I recently got a lovely new Toshiba Portege R500 laptop (can you say “under 2 lbs, including optical drive?”), and was surprised to see that it came with XP – I sort of figured new Windows machines would be shipping with Vista. But at least so far, I haven’t seen any compelling reason to install Vista on it (I am running Office 2007, which I like better than the previous Office version).
And then yesterday I happened upon this opinion piece in eWeek by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols titled Night of the Living Vista which says:
Today, I think of Vista as the zombie operating system. It stumbles around, and from a distance you might think it’s alive, but close up it’s the walking dead.
The first sign that Vista was in real trouble was when major vendors started to offer XP again on new machines.,
and goes on to say:
Now you might think some of this is legacy backlash. People don’t like change. They’d rather use Windows 2000 than XP, Windows 98 SE than 2000,and Windows ME more than…well, OK, no one liked ME. But I’ve been through these cycles many times before. This is different.
XP SP2, with XP SP3 finally due to show up soon, is not only the best Windows to date, I can’t think of a single reason to switch from XP to Vista. I’m not talking a good reason, I really mean any reason.
Interesting, to say the least. Is this a serious issue, or just the inevitable major upgrade backlash/lag? (Just think about how many people took their sweet time upgrading their Macs to OS X, for instance).
Oren Sreebny 
Hey, Oren.
We’re seeing the same thing on the industry/enterprise side of the fence. With it’s inconsistent interface, dramatic rise in system requirements, and broad swathes of incompatibility (from small ticks you can work around to outride “it don’t work”), the only places that seem to be in a hurry to upgrade to Vista are those who bought into advance deployment deals with Microsoft.
Microsoft may trumpet their sale of licenses… but I’ll wager fairly large sums that installation is considerablly lower. And if you hadn’t heard, MS just announced that they’ve extended OEM availability for XP another 5 months – and unless Vista SP1 dramatically changes the game, I’d expect to see another extension.
Yeah, it’s messy.
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I can say that, but it wouldn’t be true– that’s a 2.4lb computer with the optical drive and conventional disk drive. Still, pretty impressive. I will salivate, but not drool.
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I’m running Vista on my home box (thanks to my previous box blowing up), and, honestly, I like it a little more than XP. More secure, feels more solid, better UI, really feels like it’s ripping off OS X.
Is it stable? Hell no. In three months I’ve had three BSoDs. Between home and work XP installs, I had three BSoDs. Ever. Combined.
It’s nothing that couldn’t be fixed with SP1, but MSFT is so flippin’ slow on rolling out SPs that it’s hurting Vista.
The worries about Vista are a little short-sighted, though. It will replace XP. It’s inevitable. XP had a slower uptake than 98, which had a slower uptake than 95. It’s just going to take Vista a little longer, thanks to people keeping their computers longer.
The worry for MSFT, though, is that Vista’s replacement might be a non-starter. They may not get the return they need in the opening two years of Vista’s replacement to justify the millions they’ll put into developing it.
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