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Microsoft seeks fresh vista for Vista
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Buffing it up
The campaign to buff Vista’s image is already underway on several of Microsoft’s Windows Web pages. At “Discover Windows Vista: Why now?” the company acknowledges the problems Vista has had, but says improvements have been made to the operating system.
“We know a few of you were disappointed by your early encounter,” the company says on the site. “Printers didn't work. Games felt sluggish. You told us — loudly at times — that the latest Windows wasn't always living up to your high expectations for a Microsoft product. Well, we've been taking notes and addressing issues.”
Microsoft says that Vista “now supports 77,000 printers, cameras, speakers and other devices and components—more than double the number supported at launch.”
Last February, the company released Service Pack 1, a free download of software improvements for Vista that has helped with several issues, including the speed at which files are copied, Microsoft said.
The ‘Mojave’ experiment
Earlier this month in San Francisco, Microsoft had a firm conduct and film interviews with 120 Windows XP, Windows 2000, Mac and Linux users who had negative perceptions about Vista, and who weren't familiar with it. The users were given a 10-minute demonstration on a computer of what was purported to be the next version of Windows, and told it was called “Mojave.”
In fact, it was Vista, and the reactions to it were very favorable, Bill Veghte, Microsoft senior vice president, said last week at the company’s financial analyst meeting.
“Actually, it’s totally different than I heard it would be like,” “I’m impressed,” and “It looks awesome, easy,” were among the comments made about Vista, Microsoft said. The company discusses the effort on its Windows Vista blog posted July 29.
“Perception versus reality, that’s a conversation that we’ve got to go have with our customers,” Veghte said at the meeting.
Whether it’s too late to have that conversation is hard to tell. Some consumers and businesses are opting to stay with Windows XP until Windows 7 is released. Microsoft said last week it has sold more than 180 million copies of Vista.
However, competitors are nibbling at Windows’ share of the operating system market. In June, Windows had 90.89 percent of the market, compared to 93.06 percent in August 2007, according to Net Applications. Apple’s Mac OS was at 7.94 percent, up from 6.18 percent for the same period, while the Linux OS was at four-fifths of a percent, up from just under a half-percent last August.
“It’s obviously been a bumpy road down the Vista path, but Microsoft has put a lot of effort into it,” said Stephen DeWitt, a senior vice president at HP. “It’s a very stable operating system. We’re certainly seeing a lot of happy customers” who are using it.
Small and large businesses have been slow to shift to Vista because of the costs of doing so, from training to new software and equipment.
Resource requirements
On its site, Microsoft says the most minimal version of Vista, Home Basic, needs to run on a computer with a 1-GHz processor, 512 megabytes of memory and a 20-gigabyte hard drive, with at least 15GB of available space for the operating system. Other versions of Vista require a 1GHz processor, 1GB of memory and a 40GB-hard drive, with at least 15GB of space available.
But in order to get Vista to run more smoothly, many users have found the processor and memory requirements to be at least twice what Microsoft recommends.
“If a person is looking to buy a new computer, and they’re willing to pay for the kind of hardware that running Vista will require, they’ll like Vista,” said Cherry of Directions on Microsoft.
“If they want to upgrade an existing PC to Vista, they probably won’t like Vista. Their machine is probably underpowered.”
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