Microsoft can't even fool themselves anymore it seems as Microsoft has been treating the XP+Vista bundle sales numbers as if they were for Vista sales alone.

Not only is that intellectually dishonest, but sidesteps the fact that people, for reasons real and imagined are continuing to adopt XP in spite of Vista being a readily available zero cost option.

In the marketplace of free ideas, the benefits of Vista do not sell.

I don't understand whats wrong with vista... sure at its release it blew... but now... its the same price as xp... and if you buy a system its silly to get xp... vista performs just as well as xp on modern... not top of the line hardware... so its pointless... I just don't understand

I think the important part that everyone is mising is that they are talking about sales of Vista to BUSINESSES!!!! Loads of regular consumers have bought vista or bought computers preloaded with it, but businesses are rightfully more hesitant to do mass upgrades because it costs lots of money and potentially leads to massive losses of productivity. Also, Vista just doesn't have anything to attract businesses. Its got DX10 and other features for gamers and video-centric software as well as a slicker/cuter interface -NONE of which has anything to do with business!

I agree thogrom, when I switched to Vista from XP, I was surprised how much I liked Vista BETTER! Many things about Vista just work so much better than they have ever, with some tweaking I am getting the same if not better performance than when I used XP on the SAME machine. The only real problems I have against Vista is the slow 64 bit support, which is to be expected and will be fixed rather quickly, as well as the data storage system. Vista uses twice the amount of hard drive space for the same file if it were on XP, but that merely means a hard drive upgrade and hard drives are dirt cheap today. All those who do not like Vista usually have absolutely no idea what they are doing, and to be quite honest, they are just unhappy because they do not want to spend the money on an upgrade. I will NEVER go back to XP, I love Vista and I think it is the first good move Microsoft has made in a long time, and if you do not like it then stop whining about it, your just being very arrogant because, believe it or not, your opinion is not a fact and neither is mine, or anyones.

Also, eraigames is absolutely correct the slow adoption of Vista is because they don't want to spend the money to buy Vista AND train their employees to use it to it's fullest. Maybe the reason that Vista is being adopted slower than XP was, is because XP was a VERY huge leap in stability and performance, and Vista is not. Also does a global recession mean anything to anyone?

Does anyone read the articles before they're posted, including the person who actually wrote them?

"To us, the 180-million-story raises doubts at best and may put Microsoft’s PR team into deeper Vista trouble than it is already at worst."

lolwut

To be fair with the sales numbers one must not forget that a large number of Vista sales were bundled with new machines. New customers really had no choice unless they reinstalled XP later but why would anyone do that unless they were able to compare both operating systems on the same computer? I was fortunate to see the difference on a top of the line system. The XP was noticeably quicker with boot times, file transfers and games in general over Vista. I for one was dissapointed upgrading to Vista after all the hype because it still felt like XP with just flashier graphics and really no improvements that the average user would notice. And lets not forget the hardware driver fiasco sooo many people experienced upgrading to Vista. Shame on you Microsoft. Its not surprising Vista has such a bad reputation.

The hardware driver fiasco was demonstrated to be 28% nVidia's fault, IIRC, 17% Microsoft's fault, with Intel and AMD/ATI following.

Of course Microsoft is not blameless here either, because they gave certifications to nVidia's garbage drivers.

So, I'm an IT contractor/consultant, and I've yet to have had to support a single user who chose Vista since its release. NOT ONE.

I have tried to make myself familiar with Vista, since one day one of my customers might ask for help with the OS... but, honestly I'm not sure if that day will ever come. The only instances where I'm confronted with the OS, is when someone wants me to wipe it to put XP Pro SP2 on instead. People are outright afraid of the OS. I've heard numerous morons refer to Vista as if it was a computer virus "My new computer had the Vista at first, but don't worry we have XP now" or before major vendors started offering XP "I don't want a new laptop, they have the Vista, and my software I need for my job won't work".

Who am I to argue with my customers though? Especially, when many of their concerns are valid. The only benefit I can think of is the UAC, and I know they'll beg me to turn it off for them anyway.

mello1, as I said before I have Vista configured, without any modifications to the software, so that it actually just runs faster than XP. Vista's biggest problem is that when you install it EVERY extra feature possible is enables which is why it becomes slow. Vista's main benefits are just a wider support of future content, business and entertainment related. Also it installs sooo much faster, a godsend for computer builders.

