Vista: Microsoft's biggest failure yet?

Not much love for Vista

The Register comments on a recent report by Forrester (the report itself is not a free download). Apparently, adoption of Vista in the enterprise market has not moved much since last July. It's still just under 10% of corporate PCs that run Vista. The Register article then concludes that Windows 7 will come to the market sooner, rather than later.

In essence, the quick release of Windows 7 is seen as both a necessity for Microsoft as well as an admission of the ultimate failure of Vista. Considering the $6 billion development price tag, and who-knows how much additional money for marketing and sales efforts, could Vista be the biggest failure coming out of Redmond so far?

Surely, most of the Vista developments were re-used for Windows 7. But the marketing dollars are lost, and the investment in Vista did not pay off as quickly as hoped for (greatly delayed ROI). Any substantial pay-off may only materialize after the re-packaged and re-branded Vista finally begins to sell under the Windows 7 name.

Microsoft is a very profitable company with large cash piles. They can easily handle even those kinds of failures that what would entirely devastate other companies. But to a company used to successful product launches, Vista's failure simply cannot feel very good.

The problem with selling proprietary software

All of this just exposes the major problem with proprietary software companies: In order to provide incentives for users to pay large license fees every couple of years the product must change significantly. Thus, old developments are not evolved and continuously improved. Instead, sometimes artificial breaks from the past are orchestrated, something entirely new is presented: "See? All shiny and new! Surely worth a couple hundred dollars to you, no?"

But with those artificial breaks come artificial incompatibilities and entirely unnecessary issues and problems that users have to deal with. Mostly, an entirely unnecessary amount of new and largely immature code enters the product. In essence: If you have something that tends to work reasonably well then you might just focus on gradual improvements. That would be the sensible choice. But of course, that doesn't give a good reason for consumers to spend their money. No bling, no flash. It has to be something new and different.

Contrast this to the development and release model in the GNU/Linux world. Take a popular distro like Ubuntu, for example. Every six months whatever nice improvements have been made in the last half year are packaged up into a new release and made available to the user community. The changes with each release tend to be relatively small and gradual, but over time, you get significant improvements in the overall feature set. Since from release to release the changes tend to be gradual, your software by and large just keeps running, and you don't have to re-learn how to do stuff.

This is a far more reasonable approach to evolving a complex computing platform. But you can only do this if you don't depend on license fees.

Another good reason for the FOSS model of software development. Specifically, it is a very good reason for me, the user to chose a free and opens source operating system, rather than a proprietary system where I know, the overriding and only concern for the vendor is its own bottom line.

Other related posts:
Half of Australians think it's OK to pirate Microsoft software
Windows 7 Starter: The anti-feature edition
How Microsoft wins against GNU/Linux in schools