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Tue, Nov 20, 2007 9:50 EST
HP CEO: Vista Never Had Its Moment in 2007
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Posted by: Laurianne McLaughlin in News Topic: ApplicationsBlog: Inside Tech
Current Rating: |
Wondering what's happened to momentum for Microsoft's Vista operating system in corporate America? Fact is, enterprise IT has continued to decline the Vista plate like it's an undercooked holiday casserole. Listen to what Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd said yesterday: HP never saw a "Vista moment at any time over the past year," he told reporters on a conference call to discuss HP's fourth-quarter earnings.
HP was happily announcing that revenue for its personal systems group has spiked to $10.1 billion; that's up 30 percent compared to fourth quarter a year ago. But that success sure isn't because businesses planned a Vista upgrade and refreshed systems at the same time.
On the contrary, Vista did not play into HP's sales uptick, Hurd declared. That uptick is all about sales in emerging markets including China, he says. In fact, HP says that revenue from Brazil, Russia, India and China increased 37 percent; it's now nearing 10 percent of HP's $104.3 billion in sales.
I can practically see the steam coming out of Steve Ballmer's ears when he hears Hurd say this out loud. This isn't the way Vista was supposed to play.
Vista, one of the longest, priciest and most-watched R&D efforts at Microsoft, has turned into a presidential candidate that no one in corporate America wants to listen to anymore. Sure, Vista's shipping on plenty of new consumer PCs. But in the enterprise, it's stuck in neutral. In pop culture, it continues to be teased by those pesky Mac TV commercials.
At our recent CIO-08: The Year Ahead conference in San Diego, I talked to many CIOs about what was on their minds, technology-wise. I brought up Vista with many of them. I got many shrugs, and many replies of "I'm in no rush." That's definitely not surprising. Any CIO worth his or her salary moves slowly on OS upgrades. But it's been a while now.
As bloggers including veteran Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley have noted recently, you're all waiting for the first Vista service pack, due in early 2008: But Microsoft's testers are beginning to grumble about just how good that service pack will be. Some enterprises are even considering skipping Vista, if possible.
Will your enterprise have its Vista moment in 2008? I'd love to hear why, or why not.
microsoft, operating system, vista
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Vista upgrade is not an upgrade, but wholesale replacement. The processor and memory requirements will give every CIO pause (just to keep performance level with existing levels), not to mention researching how many peripherals have to be replaced as well due to incompatibility issues. VISTA will force many CIOs to consider LINUX and MAC alternatives due to cost and compatibility issues in order to stay in budget...anyone remember Windows ME... it looks downright inviting in comparison.
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Unfortunately Vista requires much more memory and processor resources and provides little if any performance improvement. The licensing structure is difficult to manage and unterstand and there is nothing that is a solid business driver to make the switch.
If it ran faster, was more reliable, easier to use, or offfered a genuine benifit to business then it would be flying off the shelves. New screen savers and widgets for monitoring ebay accounts just doesn't justify the cost in licensing and manpower it install it.
I have to agree that so far anyway Vista is an "also ran" product.
The biggest downfall of vista from an enterprise standpoint is the fact that it's absolutely incompatible with many applications. Therefore, making it worthless.
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I'm a CIO. I've been using Vista on my Lenovo T60p since March 2007 and have wanted to be impressed and compelled to roll it out across my enterprise, but I'm neither impressed or compelled. It is Ok, but not clearly better than XP in terms of my end user experience thus far. I'm eager to see how SP1 performs. I hope it is a noticeable improvement.
After 12 years of 32 bit Windows, I expected more that what I've seen from Microsoft. I think the first 12 years of VAX/VMS development was more impressive in terms of enterprise value.
Thanks for the feedback, especially about your trial of Vista on the personal laptop. And yes, I've heard from many people, especially in midsize companies, that the hardware requirements are a big hurdle. It's interesting to me, also, that none of you raised the issue of security, which Microsoft tried so hard to stress with Vista.
Keeping a watchful eye on the technology trends and products that can make your life easier--or oh-so-much more difficult.
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