You can't take the 180 million too seriously. I'm sure many companies are like us, we have volume licensing where we pay a maintenance fee to keep our software up to date. All our vista licences are essentially Vista licenses, that doesn't mean we actually use them however.

Outside of me and one other in the company who are testing the OS, we still haven't actually switched any of the general users to Vista.

Sorry I meant all our XP licenses are essentially Vista licenses.

180 M? It is only because they don't sell anymore computers with XP. If they sell with XP or Vista, to be chosen, the Vista sales would be less than 50 M. Almost all Vista computers sold in Brazil was UPGRADED to XP, legaly or not, and got much faster and easier to use.

And about 50 M sold if the costumer could chose, most of then wold be changed to XP after few days or weeks.

So, the Vista "success" is fake, unreal.

Why is Microsoft is upset about this??? If people want to buy a license of Windows XP then LET them!!! Who cares?!?! Long as Microsoft continues to make money off of WinXP sales then they should be happy. I know Microsoft wants to eventually phase out Windows XP but that's not gonna happen anytime soon. Honestly, I had a choice to purchase WinXP or Vista license I'd get WinXP period.

If I were an enterprise user I'd get Vista license and then simply use WinXP as "downgrade rights". The reason for this route is if the company decides to use Vista for all their dekstops the licenses are already in place.

I can tell you guys this much, I work for a software development company that specializes in interactive software intergration for Powerpoint allowing Powerpoint slides to be used with various hardware in large group meetings and events allowing audience members to respond in realtime via interactive keypads.

We just recently released an update for VISTA compatibility, I mean within like the last 2 months. So yeah, my company waited for all this time before becoming VISTA compliant. They decided on this due to an overwhelming response from our corporate customers stating that they had no future plans to upgrade to Vista or Office 2007 anytime soon.

So basically having our software working with VISTA was put on the back burner all the way up until recently, because none of our clients was interested in it. It just wasn't viewed as that important.

I can tell you guys this much, I work for a software development company that specializes in interactive software intergration for Powerpoint allowing Powerpoint slides to be used with various hardware in large group meetings and events allowing audience members to respond in realtime via interactive keypads.

We just recently released an update for VISTA compatibility, I mean within like the last 2 months. So yeah, my company waited for all this time before becoming VISTA compliant. They decided on this due to an overwhelming response from our corporate customers stating that they had no future plans to upgrade to Vista or Office 2007 anytime soon.

So basically having our software working with VISTA was put on the back burner all the way up until recently, because none of our clients was interested in it. It just wasn't viewed as that important.

Sorry about the double post, there was a page load error.

Why would a business upgrade to Vista when Windows XP is running flawless. A business is not going to spend 10K + for computer technicians to come in and upgrade their computers to Vista, work through the bugs (happens in every OS upgrade regardless), buy business programs that work with vista, and possibly buy new computers so they can just upgrade to the latest. If it is not broken, and can live without the new features, then it is not worth while for any business to upgrade. It doesn't matter if it is an Apple O.S., Microsoft O.S., or even Linux. Your still half to pay for everything including the technicians and work through the bugs.

Vista works good now, the only reason businesses are not upgrading is because it costs money and time. I do not see many businesses or home users use Linux or Apples Leopard operating systems, I wonder why. I know, because they are junk!

OK so businesses don't want to spend 90000 billion dollars going to Vista so it is a flop? Is that why any gamer / PC enthusiast will say so Vista x64 and rock 4-8GB of RAM and game on? Big wup.

Who is Vista for?

I'll state it again - Vista is the best choice if you want to run a tablet pc and do a lot of inking. Other than that, only high end gamers wanting DX10 would need the upgrade. No one else, business or consumer, truly needs to adopt Vista otherwise.

----------------------------------------------------

Computer Lab Woes...

No one has mentioned how the "minor improvements" in Vista could break a computer lab.

To create the illusion of a roaming profile, redirecting folders to a network drive for personal settings along with streaming applications is by far the best solution. (This also helps keep lab workstations clean and conflict free.)

