Business PC buyers are still overwhelmingly opting for XP, computer giant HP has revealed. Yet at the same time, Microsoft is claiming that Vista is selling faster than XP ever did … so where’s the truth? HP, which is the world’s number one computer maker, has explained how Microsoft comes up with these dubious statistics.
we all know where the truth is
What is the truth? Are you telling the truth? Am I? Whose nose knows? What a piddy.
What was wrong with my post? Was it not cordial enough?
Please enlighten me, for I am too heavy.
And, this is news… HOW ?
It is news to me, every PC i have seen for sale have Vista on them, where oh where can I buy an XP machine ?
You can’t. HP is only able to offer XP upgrades with a Vista license for business customers. MS get’s a Vista +1 sale, HP gets a business customer +1 sale, business customer gets XP; mostly win,win,win.
Now, if you can convince HP that your new machine is for business use and HP has hardware that fits your needs; that may be a way.
If you are lucky, the computer you want is already marketed toward business users and the option of XP is just there.
All of the computers I’m considering for my next purchase, which are all ‘business’ machines, come with the choice of XP with no extra (apparent) charge.
Thank you for being honest and referring to XP as an ‘upgrade.’
–The loon
Some stores are offering Windows XP and Windows Vista with computer purchases.
Weird scenario.
There was only the one comment when I popped this article. You beat me too the second by the time I read the article and swapped back but I was thinking the same thing:
MS counts a Vista license as a Vista sale even though they allow Vista licenses to be used against XP installs??!! Next they’ll tell us that MS counts any license going from there warehouse to a reseller’s warehouse as a sale even if that license is not yet purchases by an end user. Say it isn’t so!! Oh the humanity!! Who will think of the children.. oooh.. won’t someone think of the children!?
I kind of thought there was going to be something new in the article though too rather than just a major vendor like HP stating exactly what everyone else has been stating since the first release of MS sales figures for Vista.
This is why “figures” will continue to be complete bunk until the counts for OS activations and updates can be reviewed. I can’t think of figures that would be more accurate for measuring actual end user installs rather than business to business resales. MS knows what those figures are but they obviously don’t match the marking or they would have been paraded prominently already.
Edited 2008-07-28 19:44 UTC
If you’re an OEM or ISV, it’s very useful to know what your platform demographic is.
For example an OEM developing a new bit of hardware would apparently be wise to concentrate on developing XP drivers before they worry about Vista, because the majority of their customers will likely be using XP.
Likewise if you’re an ISV, you might think twice before you start to make use of any Vista-specific APIs or features.
Edited 2008-07-28 20:38 UTC
Maybe it is just me, but I really do not understand Microsoft business tactics here.
Why have they dropped XP when there is still strong demand for it?
Is that just wounded pride that they need to prove to the world how Vista is great? Or is that some sort of shareholders masquerade (like “we have not spent so much money developing Vista for nothing”).
IMO, it is very dangerous tactics. They might end with business switching to alternatives….
Maybe it is just me, but I really do not understand Microsoft business tactics here.
MS’s business tactics go way back to the start of the industrial revolution. Planned obsolescence. Always have a newer, bigger thing to sell consumers to create a demand for the new product. Killing off the older product simplifies the choices for consumer, i.e., subtle arm twisting to buy the newer, bigger version even though individuals/companies do not need it. Also, having both XP and Vista selling at the same time and watching people choose XP systems is also embarrassing. Plus you have to justify the 6+ years of research and development to your stock holders. Those are all the reasons I can think of for the moment. Also being a monopoly and dictating upgrades to meet MS’s needs and not user’s needs is a reason.
Edited 2008-07-28 22:12 UTC
Because they keep having to tell shareholders that all the money they poured into Vista, and Web technologies, and even Office[There’s a full list somewhere] is an ‘investment’ and that the returns are ‘just around the corner’.
Pretty soon, the shareholders will start to get bored of this and demand some actual results. If you force people off XP, many of them will reluctantly pick up Vista.
Three reasons come to mind.
