Thu 9 Mar 2006
According to Microsoft officials Windows Vista will have 2750 new features. There was a detailed discussion about the major features like WinFS and NGSCB which were planned for Windows Vista, but had to be cancelled due to time constraint. I always said that these major features, which seem to be so important because every journal talks about them, are not the part of an operating system that’s decisive for its success.
Windows’ success on the desktop is not dependent on some special features that makes it better than Linux or Mac but rather to the countless details, the many specific features that the other operating systems lack.
This is also one of the reasons why Microsoft Office is successful. Most people need only a few of the features, but everyone uses some features which are not available on competing office suites making these relatively unimportant features a decisive force in the success of an office suite and, of course for a desktop operating system.
Yesterday I read an interesting article about the changes of Group Polices in Windows Vista. This is a good example for my argument. Some system administrators wouldn’t change to an operating system which doesn’t have a similar feature. And some sysops will again go for Windows just because of those interesting changes in Group Polices of Windows Vista.
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Micheal,
From my point of view, MS is losing users on the geek/home front. The geek brain drain is evident…I have 5 friends that would be considered computer geeks and 1 year ago all of us were using winxp. Today, I am the only one using winxp because as a system admin myself that is what my company uses and has no plans to change. As for the other 5, 4 have moved over to the mac and 1 is using Linux after all were disappointed by Vista.
Vista SP1 better be one hell of a service pack. In fact, it better be the best service pack that MS ever created because I’m seeing the brain drain around me and I’m starting to feel lonely.
Another example, this past weekend I went to my local Compusa and my local Apple store. Even though the Compusa must be 20 times the size of the Apple store, the Apple store had many many more people shopping. I noticed that no one was shopping for a pc at the Compusa while I was there.
The only place MS is safe at the moment is in the Enterprise because most move at a snail’s pace when switching platforms.
Apple is certainly doing fine at the moment. The ipod and iphone hype probably also pushes the sales of Macs. But I heard so often in the last 15 years that Microsoft is running into problems in the near future that I am only willing to believe this when I see a significant decrease of their revenues. As it seems now their cash cows Windows and Office are performing as well as they always did.