The truth behind Vista's sales figures

• Tags:
• User Interface,
• Premium,
• Malware,
• Natural

Jason Hiner

Published: 12 Nov 2007 16:42 GMT

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…drive businesses to upgrade. Most businesses have worked with Windows XP long enough to develop their own tried-and-true manageability and mobility solutions and best practices.

As for security in Windows Vista, it's either the primary factor that makes Vista worth the upgrade or the primary deterrent, depending upon who you talk to. Former Windows chief Jim Allchin once said: "Safety and security is the overriding feature that most people will want to have Windows Vista for."

ZDNet.com's Ed Bott recently wrote that Vista is more secure than its predecessor, basing his opinion on the lower patch counts for the new OS compared with Windows XP Service Pack 2. An Amplitude Research study in May stated that half of the companies adopting Vista were doing so for security reasons.

However, others strongly disagree. Earlier this year, multiple experts rejected the idea of buying Vista on the basis of security. Many IT administrators have avoided Vista because of the flurry of UAC confirmation windows, which many of them believe users will eventually just click through without reading.

John Pironti, chief information risk strategist for Getronics, agrees with such views on UAC, believing that it goes overboard. "The best security is transparent to users," he said. Microsoft has simply tried to transfer culpability to users for letting malware into a system, according to Pironti: if users click through a bunch of windows that they don't understand and activate malware, is it the fault of the users or of Windows for letting it in?

One of the signs that a significant number of IT administrators are resisting Vista upgrades was the news in September 2007 that Microsoft agreed to allow PC manufacturers to downgrade Vista PCs to Windows XP. This is especially significant for small and medium-sized businesses. Large enterprises generally buy their systems without an OS installed and apply their corporate desktop image to all of their machines.

Sanity check
I can't conclude this discussion of Windows Vista adoption without briefly addressing the issue of Vista's user interface problems. Microsoft has clearly attempted to follow in Apple's footsteps by making Windows more intuitive for novice users. However, unlike with Mac OS X, a more intuitive Windows has come at the price of slowing down power users because it now often takes more clicks to accomplish average tasks than it did in previous versions of Windows. For example, clicking into the properties page for a network interface takes one to two clicks in Windows XP and five to six clicks in Windows Vista. That kind of interface tweaking is not only an annoyance but also a productivity hit for business users.

Am I concluding that Vista will fall flat and not be adopted by businesses? No. Ultimately, Vista will be adopted by businesses because they simply don't have many other viable alternatives. Apple's OS X might see some incremental gains, but it's not prepared to make a full run at mainstream businesses. Linux? Forget about it. If Linux was going to make a move on the business desktop market, it would have happened years ago.

Microsoft has admitted that Vista will fail to meet the goal of selling twice as many seats as XP during the same time period after its launch. Still, in its recent earnings release, Microsoft reported that it has seen a notable rise in the number of businesses signing long-term licensing deals that include Windows. "They wouldn't be signing these agreements if they didn't have the intent to [deploy Vista]," said Mike Nash, vice president of Windows product management. So there could be a sizable number of companies that are buying Vista licences with no immediate plans to deploy the OS. They are simply future-proofing themselves for Vista deployments.

Thus, it looks like there are three primary factors driving Microsoft's surprising spike in Vista revenue:

• Worldwide growth (10 percent) in PC sales, featuring Vista on more than 90 percent of them
• Consumers buying the higher-priced Home Premium and Ultimate versions of Vista
• Businesses signing general licensing agreements that include Vista (future-proofing their PCs for if and when they deploy Vista)

These developments show that Vista might be bringing in a nice chunk of change in 2007 even if the OS is not yet showing up on huge numbers of PCs or winning the loyalty of IT pros. These developments are not a ringing endorsement of Windows Vista. They merely make it a melancholy inevitability.

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