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Interesting to see how MSFT plans on spinning its numbers when it reports earnings and guidance.

I *just* activated Vista on my StinkPad, like just this second. I have to admit, it's not nearly as hideous to look at as XP was. >.<

Perhaps it's time for the band in Redmond to strike up "Nearer my God to Thee"...

The world is running out of chairs.

Mafia$oft is totally screwed. They are going to want to get Vienna out the door as quickly as they can, BUT they need to actually make improvements to Fista, which takes time. It will be interesting to see how many of the features dropped from Fista make it into Vienna.

C1,
Let's see how it works. Also, any feedback on build 420?

Remember the days when some of us were a bit worried that Vista might be fantastic; might make Mac OS X look bad, outdated, outclassed?

Were we really that young and foolish?

"One quarter of the 612 survey respondents said they were already using the new OS"

Also noted was that one quarter of those surveyed were having major computer system issues recently and were in danger of losing their jobs.

Good old MS will force them to upgrade by dropping support for XP sometime down the road. Just like they did for Exchange 5.5.

"So you are having problems with the new Daylight Savings changes? What version of Exchange are you running? Version 5.5, oh I'm sorry, that's no longer supported in your contract but we can help you for $5,000."

I wonder how many Mac users are upgrading to 10.5? I'm running 10.3 and it's good enough for me. So far, nothing in 10.5 makes me want to upgrade but I know i'll need to someday only because certain software or security updates will no longer run on this OS. By that time, i may have already bought another computer.

Vista, the 'Pinto' of operating systems.

"Remember the days when some of us were a bit worried that Vista might be fantastic; might make Mac OS X look bad, outdated, outclassed?"

nope

They may not know it yet, but...

70% of businesses will upgrade to OSX.

I got a cheapo machine with Vista installed planning to use the box as a simple fileserver and torrent downloader. Cheapo or more expensive didn't mean much to me because I'm not planning to run anything more advanced than Azureus on it.

Know how when you start a Mac for the first time it is ready to go in about 2 minutes? With Vista it was literally an hour and half or so from first starting it to being able to do anything with it, as it spent that much time installing Vista from the OS partition.

Activated it, and went about setting it up as a simple fileserver.

I stuck a bog-standard years old firewire card in the machine--Vista blue screen of death. Wanted to swap out the hard drive and put in a 500 gig drive as C: Had to go through a whole procedure just to burn an installation disk for Vista, which is the only copy of the installation disk I can ever make.

Took that card out, and figured that since firewire was going to be iffy I'll stick in a SATA card, take the external drives out of their shells, and put them in the machine where they'd be a lot easier to manage anyway then having a bunch of external drives with power supplies, and shells, etc.

Only problem was that now Vista insisted that it could no longer verify its genuinness and that it would have to be reactived.

Screw that--installed a bootleg XP copy, at least until linux drivers catch up with the machine.

According to Omni's market research most (+90%) Mac users upgrade to a new version of the Mac OS within 6 months or so of its release.

The WOW starts . . . never.

Disappointing?

Nah, they'll pull something on everyone to make sure they have to upgrade.

Yeah, it did take a little bit of forever to get Vista going, and every little thing you do elicits the super-fun Allow? button. But it's an improvement on this machine (T42p)

And Cubert, "Also, any feedback on build 420?"

Tech services STILL hasn't posted the build. I though they had it the other day but no luck. Checking the server aaaaannnnd... Nothing. I gotta bug somebody about it.

Re: Upgrading to 10.5

I had 10.3 and upgraded to 10.4 because of the Dashboard. I agree: some people might not find any value on it.

To me, there are a couple of reasons I would switch to 10.5, on top on my head:

1. New Mail App
2. Multiple Desktops
3. Time Machine

Again, some people might not find any value on this, but I do, and I bet a lot of people would agree that 10.5 justifies the upgrade cost.

But at the same time, 10.3 is STILL much better than any Windows, so if 10.3 does it for you, great!

I find it VERY hard to believe that one-quarter of respondents are already using Vista at their companies. Maybe they are running Vista on their own computer, but that doesn't mean 25% of companies are already running it.

Baron,

yes I was also so young and foolish.

At least a part of me couldn't believe that after MS had invested so much money and time, that they'd dare to bring out something so second-rate.
Happily they proved me wrong.

The remaining 5% responded " There's a Windows' update?"

Of course I want to believe, but - With every new iteration of Windows about 30% of companies have always said they were not going to upgrade, but in the end were forced to for various reasons.

On the bright side, an important difference this time around is that Mac OS is rapidly being considered (seriously considered) by ever more enterprise users, now combine that with linux and Sun business tools and its just possible that MS's OS(es) are going to be in a whole lotta hurt in the next 18 to 24 months.

"Things can change if they just will."

MW: "must" - as in must change.

Windows Vista market share is 2.04% with a bullet... as of the end of March.

Microsoft purportedly sold 20 million Vista licenses in the month of February and I say bullshít. Kevin Kutz, Microsoft's director of Windows Client products will probably be thrown under the bus when it's revealed that Ballmer actually stuffed the channel with copies of Vista and called them sold. To date no one has parsed out the figures in terms of who bought what and it isn't likely that we'll see those numbers today, either.

I would imagine all meetings in Ballmer's office are currently standing room only... not only because the room is overly crowded with excitable chipmunks but because all of the chairs have been removed to protect the innocent.

A Turd is a Turd.

My other half works for a global consulting firm and they are still using Windows 2000. Vista has very little hope in the corporate space.

Even corporate IT gets tired of dealing with crap on a daily basis.

