I've been following the advance coverage of the forthcoming Windows Vista for a while now, and I'm becoming ever more convinced that it's going to be terrible. Wait, I should qualify that. I don't think it's going to be significantly worse than Windows XP or 2000. But I think that measured against the yardstick of the time and expense spent to create it, it will be judged a failure.
Take the recent rah-rah article at ExtremeTech, whose title make it almost a parody. Taken together, the changes to Vista will be amount to a set of nice-to-haves. (I'm not a Mac user, but I understand that most or all of the improvements are available today on Macs.) The net is that I just don't see any compelling feature that's going to get customers to upgrade to Vista. Like XP, Vista's revenues will overwhelmingly come from new PC purchases, where the price of Windows is illegally tied to the sale of the CPU. Worse even than XP, Vista won't even run on most of the hardware shipping today. Not that it won't run on old hardware, it won't run on a lot of the modern hardware people are buying right now. So you have an OS that won't run on your PC, that doesn't do a lot your current OS doesn't do, that will cost a few hundred dollars to upgrade. Not a very compelling upgrade proposition. Which basically ties Vista's growth to the shipment rates of new PCs.
So Vista will likely be a bomb. And with Mac sales growing at 4x the rate of PC sales, I see Mac market share continuing to climb in the next few years.
Recent Comments