Windows Vista Falls Short - SP1 to the Rescue?

On the background of a limp Wow marketing campaign, despite the $500 million Microsoft poured into its initial attempt of converging users to its latest operating system, Windows Vista proved impotent in the first year since RTM. The Redmond company released Vista to manufacturing in November 2006, and to Software Assurance customers via Volume Licensing. Then in January 2007, the operating system hit the shelves. With every stage in the product's evolution, Vista managed to fall short of the Wow. This is also the conclusion of analysts from Gartner and Decisions on Microsoft, following Vista's first year after RTM.

Although Microsoft has applauded shipping in excess of 88 million licenses of Vista to its channel partners worldwide, the analysts' perspective is that the platform failed to meet expectations. Back on January 30, 2007, David Mitchell Smith, VP and Gartner Fellow asked: "Windows Vista - (too) great expectations?". 10 months later, Michael Silver, also a Gartner analyst answered yes.

"The uptake is much lower than expected. Organizations really seem to be way behind where they said they would be last year. [Microsoft] overestimated their vendors' abilities to get Vista-supported versions of their applications done, they underestimated the difficulty of moving to Vista, and they overestimated the value of Vista. It's just a much slower deployment overall. Now we're hearing a lot of folks talking about late 2008, early 2009. Before, they'd been saying late 2007, early 2008", Silver revealed as cited by ComputerWorld.

The fact of the matter is that a luxuriant variety of factors contributed to Vista's mediocre performance. Everything from incompatibility, lack of device and software support, poor reliability and performance, and hardware demands impacted the operating system's uptake. Microsoft is currently softening the rough edges of the platform, and is preparing the first service pack for 2008. But the proximity of the service pack could also hurt Vista adoption. "I don't see anyone rushing out to do the upgrade, especially now that SP1 is on the immediate horizon," commented Michael Cherry, an analyst at Decisions on Microsoft.