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How much trou­ble is Vista actu­ally in?

Just lately it seems to be one thing after another. First there were the sto­ries of peo­ple “upgrad­ing” Vista to XP. The the whole Vista-ready deba­cle and the result­ing class-action law­suit. And now we have panic set­ting in over the end-of-life of XP.

To get around the end-of-life prob­lem accord­ing to a report on Silicon.com, Dell and HP are prepar­ing to use the down­grade rights that come with Vista to carry on sup­ply­ing XP pre­loaded on new machines. If this receives sig­nif­i­cant take-up it could be a real blow to Microsoft – new machines are the main route to upgrade for the vast major­ity of users and the one that will deliver the best Vista experience.

Of course it is almost incon­ceiv­able that Vista will fail. Win­dows as a whole still tops 90% mar­ket share and within that Vista racks up just over 14%, dwarf­ing OSX and Linux. It could be sim­ply a case of allow­ing users to stall for time until Vista’s prob­lems are ironed out. But with with the next ver­sion of Win­dows slated for a 2010 release (that’s if it comes out on time – a big if based on the expe­ri­ence of Vista/Longhorn) it is con­ceiv­able that peo­ple may leapfrog Vista and go straight from XP to Win7. And with the sug­ges­tion that Microsoft may delay the XP end-of-life date, this may become a very real possibility.

Of course, although bad, this would not be the worst pos­si­ble out­come for Microsoft. That sce­nario is one where there is a whole­sale shift to Linux allow­ing users to aban­don paid-for licensed soft­ware for good. This last week has seen the release of the lat­est ver­sion of Ubuntu which is esti­mated to already have over 8 mil­lion users and offers the most Windows-like user-friendliness of the Linux flavours. Even Apple has been post­ing impres­sive sales results for its PCs – 51% more that the same quar­ter last year and an increase run­ning at some five times the indus­try aver­age. And, should we get to a ubiq­ui­tous web model where all that users need is a browser then all bets are off.

But back to today. Yes Vista is in trou­ble but I can’t see this as the tip­ping point for a whole­sale migra­tion away from Win­dows per se – not yet any­way. Per­son­ally, I think Microsoft would be mad not to extend XP’s life – no user wants to be forced into an upgrade (espe­cially one that is receiv­ing so much neg­a­tive pub­lic­ity), it will sim­ply rein­force the view of Microsoft as an unhealthy monopoly.

In the mean­time, to cel­e­brate the release of Vista SP1 there’s this lit­tle gem which, depend­ing who you believe is either ‘ironic’ or ‘moronic’ – you decide:

The les­son here: never, ever do a cor­po­rate song.

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