1) Most people are generally unable to accept “sink cost”. Gamblers who lose their house, keep thinking that they can make it all back, if they keep increasing the stakes. Addicts aren’t the only one affected. In the dot-com bust, many companies went bankrupt and many companies fell from highs that any sane person would see would not be regained within the next 20 years, assuming the companies survive that long. It made sense long before the bust was in full swing. Still people refused to accept it. I know some people in Nortel who, when it went down to 40 dollars, honestly thought it was a bargain and made a mortgage on their stocks so they could become rich. Vista is a “sink cost”, but Microsoft keeps thinking that it’ll recover once XP is out of the picture. They’re counting on their monopoly and people’s complacency to make Vista what people expect.
2) Vista was a major rewrite that included some new technologies. If they kill Vista, those technologies have to be ported to XP or they have to take a lot of flack for abandoning their technical partners. If they do that, they may never recover.
3) If Microsoft had a bit of vision and could swallow their pride, they could find a way out by going the Apple route…dump both XP and Vista and go for emulation — none of this virtualization stuff that adds yet more bulk with little benefit — virtualization should be the focus of the new cleaned up API. All future work is on a lean, cleaned up API over a stable kernel. They could go with a F/OSS kernel, but knowing Microsoft, buying QNX might be a better bet and would allow them to break into markets where they have no credibility.
So hope and fear and lack of imagination/humility keep Vista alive. In essense, Vista for Microsoft is like riding a mechanical bull. You know you’re going to fall off, and you’re too proud to ask to turn it off, so you hang on for dear life, hoping against hope for a blackout so you don’t have to fall.
I keep hearing this argument again and again, and I think it is flawed.
First, you assume that Microsoft problems are due to bad API. Well, more specifically, you seem to assume that XP had serious problems. Well, for business, not so much. XP was extremely successful product.
Now the for the API. Well, Win32 is not great, but if you compare it to e.g. what we have in X11, it is still a relatively good API.
Anyway, the most important problem is that this is API used by majority of world’s software. Do you think that it makes a sense for business to rewrite everything? And if they do, would not be better for them to consider abandoning Microsoft altogether and go different path? (either OSX or FOSS).
Of course, everybody touts virtualization, but that will just make existing software second-class citizens.
The reality is that XP and Win32 API works quite well. Throwing everything away does not make sense.
The key problem is, if you stay with XP and abandon Vista, you have to add Vista capabilities to XP and maintain all the 1000s of configurations kept inside of XP to preserve backwards compatibility.
In essense, XP would become incredibly bloated. Eventually, Microsoft has to abandon its backwards compatibility. It’s not without precident. It gave up DOS, in favour of the less close to the metal NT-DOS. This resulted in thousands of DOS applications failing to work, but they gave DOS enough time to survive. Microsoft can’t do this now, but they can clean up Win32 to get rid of all the backwards compatibility kludges and build it on a lean kernel. Then the Windows XP and Windows Vista APIs can be built, WINE-like
on top of the Win32-clean API.
This approach has several benefits:
(1) The Vista libraries would only need to be
loaded if you have Vista apps.
(2) The XP libraries would only need to be
loaded if you have Vista apps.
(3) If you only have Win32-clean apps, your machine would be a lot faster and your kernel will be a lot smaller (idealfor the embedded market).
(4) Porting apps from XP and Vista would simply be a matter of replacing obsoleted APIs with new ones. Code analysis software can catch most of these cases.
I don’t see the down-side, other than Microsoft possibly regaining its leadership (which is, Roman empire-like, slowly in decline).
X11 is a low level API, I’m not a Windows export but isn’t this comparing Apple and Orange?
To compare ‘identical purpose API’ I think that it would be more fair to compare X11 to GDI and Win32 to Qt or GTK, no?
GDI is part of Win32. Win32 is roughly equivalent to POSIX + X11 (well, in fact, xlib).
