Vista in Context

The year 2007 has been an exciting year for operating systems. In January Microsoft’s new OS, Vista, was released, in October we saw Ubuntu 7.10 and Leopard. Exciting times indeed.

Which one of these are the “best” is a silly question and I won’t go into the gory details of comparing any of these systems. However, what is as clear as daylight is that amongst these 3 the biggest “loser” seems to be Vista. It has been criticized since before day 1. The adoption rate of Vista hasn’t been that bad though, but whether this should be attributed to Vista or an increase of hardware sales (more than 90% of computers come with Vista installed) isn’t clear.
The real moneymaker for Microsoft is probably the business sector and upgrading to Vista will in all likelihood only occur after the first service pack is released. Right now, certain vendors still give you the option of getting XP instead of Vista but that will change soon enough.
Market Share
But, the real reason I am writing this is to put certain things into context. Firstly, an overwhelming majority of users use windows. Xbit labs reports that the market share is about 90%. That is massive. To compare: Apple’s share is about 6.06%. To serve a customer base that big is tricky. There is a saying along the lines that to design a product for everyone results in a product for nobody. There will be problems, no matter what.

Similarities with XP
A big argument you hear when discussing Vista is that it doesn’t offer any real advantages over XP. Whether that might be the case or not, the adoption of XP was just as sluggish as Vista. Do yourself a favor, search the google news archives for Windows XP news and you will be surprised at how much the stories about XP and Vista sound alike, yet, XP is still the most popular OS by far.

Too far ahead
And lastly, to those people predicting the end of Microsoft: dream on, with a market share of 90% they aren’t going anywhere. At best they will lose some of that 90%. Don’t expect to see OSX, OS11, or any of the (great) Linux distributions to overtake that.

Disclaimer: I don’t care what OS you use, how you switched and how good (insert OS here) is compared to Vista. And, biggest market share doesn’t equal “the best”.

Sources:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20071002235454.html
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=564
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN3131673820071101