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| Online Petition Favors Windows XP Over Vista |
By:
Richard Koman |
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Windows may or may not be collapsing, as two Gartner Group analysts indicated last week, but Microsoft is receiving substantial pushback against Windows Vista. With less than three months left until Microsoft says it will stop selling and supporting most versions of Windows XP, will customers be forced into an operating system they don't want -- or is Microsoft facing a customer revolt of stunning proportions?
Resistance is strong enough that InfoWorld Executive Editor Galen Gruman has launched a "Save Windows XP" online petition that has received more than 100,000 responses.
"Millions of us have grown comfortable with XP and don't see a need to change to Vista. It's like having a comfortable apartment that you've enjoyed coming home to for years, only to get an eviction notice," the petition reads.
"The thought of moving to a new place -- even with the stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, and maple cabinets (or is cherry in this year?) -- just doesn't sit right. Maybe it'll be more modern, but it will also cost more and likely not be as good a fit. And you don't have any other reason to move."
Will Microsoft Pull an ME?
Gruman wants Microsoft to do something similar to its handling of the disastrous Windows Millenium Edition -- continue selling XP until an acceptable version of Vista can be developed.
It's not clear whether businesses are really pushing back on Vista, said Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT, in a telephone interview. "We're just a few weeks past Service Pack 1 for Vista," he noted. "The availability of SP1 is usually the trigger point for serious implementations." While business implementation of Vista so far has been minor, "I expect it to pick up speed," King said.
At the end of the day, though, neither Microsoft nor any other company can force customers to buy their wares. "You try to bring them over a little bit at a time," King said. "Business has found XP, especially the Professional version, to be a very stable operating system that gives them what they want."
The High Cost of Vista
In Gartner's critique of Windows, the analysts said that with Vista Microsoft was attempting to move to a new code base that gets them out from under years of legacy code. While that's true, King said, Microsoft did make some missteps with Vista that haven't helped.
"Vista really represents a fundamental rethinking of how the operating system should be designed, especially in the area of security. It's a more sustainable development model for Microsoft moving forward," King said. But Vista stumbled in two areas, he added. "Because of Microsoft's ambitions for the OS, it ran into product delays, which were probably inevitable. Secondly, this was the first version of Windows that required a hardware upgrade."
That means businesses will have to spend several hundred dollars per PC just to run Vista. For large enterprises, that is millions of dollars that Vista's apparent advantages don't seem to justify, King said. And that is just the most visible cost of upgrading; rolling out support and putting out incompatibility fires could drive costs well beyond the cash outlays.
But, if not Windows, where would business customers go? Few enterprises are interested in adding Macs to the IT mix, and Linux and Web-enabled solutions are seen as too radical. "A lot of companies will just keep running XP -- especially given the uncertainty in the economy," King said. "Companies don't want to make major changes in their infrastructure right now. They will try to squeeze another year or two out of their XP laptops and desktops." |
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