They are trying to go back to the old glory days. Where people actually cared about Windows OS releases. And developers flocked to create application for it. Today people have gotten more pragmatic about the OS. We will develop for XP and try to use the standards Windows API as much as possible and chances are it will work fine in Windows 95 – Vista. But test in XP as that is what most people are running.
Back in the old days When Windows 95 was released and even Windows 2000 there was a good push to make apps that used the new features of the OS. And if you don’t have the latest and greatest OS then you are a dinosaur and not worthy of our product.
Also the web has flattened things. Back in pre-2000 days we really needed software to do everything we need done. Today most of it can be done via the web, which doesn’t want to care about what OS you are using.
As the OS losses its grasp of computing, thus Microsoft looses its grasp on computing. So making Vista seem like this big seller it is trying to convince people that they are still relevant and if you don’t have vista then you are behind the time.
*EXACTLY*
Win32 is not perfect, but you can create any application in it. Why should you narrow your user base by using some shiny new incompatible API?
Heck, even today I am still forced to support some customers running Win98… As developer, I see no benefits in new “silverbullet” API that is supposed to “save windows”.
As I can speak for ThyssenKrupp Steel we are still using AND buying XP-powered desktop computers from our business partner HP. They will ship the desktops with Vista too but we decided to stay with XP for the next time. So they reassembled the pre-configured PCs (and notebooks btw) with XP+SP2.
The advantage is still the usability and our customized software runs very steady under Windows XP.
Well it is only a question of time… but I can underline HP’s statement.
…why MS need us to adopt Vista (well, one of the reasons)…
Vista has a lot of new tech under the hood that would make development of new products easier for them. There is a newer driver model, newer gfx libraries and so on…
This is the same for Apple with Leopard. If most of the user base is on Leopard, then iLife stuff can use Core Animation for instance, but if a lot of users are holding back then they may not be able too.
Actually, the thing that puzzles me is why 2k3 (I haven’t tried 2k8 yet, so maybe that one) isn’t flying off the shelves. I have to run 2k3, XP and Vista at work and would choose 2k3 for it’s size and speed any day over the others, XP feels old and slow in comparison, Vista feels new and old – lol… If you are not a gamer and need an MS environment then have a look at 2k3 or 2k8…
What I am confused about is why they compromised so much with Windows Vista. Windows Vista should have stripped all backwards compatibility out and removal of all the upsafe calls they marked off when they did the big code audit (those calls are listed on Microsofts website, and updated regularly with the alternative safe method suggested to use).
Do that and provide backwards compatibility with Windows XP through virtualisation. Ensure that all Microsoft applications are compatibility on day one with Windows Vista – and you’ll find things would have gone a whole lot smoother.
As for the future, if they made this giant leap forward – it would have hurt initially but the difficult decisions would address the issues now so hat for the next atleast 2-3 releases it would be gradual evolution without the disruption. Its better to do one big disruption than having many small disruptions.
1. because of the cost.
2. because Microsoft don’t want this to happen. I’m not going to suggest reasons why, but it seems that all of their latest ‘free’ software releases (2 of them being Live Writer and Live Mesh beta, but there are many more) actively refuse to install on server OSs. This is an obvious attempt to persuade the early-adopters not to switch to server OSs.
We have tie up with Dell and so far we have purchased around 80 Notebooks out of which 30 arrived last week. All have Windows XP. The last batch has a Vista logo on top of laptop and a Serial key of Vista on back side yet it is pre loaded with Windows XP from DELL !!!
Most of the people in my company prefer windows XP or directly shifting to Ubuntu !!!
That’s how Dell handle XP downgrades. Installed is XP, but license sticker is for Vista. If you look at Recovery CD with Operating System, you will see that’s Vista, too. So if you need to “restore” system you will get Vista, not XP.
XP on a new machine is a nonsense.
I use Vista since 30 January 2007, and I would never go back to XP.
Vista works much better than XP
Edited 2008-07-29 06:57 UTC
…..but we already know you are a shill.
How is your experience so different from millions of other people who do have serious problems with Vista ?
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice …
http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/