Microsoft has finally launched the long-awaited Windows Vista. Will it sell well? It's already pretty obvious that Windows Vista will have a hard time competing against Microsoft's previous operating system, Windows XP. Many businesses are happy with it, and see no reason to switch. Still others are just now switching to Windows XP.
The way I see it, Microsoft is targeting the wrong crowd. With its flashy Aero theme, and parental controls, it seems more aimed to be purely aesthetical people, at not at the true business crowd. What the business crowd wants is an affordable upgrade price, flexible solutions, and minimal training required for the employees who are switching.
Vista just ain't giving that. First of all, they apply a fancy theme, which although looking good, doesn't really do much except slow the computer down (a lot). Then, it adds many needless visual features. To top it off, a lot of businesses will need to upgrade their perfectly-fine-until-now computers to be able to support the new operating system.
Other main selling points include increased security, bug fixes, Internet Explorer 7 (which should be free to all XP users), and speech recognition. Now although these may seem like great selling points for some users, who are they really targeting? These seem more general fixes than anything, and perhaps Service Pack would have been better than Vista.
They've taken a long time to get here. They've gone from bug fixing, to more bug fixing, and to more bug fixing. Looking at parts of the operating system tells me that they are trying to target too much, and too many audiences. And in the end, they might end up missing everybody. People will probably end up buying Vista eventually, but likely when they buy a new computer (which is probably what is going to save Microsoft's butt). I sure don't remember XP being launched this way.