However, with Vista having more and slightly different folder structure and redirects, you cannot create a common set of redirects between the two OSes.

You have two choices when upgrading - a risky and expensive all-or-nothing changeover (which requires a lot of work hours to complete and a lot of planning ahead) OR break your roaming profiles in two, increase the amount of disk storage required for the same number of users, increase the maintenance complexity, and make your users remember two separate identities.

Considering the beefy hardware requirements of Vista, if you maintained several labs of 10 to 100 machines spread across several buildings (such as in a University environment), would you recommend to your superiors to upgrade to Vista?

(Note: I have not mentioned the changes in how Volume Licensing is monitored... which adds more system complexity and hardware overhead!)

Interesting to hear many of the comments from both sides. I would personally only recommend Vista to new business's, or new departments within a corporation and to Home Users. This would be after carefully considering the software required by the business/business unit or home user - lets face it - love Vista or not, most major software is atleast 32bit Vista compatible as is all must have utilities such as Virus scanners etc. I think that Vista with Service Pack 1 and updates with the latest mainboard/video drivers is sufficient for most business users and most home users. I do tend to agree, however, with those that wouldn't upgrade to Vista as that can be problematic, and I personally would only recommend doing that under special circumstances (of which I can't think of any atm)

I'd tend to think that upgrading a large corporate would be a waste of time if XP is doing its job - however, as said, I wouldn't see such a problem of it being installed in new or seriously deprecated areas of an organisation. As for mentioning Home Users, I think most would be happy with Vista 32bit on a fully compliant system with SP1 and all good drivers.

I think the enthusiast will probably go Vista 64 with up to 8GB RAM to really make sure there is a heap of space for each game (tho we must remember 32bit appz are limited to 2GB RAM [please correct me if Im wrong]) - so those apps should have the full 2GB to operate within a 64bit Vista System, and more left for great multi-tasking. Myself and two others are in the process of testing Vista 64 for compatibility with 32bit games and apps to see if its worth while going the whole hog with 8GB RAM in an ethusiast configured system (e.g SLI and RAID etc etc) Most gamers I know use Vista 32 with 4GB RAM and just accept that they'll only have access to about 3.2 GB. According to them compatibility is good in this case.

Lets not forget Security - theres substantially better security in Vista against Viral/Spyware attacks. This may be of use to new business users and more intensive home users alike.

I personally run Vista 32 with 3GB of high quality RAM and found that SP1 and the latest drivers have fixed most problems, and that also most developers support it now. My only pondering would be about going 64bit to leverage more resources in a PC - this is where Vista could really shine - hence why we are testing this atm.

I'd really like to hear others opinions about the issues raised here and above.

Vista is simply terrible.

I installed it on my new Q6600 basically because I thought it couldn't be THAT bad and because I couldn't find an XP installation disk recent enough that it would recognize my SATA II HD properly.

BIG Mistake .... TONS of software doesnt work with it ... and by TONS I mean 30% of what I've tried to run. Sure some like Nero and Endnote etc will work when you PAY FOR an upgrade to the latest version ... but seriously, thats a huge hidden cost in some cases.

Secondly - I work in medical research... so many of our core programs don't work with Vista its terrible. I have this great machine and I can't use it for any data analysis because Vista won't run any of the software reliably.

AND finally - for games - with the same memory and same hardware - its slower than XP.

I have 1 thing to say: GOOGLE-OS!

Help us Google, you're our only hope.

Couldn't agree more. Point of article is more towards business adoption of Vista, not really consumers. That said, as a consumer I'm not impressed w/Vista because it seems to be a bloated OS put out there to push hardware sales. "It's as fast or faster than XP...yara yara yara" yeah w/tweaks that 90% of the users don't know s about. "But it's that it comes w/all it's features enables & if you disable most, then it's the best thing since slice bread!"
Sure, disable all those great new features and whoa, you got yourself an OS that's better than XP! Yeah right! Now you got yourself XP w/more eye-candy that STILL requires more hardware and horse power to essentially do the same thing. And then you have all those different flavors of Vista: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate; oh yeah, and the "Vista Experience" score. Crap. Should have made option in Vista that allows it to look & work like XP; that would have definitely helped adoption (and kept price same or almost same as XP w/o all that different flavors crap!)

