What's gone wrong with Vista?

Posted on 19 Sep 2007 at 16:42

Dale Vile, research director of Freeform Dynamics, has been studying enterprise adoption of Vista, and while he states that for most large companies it's a case of "when and not if", he isn't seeing a flood of early adopters. "Current indications are that it will take three to four years for Vista to become genuinely pervasive in the enterprise sector," his report claims.

For small businesses, meanwhile, Vile claims it's the other Microsoft newcomer that's driving uptake. "Proactive adoption of Vista goes hand-in-hand with proactive adoption of Office 2007," he claims. But why do companies need to upgrade their OS to run Office 2007, which runs happily on Windows XP? "If you're going to make a major desktop upgrade, it makes sense to do as much as possible," Vile says.

Teething problems

So why has Vista struggled to win over the vast majority of PC owners to date? Even before launch, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the biggest problem Vista faced was the strength of XP. And, sure enough, Microsoft has failed to find that "unique selling point" to distance the OS from its predecessor. "Our contention all along has been there really isn't much in it," says Shiffler. "There isn't anything really must-have."

Games were originally predicted to be one of the strongest reasons to upgrade, with Vista being the only OS to offer support for DirectX 10. Yet, there weren't any DirectX 10 graphics cards available to buy at the time of the January launch, and when they did appear, driver performance was patchy at best. And even now, there are precious few titles ready to take advantage of the superior graphics hardware. In fact, Vista-only titles such as Halo 2 - a disappointing port of the three-year-old Xbox title - don't even exploit DirectX 10. It will take the arrival of potentially groundbreaking titles such as Crysis later this year before serious gamers will consider abandoning XP.

And games aren't the only victims of poor driver performance. A number of manufacturers failed to prepare drivers for Vista in time for the January launch, not least of which was Apple: its iPods initially failed to synchronise properly with Vista PCs. Various smartphones, scanners and other peripherals also suffered compatibility glitches. And although Microsoft has almost certainly made a better fist of backwards compatibility than it did with XP, this time around its audience is much more critical: there weren't millions of blogs ready to lambast the company for every last gadget failure six years ago.

Microsoft might also regret splintering Vista into so many versions. With three different Vista flavours for consumers and two for businesses, there's been confusion over which version does what. The low-budget Home Basic has attracted more than its fair share of scorn: even before launch, high-profile PC manufacturers such as Acer were deriding it for failing to offer many of the new features. And while it's become a staple of the £300 PCs sold by the high-street chains, sales figures show it's by far the least popular version on the market.

At the other end of the scale, the costly Vista Ultimate has also failed to deliver the host of "extras" that users were promised pre-launch. At the time of writing, a Texas Hold 'Em Poker game is the insipid highlight of what's been served up so far.

All these issues combined have created a maelstrom of negative publicity around Vista that Microsoft has struggled to repel. The most damaging being Apple's high-profile "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ad campaign, which was launched to coincide with Vista and depicts the OS as a crash-prone, insecure and feature-stripped piece of software. Is it true? Not really, but when the cool kid at the back of the class picks on the know-it-all at the front, it's the latter that has the image problem.