Windows XP: Something's Got to Give
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When Microsoft's top brass admit the company has done a less-than-stellar job of marketing its flagship operating system, something's got to give. Exactly what that "thing" will be is tough to pin down right now. Microsoft is weighing a number of options, ranging from new mechanisms to deliver functionality "out of band" before Longhorn ships, to an interim Windows release, a la Windows 95b or Windows 98 Second Edition.
Read More on the Rumored Interim Update Here A growing number of developers and customers said they would welcome such an interim release called by some "Shorthorn." Others said they would just be content for Microsoft to simply fix bugs and apply security features and hold off on another full version of Windows until Longhorn is rock-solid. "I'm afraid we'd likely pass on 'Shorthorn' unless it really delivered value to us. I just don't see how a little update to XP is going to do that," said Anthony Frausto-Robledo, director of information technology with the Lexington, Mass. architectural firm of Morehouse MacDonald & Associates Inc. Regardless of which of the so-called "XP Reloaded" options Microsoft selects, the company's Windows client unit has an uphill battle ahead. Earlier this week at a dinner with Redmond, Wash.-area journalists, Jim Allchin, Microsoft's group vice president for software platforms, admitted that Microsoft had failed to do a good job in getting the word out on Windows XP's myriad features.
Allchin's criticism comes at a time when Microsoft is still touting Windows XP as "the fastest-selling operating system ever."
Between October 2001, when it launched XP, and September 2003, Microsoft said it sold more than 130 million copies of Windows via retail and preloaded on new PCs. However, this figure does not include the copies of XP that enterprise customers purchased as part of their volume-license agreements.
Still, Microsoft needs to find ways to maintain interest in the three-year-old product until it delivers its next major Windows client release, Longhorn, which isn't expected until 2006 or perhaps later. And it needs to do so in a time when IT spending still remains depressed. Last summer, at the company's annual financial analyst meeting in July, Allchin said he planned to keep the XP fires burning in a few key ways:
However, based on Allchin's assessment this week it appears that Microsoft decided over the past six months that these strategies didn't go far enough.
Next Page: Facing the XP Challenge Last summer, the company replaced Rogers Weed, its then-head of Windows marketing, with Tom Button, the man who helped build Visual Studio into a major brand for the company. As of July 1, Button became the corporate VP in charge of Windows client product management, with responsibility for all aspects of marketing, product management and product planning for Windows client.
Button and his crew immediately faced some tough issues. And the result has at times appeared topsy-turvy.
For one, Microsoft was set to phase out support for Windows 98, Windows 98 SE and Windows Millennium Edition at in January. But in the eleventh hour, Microsoft decided to give users reticent to upgrade to Windows XP a bit of a reprieve and extended paid support through June 2006. Read "Windows 98, ME Users Get a Reprieve (Sort Of) During the next few months, the squeeze on the Windows client team will get even tighter.
According to industry insiders, a large number of contracts for Microsoft's Software Assurance (SA) licensees will come up for renewal over the next two quarters. If these customers decide they aren't getting enough bang for their annuity-licensing buck, they might drop their SA contracts—or, in the worst case for Microsoft—switch to another vendors' products. Microsoft has a handful of smaller Windows client launches on its plate for 2004. It is poised to deliver Service Pack 2 for Windows XP; the next version of its Tablet PC operating system (code-named "Lonestar"); its next rev of its Media Center platform (code-named "Symphony"); and its 64-bit Windows XP releases for Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel Corp. 64-bit processors. All of these products will be based on Windows XP. In the interim, Redmond is stepping up its XP marketing pitch via its "Why Windows XP?" Web site. Microsoft isn't going so far as to push the "Why Windows" site the way it has its "Get the Facts" Windows Vs. Linux site. But like the "Get the Facts" site, the XP marketing site does include a number of third-party "lab reports" designed to help customers evaluate when and whether a move to XP is right for them. Check Out the 'Why Windows XP?' Site Here On the site, Microsoft features several top ten lists that the company and its reseller partners will likely rely on to evangelize XP in the coming months. Among them are: "Top 10 Reasons for IT Pros to Move to XP" and "Top 10 Reasons for Small Businesses to Move to XP." Microsoft's new message: better security, improved reliability, increased efficiency and measurable performance improvements make XP the best choice for every type of customer. At the same time, users are clamoring for not only XP's improvements, but for those promised for Longhorn, as well. This could encourage those inside Microsoft pushing for an interim release. "I'm personally ready for Longhorn," said Peter Marshall, who does IT technology research for Royall & Company, a Richmond, Va., college-recruitment firm. "I had a catastrophic failure of XP due to a corrupted registry and am fed up with that part of Windows. XP has been running on my PC for over two years without a rebuild, so I guess I should have seen it coming. And that is quite an accomplishment considering I used to rebuild 95/98/2000 on what seems like a quarterly basis," Marshall said.
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