Who cares how much they are gonna sell? Let's put it simple : I can do the same thing,who wants to pay more for something that doesn't change enough for me? I am a gamer,sure I have 2 gigs of memory and I optomize my system,but wouldn't I rather be running a Q6600 and a 8800 GTS 512 on XP rather than an E7200 with a 8800 GS?

This is true - hence why I said that I'd have to carefully consider the software one might install on it before going Vista. Its also true that you need the latest versions to support vista, but anything you've bought in the last 12 months should be compatible.

Its unfortunate however how certain specialist programs will not work. Ive had MRI Programs work ok but I guess not all do so.

Still a lot of incompatibilites Ive noticed are due to a dodgy driver or two, but I guess there's a percentage - say 10 to 20 percent that wont.

Doing basic things, like disabling indexing and the like speed up Vista nicely, but it does seem to be over-bloated for what it does do in comparison to XP.

I've been using Vista since October 2007 and just love it, 10x better at networking(Wired & Wireless) than XP. For me its faster and the longer you use it the more useful you'll find Vista's improvements.
BTW its a lot less buggier than Xp was at its release, even before Vista SP1, but if you don't have at least a 2Gh dual core CPU, 1Gb RAM and decent Video card...STAY AWAY

I think the biggest problem Vista has is companies like Acer, Hp, Toshiba and the list goes on. Who in their right mind can sell a Vista PC/Notebook with a celleron CPU and 512Mb RAM + Intel Graphics. No matter what MS says is the minimum system requirements, Vista has been around long enough for these companies to know what is a optimal system for Vista.

I work as primary IT for a small organization and all I can say is we'll probably never upgrade to Vista until the next version comes out. Heck, I'm still converting some Windows 2000 systems to XP to this day. The main problem I've found with Vista aside from needing to upgrade everything else under the kitchen sink is that it's a serious memory hog. While memory is cheap, you need at least 2GB to function correctly while correctly optimized XP works fine in 1GB or even at 512mb. Unfortunately a lot of discount laptops and PCs which many organizations are likely to purchase just happen to have 1GB of ram as I discovered.

I also find it very disappointing that Vista requires so much for basically what amounts to a "pretty" graphical interface. Seriously look at Opensource Compiz Fusion on a 700Mhz Duron with 128Mb Ram on youtube "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSGf9pFupjg" It's much neater looking than Vista and requires less resources making you wonder what in the world Microsoft did.

Heh, found an even better clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qddueXkD8E

As far as corporations go, it is fairly common place to leap frog an OS. My company went from NT 4.0 to XP SP2. So from that perspective It does not surprise me that the adoption rate for businesses is low. As several other posters stated, Vista doesn't offer anything to a business. In fact most of the enhancements either won't run on a typical business computer or IT will insist they be disabled.

Personally, I have installed Vista (pre SP1) on a few computers to check it out and it lasted less then a week before wiping and installing XP Pro. A few relative have it on new machines and I am over there fixing one problem or another every other week. When Microsloth dumps the 32-bit OS option and put's out a 64 bit version that runs as well as XP SP3 on a machine with Single core CPU (2.4 - 2.8 GHz range) with 1 GB or RAM and a middle of the road video card I'll cheer. I run with a Q9450/4GB RAM/8800GT and will be staying XP SP3. I just don't have a reason to upgrade.

Microsoft may have sold 180 million Vista licenses through OEM licencing, but how many of those were downgraded to WinXP?

I recently bought a new PC and preferred to order it with Linux pre-installed, and as of today i´m loving the OS.

ROFLMAO,
I guess Micro$oft forgot that over 90% of the computers in corporations are AGP based and a lot of them have Intel or Nforce3 chipsets in them with dual core processors.
Maybe next time Micro$oft will remember that most of these computers in corporations are 3 to 10 years old.

ROFLMAO,
I guess Micro$oft forgot that over 90% of the computers in corporations are AGP based and a lot of them have Intel or Nforce3 chipsets in them with dual core processors.
Maybe next time Micro$oft will remember that most of these computers in corporations are 3 to 10 years old.