I don't see a Wow here, just a Not Now--that is, bigger cost to essentially tread water relative to XP.

I would say that the biggest hurdle posed by Vista is that it costs significantly more for the low to low-midrange buyer to acquire a Vista PC than an XP PC that is functionally as speedy and feature-rich.

That is the essence of the Vista doldrums--that Vista for all practical purposes offers little that is new, but MOREOVER imposes an economic premium just to keep the old.

Example: Three years ago a Dell Inspiron 1150 was a just-above base model Dell laptop but ran for most office-like uses quite as well as a mid-range PC or even a high-end system. And you got almost all the features of XP Pro in XP Home.

Today an equivalent just-above-based Dell Laptop will only be available, and evidently can only run, Vista Home Basic, and you lose the true "Vista" Aero graphics, and MUCH MORE of the full OS feature set is stripped out of the Vista OS than was stripped out of XP Home versus XP Pro.

Thus, the entreaty to buy a Vista PC means a demand to pay a lot more to start with, and get much less real value at the low end to low mid-range of the Vista PC product ranges.

This is why Dell is burrowing into the sales ground and why PC sales overall are stagnant. Microsoft needs to realize that it is not just that Vista offers little that's new, but also the fact that Vista for all practical purposes TAKES AWAY economy of operation, at least at the low to low mid-range price points.

So, not only do MS and firms like Dell lose just those buyers who want many new features because Vista DOES NOT HAVE many new features, they also lose buyers who may not have needed any new features but who were otherwise just in the market for a trusty functional high-value speedy low-end to mid-range XP PC.

So the the market loss here is actually two-fold: Loss of the value-centric buyer, and loss of the feature-hungry geekish buyers.

I honestly don't comprehend why MS has cut out the bottom 1/3rd of the market. perhaps Mr. Gates noticed Mr. Jobs selling all those Macs at high margins and thought it smart to dump the PC riff-raff and focus on high-end sales. In Canada firms that often later go out of business call this "going upmarket."

'Microsoft needs to realize that it is not just that Vista offers little that's new, but also the fact that Vista for all practical purposes TAKES AWAY economy of operation, at least at the low to low mid-range price points.'

Polar, i'd never thought about it like that. Eloquently put.

PolarUpgrade, excellent post! You've nailed all your points well.

Joe, this is a great piece you wrote. Everything you say aligns perfectly with my experience. (I, too, use both Vista and Mac OS X.)

There is no "Wow" in Vista. It is not a revolutionary product, nor is it a major upgrade from XP. To be sure, Vista has a myriad of little features added. If Microsoft were trying to overwhelm us with quantity, they failed.

There will be no home run for Vista. Vista sales will track with PC sales as the market replaces its aging hardware or expands to encompass new users. In this sense, Vista will be a "success."

But as a sales driver, which is what MS is dearly hoping for, Vista will be a bust.

Some excellent posts here so far. I do believe Polar Upgrades comment on MS throwing away the bottom 1/3 of the PC's industry is correct. I would also suggest that the middle 1/3 (speed wise) of computers in general will take some modest amount of hit in regards to performance between XP and Vista. Leaving only the top 1/3 (the fastest computers, like Joe's T60p) to run at acceptable performance for Vista. One thing, Joe the cost of that T60p has to run close in price to a MacBook? The T60p is a slick machine, and its on my dream list. But you have to wonder how much of the top 1/3, will go the Mac route, is there is little difference in price?

There are a couple of other problems for MS that I have not seen addresses well anywhere. These deal with the sales of the Boxed versions of Vista, which even by MS standards are dismal. Of course the reason given for these dismal sales is that 80% of the existing computers out there currently are not hefty enough to run Vista. While this is true, there is also another reason that I have not seen touched on. I the past you could by a “Full” version of Windows, and when you bought your next computer, you were allowed to just transfer it to the new computer, all legal. Now with a mature computer market in the USA, people are buying 2 laptops for every one desktop computers. To use this “full” license, and even with the draconian licenses of XP, and worse Vista, you will need to find a laptop without a pre-installed Vista on it, or else you pay again. While this is possible by using google, its not what the average buyer is going do, they are going go down to Best Buy or another discount store and find a good sale. When they get to these stores. all they will see is Vista laptops, so the value of the “full” version is worthless when you can't use it, as you are probably going to buy another Vista license with the next laptop anyway. The full version of Vista for one would be Ultimate, but not the upgrade version.

My point is why buy these top of the line Ultimate stand alone versions, when most people cannot find a decently priced laptop at a discount store on sale without some form of Vista that they will have to pay for again. This has also helped to kill off some of the stand alone versions of boxed Vista sales.

Started with XP the eula his become very restrictive, and with Vista even Draconian. This is not as much problem for the average user who buys Vista as “part” of his new computer. The problem is for the techie (or nerd if you prefer that name) down the street. The guy you know who will help you fix your computer without charging you an arm and a leg, perhaps even free. He doesn't own a business, only everyone knows he knows a lot about computers, and can fix them cheaply. He has a lot of computers. He is the unpaid MS support line, the ones out there that have been the backbone of the windows OS. Windows has become too expensive for these Techie's, with its licensing. Vista, is causing many of these people to look at alternatives, in increasing numbers. Linux is gaining most of its user base from this segment of windows users. This is not a good sign for MS in the future when the people that the community looks up to to help them fix their computers are now moving to Linux, and may be the ones promoting Linux shortly.

