I'm actually in Greece (Athens to be more precise) but I just wanted to quickly write that registration for DDD5 is now open on the Microsoft Events page. Register for DDD5!

It's not out of choice. I'd quite happily leave Weebl (my PC) running Vista until the time when it died and needed a proper upgrade. Unfortunately that time is now and common sense says I can't afford to replace it yet. Mainly because the machine I want from Dell is £892.

So, for the next couple of months I'll be running on one of my "spare" PCs that I've recieved for £1 or less. As you might imagine, these PCs aren't the highest spec in the world, but between Chris (600Mhz, 256Mb RAM) and Bob (my laptop) I should be able to survive the couple of months to save up.

The entire thing is a shame, cause if I'd had enough money in a few months, I was going to replace the laptop with a HP Tablet PC from Play.com. That'll have to wait.

It seems that noone will ever pronounce Windows Vista a success. Not in the market place, not in businesses, not in the home. What's that about?

 

Vista has sold 40 million copies. It took Win95 a year to reach a point that Vista has in 3 months. In 2 months XP got 17 million (I can't find an exact figure for month 3). And Mac OSX still isn't there at all with an estimated 22 million. Surely that counts as a success in sales?

 

The arguement from "the other side" is that the majority of Vista's sales were to OEMs and that businesses are hesitant to deploy Vista. Yet 87% of businesses are planning to roll it out eventually (by the way, the article also mentions that 18% of businesses say they need to upgrade over 90% of their hardware to be Vista compatible - this is either a deep misunderstanding of the words "Vista Compatible" (what do you need Aero for in a business?), there's some highly specialised hardware in these businesses, or there's some crap that really needed to be upgraded anyway). Even if they're being slow in the beginning (and they always are), they'll upgrade eventually. (It'll be interesting to see how an SP1 announcement would affect this). Success? Probably not, but also not enough to be labelled a failure. It's simply "normal".

 

Well, let's be honest. There are never many retail copies of operating systems sold. when it comes to upgrading the OS, people buy new hardware. There's new graphics cards and larger flat screen monitors that they can buy with a new PC for the same cost as getting Vista Ultimate at retail. And noone's really unhappy enough with their current OS to go out, get a new one, move all of their things and then get used to the change. Nothing'll change that. Again, it's not failure, it's just normal.

 

Overall, maybe Vista isn't a success, certainly not a major one. It's just something people now consider to be part of the normal cycle, reflected even more by the statements of everyone I've spoken to. Whether they like Vista or not, they see it as an upgrade everyone will eventually make anyway.

I work in the office diagonally across from the guy in this article, which you can also get more in depth in the Times Online.

 

Crazy.