early next year, analysts say.

 
More from Business 2.0 
Our favorite gear 

Fall phone preview - thin is in 

BlackBerry's Pearl is brainy 
 

Fastest Growing Tech Companies 
Current Issue 
Subscribe to Business 2.0  
 
"I don't expect anyone's going to be camping out at Best Buy waiting for
this product," says Citigroup equity research analyst Brent Thill. "I think
the pace of adoption will be slower than the market expects."

They can get it for you wholesale
Microsoft (Charts) gets more than 80 percent of its $13 billion in annual
Windows revenue from PC makers, who install the operating system on new
PCs. The cost of Windows - estimated at around $70 - is included in the
price we pay when we buy a new PC. The proportion of people who buy copies
of Windows at retail to install on their PCs is vanishingly small.

And the version of Windows that those retail customers have on their PC
hardly figures into the equation. By and large, we buy a new PC when we
need another one.

"Consumers perceive what they have as good enough," says Joe Wilcox, an
analyst at JupiterResearch. "A pattern we saw with Windows XP is that
people would buy an XP machine and keep the older machine with the older
operating system. They don't see the benefit of upgrading the older
machine."

Wilcox expects that Microsoft will see a spike in retail sales when Vista
is released, but after a few months, people will revert to the pattern of
acquiring a new OS by default, when they make a new PC purchase.

And it's not like the retail effect really matters. Asked by analysts about
the impact of further delays in the retail release of Vista, Microsoft
executives recently said that sales might take a $200 million to $300
million hit if the release slipped past January. For a company that's
expected to do $50 billion in revenues next year, that's a drop in the
bucket.

The modest expectations for Vista do give rise to a radical question: How
many tens of thousands of engineers might Microsoft have fired, and how
many billions of dollars might it have saved if it had just not bothered to
develop Vista in the first place? Most of us would have kept buying Windows
anyway.

Al Gillen, research vice president for system software at IDC, points out
that Microsoft's Windows sales have steadily increased, even though the
company hasn't released a major new version in five years: "Have sales of
PCs been falling off? The answer's no."

Of course, Microsoft needs to keep up with the competition. Apple (Charts)
CEO Steve Jobs loves to point out that his company has released five
versions of Mac OS X in the time it has taken Microsoft to develop one. And
the volunteer programmers behind Linux continually tweak and improve that
open-source operating system. At the same time, though, Microsoft's share
of the desktop OS market has remained at around 95 percent.

Money well spent?
With that kind of market share, Microsoft's at long last trying to leverage
its monopoly power by raising prices. Of course, it's doing it in a subtle
way. The Basic version of Vista is priced similarly to the last version of
Windows XP at $199 for a retail license. But Microsoft is betting that PC
makers will want to push higher-end machines that run Windows Vista
Premium. Microsoft won't comment on the prices it charges PC makers for
Windows, but analysts believe Microsoft will charge them about $40 more for
that version of Vista as well.

The end result: The average price of Windows will go up, even as most other
components that go into a PC drop in price.

Will Vista Premium be worth the extra cost? Essentially, the features you
get with the more expensive version are better security, a prettier user
interface, and the audio-video software formerly found in Microsoft's Media
Center edition of Windows XP. That doesn't seem like a lot for five years'
work, or for $40 extra.

And here's the thing: Microsoft did a great job with Windows XP, especially
after it fixed a lot of glaring security holes with its Service Pack 2
update. And most of our computing these days is done through a Web browser,
not desktop applications. Vista won't run Web applications any better than
XP.

Of course, we'll find ourselves automatically upgrading to Vista whenever
we buy a new PC - and we'll likely get pushed by salespeople to systems
with Vista Premium, which comes complete with the premium price tag. As
long as Microsoft's business of licensing Windows to PC makers keeps
chugging along, its reliable Windows cash machine will keep churning out
the dollars.

So here's a modest proposal: Boycott Vista. Keep your old Windows XP PC
around. Don't buy a new one. That's the only way we have to let Microsoft
know Vista is an overhyped, late, and pointless update to XP - a perfectly
fine operating system.
--- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.0pr5
 * Origin: Try Our Web Based QWK: DOCSPLACE.ORG (1:123/140)