Re: Windows Vista
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Would you trade a market of 95% of all Windows-users for even 50%? And how long do you think it'll take before Vista hits 50%? We techies know that Vista isn't really that much of an improvement over XP now and the average user doesn't, but they will as soon as people they know get it -- and are likely disappointed unless they're upgrading from 98.
Let's rehash Vista for a moment:
1. Aero: You can make XP look just like Aero right now for free; just go look at softpedia.com or download.com.
2. The sidebar (is that even still on Vista?): desktop sidebar [desktopsidebar.com] works even on Win 2k. And then's there the Google Desktop.
3. Better security: You'd be better off sticking with Win 2k or XP and getting the free version of Win Patrol [winpatrol.com]. More security and it uses less than 5 mb of Ram to run in the background -- how much memory is Vista going to require again?
4. DirectX 10: It'll be almost useless for a long time. No game company is going to trade the market of almost all Windows-users for the Vista-users market exclusively. I predict that when games get more advanced they will either use OpenGL or even program what the game needs into the game itself (which likely won't be a permanent upgrade to your system).
Those are its pluses! Consider the biggest negative of all: 8 different versions, each costing more than the last. Is everyone going to rush out and buy a copy of Vista when the version they can afford has less features than the copy of XP they already have? Most who do so would by mistake.... and they won't be very quiet about how they feel they got screwed either. Personally, I think the 8 versions thing is what is going to be the biggest detriment to selling it. MS is trying to force everyone to pay through the nose for Windows and a great many simply will not. MS has forgotten that their target market is cheap; if they weren't a lot more of them would be using Macs (and I'm no Apple fangirl by any means, so don't take it that way).
Pirate Vista? A lot of them won't even bother with that when they find out from folks who have it that it's not really that much of an improvement over XP (from a user's standpoint) and requires powerful, expensive hardware -- which a lot of people simply don't have even now. You can't download hardware over p2p so Vista will be useless to many, who aren't going to upgrade without a compelling reason to do so. And what complelling reason will there be? MS's own games? That's not good enough for most, not so long as there are a lot of games that still support XP. No, I think Microsoft's only real hope lies with companies like Dell, who will sell pre-built computers with Vista. And guess how happy those people are going to be when they find out that they have to pay do much exta for features? To summarize, I think word of mouth alone will do a lot to prevent Vista's widespread adoption -- it will cost too much to have anything beyond the basics, most hardware can't even utilize it and hardware that can won't be all that common for another couple of years. For all that inconvenience Vista Premium should have a boatload of great features, but it's apparently not going to. Even with all that aside it would be very foolish for a game company to go Vista-only because the Vista market share is going to be too small. And if Vista bombs they certainly won't. Even if it is suceesful, its market share is still going to be low enough compared to previous versions of Windows that marketing games to it exclusively just wouldn't be profitable enough, especially since OpenGL can be used instead.
Come to think of it, maybe Vista will do more to push OpenGL than anything else. Bonus! Go MS! :-D