Reports that Vista is selling poorly relate primarily to
off the shelf sales compared to XP. New computers that have Vista pre-installed
seem to be doing well, and Microsoft has logged at least 60 million
Vista licenses. The conclusion has to be that home PC customers
are overwhelmed and intimidated by the prospect of installing Vista on a PC
that already has XP.
My take on all this is something that Iive been saying all along. Itis
one thing for a corporation to carefully build a “spin” of an OS,
push it out to their users, and clamp it down. Itis another matter
entirely for a mere mortal, an every day person who just wants to gets
some tasks done, to cope with an OS that has more than 50 million lines
of code.
I remember when I was at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee in the 1990s.
Many of my colleagues had a DEC Alpha, and they routinely reinstalled or
updated the OS in a mind numbing and frightening sequence that only
a very seasoned UNIX veteran would engage in. As for me, I had a lowly
SGI Indy. I could manage occasional Irix updates, but they too were scary.
Once I tried to move major sections of the OS to an external drive.
I wrote the Perl script and a UNIX guru and I went over it character
by character. We decided it was okay. But it wasnit. One misplaced
comma destroyed the hard disk data structure, and the poor Indy quietly
died.
The upgrade of a major UNIX operating system, in earlier times, was
a major undertaking. The fact that Apple has made it possible
for grade school kids to upgrade from Tiger to Leopard and not skip
a beat has to be one of the most inspiring and stunning computer
science accomplishments of the 21st century. Itis something we
often overlook.
If PC home users elect to only upgrade their OS when they buy a new computer,
something is seriously wrong with the fundamentals of Windows Vista for
the home user. In fact, if Microsoft doesnit figure out why so few
customers are buying Vista off the shelves, running home with excitement,
and upgrading their PCs, Vista might be the last desktop OS before PC
users are forced to move over to simpler handhelds and tablets with touch screens.
When we evaluate OSes, itis a complicated affair. Some inexperienced writers
just look at the two GUIs and shrug. They canit see the difference. Others,
professionals, know what major OSes can do, and select the right one for the job
in a corporate environment. However, home users are just terrified and
they just want to get something done without worrying about losing
their lifeis accumulation of data, pictures, movies, correspondence,
and taxes.
The iPhone is the beginning of a new era in handheld computing. I believe
that someday, weill be carrying around small slate-computers, smaller
than a MacBook and larger than a Newton. Time Machine will back it all up,
and updates by Apple will be painless.
Microsoft is going down a dangerous path by putting an OS on PCs
that terrifies its users and intimidates them from buying it off the
shelf to install themselves. The Leopard release next week,
with some minor glitches to be sure, will nevertheless
punctuate Appleis superb handling of this whole affair and set the stage
for a whole new personal, portable computing experience here in the early
part of the 21st century that Microsoft will have extreme difficulty
duplicating.