" I've still used Vista on a daily basis, just not as my bread-and-butter operating system" . Joe, that sounds funny, why not you eat your own dog food and run Ubuntu daily on your machine and tell us your experience

I am sure that we are dying to hear you Ubuntu experince

Knowing that the Windows Vista is picking up , you sounds softer and change your tone

Rick wrote: "I am sure that we are dying to hear you Ubuntu experince."

I'm going to put Ubuntu on an old Mac G4, as a matter of fact. But this isn't Linux Watch, Rick.

Change in tone? There will be no change in tone. I will increase hands-on Vista posting, though, related to new applications.

Thanks,

Joe

Why dont you call this site.. www.apple-fanboy-watch.com?

Joe,

Thanks for the great article and the insightful comments from chips and polarupgrade. When you point out that "Web 2.0 is a distraction, as it becomes the platform of choice for many developers." you are spot on. More and more Microsoft developers now work with ASP.NET instead of developing windows applications. This is great for internet applications, but must hit the overall development of windows.

Joe,

Thanks for the great article and the insightful comments from chips and polarupgrade. When you point out that "Web 2.0 is a distraction, as it becomes the platform of choice for many developers." you are spot on. More and more Microsoft developers now work with ASP.NET instead of developing windows applications. This is great for internet applications, but must hit the overall development of windows.

Seeing what Vista was all about, I switched to Ubuntu.

Joe, be careful of Mac

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/03/danish_consumer_complaints_board_claim_ibook_defect/

Just curious, what was the limitation in the built in Vista VPN client that kept you from using it?

barlo wrote: "Just curious, what was the limitation in the built in Vista VPN client that kept you from using it?"

Apologies if I wasn't clear, barlo.

Problem was incompatibility with a third-party VPN client.

Thanks,

Joe

Really I am greatly surprised of this forum's level Chips, Richard , Tasistro and now PolarUpgrade (among others) show a uncommonly capable. To the things said here it would be hard to add something more... but here go my two cents:
The other big enemy of Vista ( besides all others) is Ms in itself , I explain myself ; years ago when Ms’s began to grow it had the people’s sympathy, and that allowed Ms (among others reasons) to fight in equal conditions companies such as IBM, even though the balance of power was quite “unbalanced”
But what sympathy? business-speaking, it means that if the costumer has to choose between two products of similar characteristics (or perhaps the “nice” product is a bit inferior) the costumers will choose it over the normal product , (now imagine what “antipathy” could produce.) With the passing of the years MS has changed form Dr Jekill to Dr Hyde (he reasons are easy of explain, psychologically speaking.) Transformation aside, Ms could live without problems for its monopolistic conditions, but it is slowly going to finish, Thus Ms, to survive in the future, will have to produce products VERY superior to the ones the competence has (a harder thing to do with each passing day) an example of this is its failure in almost every area on which it tried to expand itself.
And this is easy to see, unless that is has to be seen by the ones blinded by the glow of the gold (money and power)- which makes them believe they are above of the common citizen (read costumer) and that it is enough to make pacts with and treat only their “equals” (companies or people with as much money as them) …er…any resemblance to Ballmer is pure coincidence.

I installed Home Basic (costs less than $100) on my girlfriend's 4-year old Vaio. The Vaio has a 1GB Centrino + 512 MB memory. I am impressed! Add on Office 2007 Student, GIMP, Blender, AVG, etc. . . and it takes a total of 7.5 of the 30 GB on the machine (bloat where?). My favorite features are the defrag-scheduling, the scheduled spyware scanning, the auto-downloading of hardware drivers, the IE sandboxing, the user folders structure, and the new media player. I'm pretty confident I will not need to do any further support on this puppy! Plus everything just worked for me right out of the box. This is a four year old laptop and Vista runs faster than XP did on it! Color me impressed!

I installed Home Basic (costs less than $100) on my girlfriend's 4-year old Vaio. The Vaio has a 1GB Centrino + 512 MB memory. I am impressed! Add on Office 2007 Student, GIMP, Blender, AVG, etc. . . and it takes a total of 7.5 of the 30 GB on the machine (bloat where?). My favorite features are the defrag-scheduling, the scheduled spyware scanning, the auto-downloading of hardware drivers, the IE sandboxing, the user folders structure, and the new media player. I'm pretty confident I will not need to do any further support on this puppy! Plus everything just worked for me right out of the box. This is a four year old laptop and Vista runs faster than XP did on it! Color me impressed!

I just installed PCLinuxOS 0.93A with XP, dual booting on my Laptop. PCLinuxOS is free to use and download throught the distrowatch.com website. I have a 900 mhz cpu and 256 mb ram, yet XP and PCLinuxOS run faster and cheaper, and seem to do everything the so called upgrade can do. Try runnning Vista on 900 mhz cpu with 256mb of ram. Some of my favorite features of PCLinuxOS is "no defrag is needed," no antispyware or antivirus programs are needed as well. It comes with OpenOffice as a default install with the Operating System, which also saves you a lot of bucks over M$ constantly changing Office.

It also comes on a "live cd" which allows one to run completely from a live cd to see if all your hardware is supported before you do an install. This is better than a tool that gives you a number, and tells you that your computer is "vista capable" and then after you install it (and perhaps lose your XP license in the install) you find out that its dosn't like all your hardware, or won't run. BTW, did I mention PCLinuxOS and most GNU/Linux versions are free?

"OEMs need to think more out of the box and come up with some truly compelling form factors."

I expected at least one hardware maker to burst out with a new Vista-only device that would knock your socks off - perhaps some new variation of the Tablet PC. Nada.

It's as if they were caught flat-footed when Vista actually released. They probably spent too much time listening to Gartner.

Perhaps all the OEMs are devoting their resources to the Home Server - which, let's face it, is a new product and therefore a whole new market.