We've just done a Vista straw poll of some 300 clients and suppliers worldwide ... because back in November last year we were gearing up for Vista and were all ready and waiting to buy a raft of Vista PCs running Office 2007.
We mailed 1,000 contacts in November discussing the likely impact of Vista and O'07 on business and future communications. The replies at the time were somewhat muted. Some people even wrote back asking what Vista was and we had to point them in the right direction. Some knew about it but weren't enthusiastic. Some said they planned to be early adopters, mainly because they liked new IT or because the time was right for for them in the upgrade cycle.
Come January, we held off buying as we were waiting for PC manufacturers to spec out Vista machines.
We waited.
Eventually Dell and others started to offer requisite bits of kit, but the specs looked a bit feeble and problems with video drivers made made it sensible to wait a bit longer.
So we waited some more.
By then, the web was on fire with bad news Vista stories: hardware issues, drivers, resource demands, lack of compatibility, etc, etc, etc. It made for torrid reading.
We waited some more.
Blogs were bogged down with more Vista woes. Former pugilists from the Windows' corner started saying that they were giving up on Vista. Chris Pirillo, for one, said he was "upgrading" back to XP. A writer for one of the Windows mags decided that his trial run with a Mac was too enjoyable by half and announced that he was keeping the MacBook Pro as a long-term replacement for Windows.
Things, for Vista, were not looking good.
So this week we polled out to 300 people around the world to find out how many of them (in large and medium sized companies, as well as a smattering of private individuals) had switched to Vista and O'07.
The answer?
You want to know?
None. Not one. Not a single person. Not a sniff of a bite. Not even the people who had said they were planing on being early adopters had bought Vista. Seems everyone else, like us, got cold feet and held off from buying Vista.
So where are the 20 million users that MS claim have bought Vista? Seems a bit strange to me.
Interestingly, the only reports we got of people buying new kit, were people buying Macs. That's right: people who were hanging on for Vista have ditched their PCs entirely and bought Macs.
Now there's a thought for Bill Gates to ponder.
Is Vista Microsoft's very own plague?
Now that Macs can run Windows - even Vista thanks to the latest release of Boot Camp - it seems that people can have the best of both worlds: Mac for sheer pleasure and productivity; Windows for those business apps that only run in Windows.
Gets a bit expensive having to buy two OS's, but it sure is a mighty fine way for Apple to seduce people into trying their kit out. In the past, buying an Apple meant hanging out in a unknown and unreachable wilderness. But now you can buy Mac hardware and still have the link back to Windows if you need it. Ingenuous.
You can, it seems, really and truly have the best of both worlds. Hard for MS to argue that two worlds aren't better than one.
I must say Apple have done a great job: first in switching to Intel processors and then in marketing itself into a position where it is seen as IT-candy. It has also been helped by MS seemingly making a hash of Vista.
Or are we all just getting caught up in Mac-euphoria?
We mailed 1,000 contacts in November discussing the likely impact of Vista and O'07 on business and future communications. The replies at the time were somewhat muted. Some people even wrote back asking what Vista was and we had to point them in the right direction. Some knew about it but weren't enthusiastic. Some said they planned to be early adopters, mainly because they liked new IT or because the time was right for for them in the upgrade cycle.
Come January, we held off buying as we were waiting for PC manufacturers to spec out Vista machines.
We waited.
Eventually Dell and others started to offer requisite bits of kit, but the specs looked a bit feeble and problems with video drivers made made it sensible to wait a bit longer.
So we waited some more.
By then, the web was on fire with bad news Vista stories: hardware issues, drivers, resource demands, lack of compatibility, etc, etc, etc. It made for torrid reading.
We waited some more.
Blogs were bogged down with more Vista woes. Former pugilists from the Windows' corner started saying that they were giving up on Vista. Chris Pirillo, for one, said he was "upgrading" back to XP. A writer for one of the Windows mags decided that his trial run with a Mac was too enjoyable by half and announced that he was keeping the MacBook Pro as a long-term replacement for Windows.
Things, for Vista, were not looking good.
So this week we polled out to 300 people around the world to find out how many of them (in large and medium sized companies, as well as a smattering of private individuals) had switched to Vista and O'07.
The answer?
You want to know?
None. Not one. Not a single person. Not a sniff of a bite. Not even the people who had said they were planing on being early adopters had bought Vista. Seems everyone else, like us, got cold feet and held off from buying Vista.
So where are the 20 million users that MS claim have bought Vista? Seems a bit strange to me.
Interestingly, the only reports we got of people buying new kit, were people buying Macs. That's right: people who were hanging on for Vista have ditched their PCs entirely and bought Macs.
Now there's a thought for Bill Gates to ponder.
Is Vista Microsoft's very own plague?
Now that Macs can run Windows - even Vista thanks to the latest release of Boot Camp - it seems that people can have the best of both worlds: Mac for sheer pleasure and productivity; Windows for those business apps that only run in Windows.
Gets a bit expensive having to buy two OS's, but it sure is a mighty fine way for Apple to seduce people into trying their kit out. In the past, buying an Apple meant hanging out in a unknown and unreachable wilderness. But now you can buy Mac hardware and still have the link back to Windows if you need it. Ingenuous.
You can, it seems, really and truly have the best of both worlds. Hard for MS to argue that two worlds aren't better than one.
I must say Apple have done a great job: first in switching to Intel processors and then in marketing itself into a position where it is seen as IT-candy. It has also been helped by MS seemingly making a hash of Vista.
Or are we all just getting caught up in Mac-euphoria?
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1 COMMENTS:
The EFL world tends to be (a) very conservative (read old fashioned) and (b) run by academics who don't generally give a fiddle for technology. We ahve just bought and intalled 22 PCs all running Vista Business edition and Ofice 2007 Standard and I hav eto say it is excellent. I would have thought out of a world population of billions to is quite a fair estimate to say 20m are using Vista - in fact I would have thought that would be a minimum.
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