15% are still trying to extract old data from frozen PeeCees; 20% are still chasing elusive spyware that three security apps cannot deal with; 40% are still hunting for drivers for at least one device.... Upgrade? "Go away! Can't you see I'm busy?"

"Remember the days when some of us were a bit worried that Vista might be fantastic; might make Mac OS X look bad, outdated, outclassed?"

That would have been very hard to take, but if Microsoft had actually (by some miracle) hit a home run with Vists, Appple would have been more than up to the challenge and the whole computer industry would have benefited. As things are, Apple has no one to complete with but itself. Fortunately, this is exactly what Steve Jobs, thus Apple, thrives on. It's wonderful that Steve and Apple are constantly trying to outdo themselves, to make their most popular products obsolute. It's wonderful because it is so rarely seen in business—or anywhere else, for that matter.

@alansky

Uh, yeah maybe... I'm a huge Mac fan, but the picture you paint is techno-utopianism taken to a new level. Here's my point(s): Apple isn't there yet - really, and if Apple ever really does get to own 90% (or whatever it is) of the world's desktops then they will be in the same grave danger that has overcome MS. I want Apple to have a nice big market share, but lack of competition is big business's biggest enemy - even Apple's.

If MS every really does march its way down to something less than 50% market share, then one of the most exciting possibilities for me is that their may be more, maybe many more developers that will feel inspired to bring ever better OS platforms to the market place. Imagine a whole bunch of Apple Inc.s all competing with each other - do you realize how fast software advancements would happen? It boggles the mind. It would, in short, be the exact opposite of what we have today.

I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

MW: "had" - as in MS had it's chance, (x10).

Would that where I work was so lucky - even though I have a Mac on my desk, my boss wants me to be in the "Vista Testing Group" to help everyone else who will have to deal with Vista when our IT department rolls it out this coming Fall - they "say" it will begin taking place in October. Will be interesting to see how realistic that is...

(My last paragraph grammar corrected, and this time with feeling.)

If MS really does march its way down to something less than 50% market share, then one of the most exciting possibilities for me is that there may be more, maybe many more developers that will feel inspired to bring ever better OS platforms to the market place. Imagine a whole bunch of Apple Inc.s all competing with each other - do you realize how fast software advancements would happen? It boggles the mind. It would, in short, be the exact opposite of what we have today.

"I want Apple to have a nice big market share, but lack of competition is big business's biggest enemy - even Apple's."

Mr. Peabody, you misunderstand me. I am merely stating the obvious—that Apple currently has no competition. I, too, would love to see "a whole bunch of Apple Inc's all competing with each other." But this, unfortunately, is the Utopian vision. What we have today certainly is the exact opposite.

"Moore's Law" says processing power doubles every two years. Vista took over 5 years and nowhere near 'doubles' XPs utility. In fact, many have noted that Vista actually has features that detract from it's utility (DRM, lack of drivers, software incompatibility, rigid activation, etc).

For the sake of argument, let's give Vista a "90% of XP" rating derived from (increased eye-candy, increased MS revenue for pushing it into the channel, increased box seller for the extra hadware requirements) - (DRM, driver lack, broken software). Now that's 10% decline over 5 years. This figure yields the 'growth rate' of negative 2% (rounded off −2.1072%) per year. Ergo, we conjecture (using just a little more rounding):

Ballmer's Law Window's utility halves every 30 years.

70% are nuts

When you have a system that already is "good enough" why change? Microsoft added no real value to Windows with Vista, hence not reason to switch.

I'm surprised that 25% of "tech professionals" are already using Vista, actually.

I wonder if they mean "yeah, I have it installed on a test machine," or if they are actually running it in production.

The Windows admin tools for managing Active Directory accounts (among other things) don't even install properly on Vista at this point. Microsoft admits this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930056/en-us

I have already come across several things on the MS website that say "This issue has been resolved in Windows "Longhorn" Server" - which isn't even available yet as a commercial release!

What a disaster! Microsoft is alienating their most loyal traditional fan base (the IT/MCSE crowd) with all this Vista/Longhorn stuff.

Macaday:
"They may not know it yet, but...

70% of businesses will upgrade to OSX."

1. Don't count on it.
A huge chunk of MS windows users are using 98 and earlier. This trend will only accelerate with Vista.

2. You have a lot of faith in Microsoft, which frankly is not warranted by their demonstrated level of (in)competence.

"a full 30% of those surveyed said they had no plans to upgrade ..."

That's too bad. How will they ever know what they've been missing?

In a year or two businesses won't have a choice when they need to buy a new computer. Microsoft will stop licensing XP and that's all that will be available. Unless they buy a Mac.

> I wonder how many Mac users are upgrading to 10.5? I'm running 10.3 and it's good enough for me.

It doesn't matter. For Apple, Mac OS X is a means of selling more Macs. Sure, there is revenue from selling Mac OS X in a box, but the main purpose of Mac OS X is to make new Macs more attractive to potential customers. Once the Mac is sold, Apple would rather have you buy a new Mac than upgrade the OS on your existing Mac. If you're happy with Panther, no problem...

Microsoft on the other hand lives or dies by Windows. If Vista continues to be a fiasco, Microsoft will start its slow death march. It doesn't know how to do much except leverage its Windows monopoly.

"If Vista continues to be a fiasco, Microsoft will start its slow death march"

25% using Vista now =Fiasco.
Another 13% within a year=Fiasco.
All but 30% eventually to upgrade=Fiasco

If those numbers are representative of the worldwide uptake of Vista, that means only 600 million upgrade copies will be sold! Pathetic.