IT departments are largely ignoring Vista. In June (18 months after Vista’s launch), Forrester Research reported that just 8.8% of enterprise PCs worldwide were running Vista. Meanwhile, Microsoft appears to have put Windows 7 on an accelerated schedule that could see it released in 2010. That will provide IT departments with all the justification they need to simply skip Vista and wait to eventually standardize on Windows 7 as the next OS for business.

The five reasons all seem well argued to me, though they're in the wrong order.

Surely the top reason is the one actually numbered 2 in the ZDNet list.

It’s easy to forget that when Microsoft launched Windows XP it was actually trying to change its OS business model to move away from shrink-wrapped software and convert customers to software subscribers. That’s why it abandoned the naming convention of Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows 2000, and instead chose Windows XP.

The XP stood for “experience” and was part of Microsoft’s .NET Web services strategy at the time. The master plan was to get users and businesses to pay a yearly subscription fee for the Windows experience — XP would essentially be the on-going product name but would include all software upgrades and updates, as long as you paid for your subscription.

Is Vista the consequence of Microsoft's failure to implement a subscription model for its OS?

Category: Software
Technorati: Microsoft Windows Vista

1. Andrew Pollack07/10/2008 20:25:32
Homepage: http://www.thenorth.com/apblog

Seems like a fairly obvious set that could be applied to almost anything. Maybe I'll take a more specific stab at it, as I think there are some interesting parallels to be drawn.

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