Vista Bashing Now Has Economic Teeth

Just when you think that the Vista bashing is beginning to settle down, up pops more bad news for Microsoft and their controversial operating system.  But this time it is not the like it - hate it consumers who are mouthing off. This time it is a economic survey which indicates that Vista is not being welcomed with open arms by businesses. Even though we consumers would like to believe that Vista was made for our personal enjoyment at home, the real money is in the business sector. But according to a recent report by Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. which states:

The inescapable conclusion of our 2008 survey is that support for Vista has been battered across all enterprise sizes and corporate constituencies. As a consequence, the Vista cycle looks likely to be materially less robust than indicated in our prior survey. …

A year of overwhelmingly bad publicity, coupled with opportunities for continued XP “downgrades” or potentially skipping over Vista for Windows 7, look to have meaningfully eroded support for Vista and are likely to impair the product’s overall adoption. The Vista cycle looks more likely to track in line with the experience of XP than to fall somewhere between an XP-like and a larger Windows 95-like cycle as we previously expected, and which had been indicated by last year’s survey results. …

Concerns about the costs of a Vista rollout appear to be weighing most heavily on the enterprise cycle. In particular, respondents reported a substantial drop in their expectations of in-place upgrades, indicating a rise in their expectation of hardware-related costs associated with Vista deployments. These hardware requirements were the single largest negative factor affecting Vista adoption. Concerns about driver and application compatibilities, and implicitly the related costs in a rollout, were the second and third biggest negative factors, followed closely by Vista pricing itself as the fifth largest factor (behind performance). …

Despite the erosion in perceptions of Vista over the last year, it remains possible that MSFT could restore some of the luster to the Vista enterprise cycle. In particular, especially with the release of SP1 for Vista, the company has addressed a number of the performance and compatibility issues that were cited as among the biggest concerns restraining adoption. It is now critical for MSFT to inform and educate IT professionals involved in the Vista decision in order to reinvigorate enterprise interest in the OS. We believe that proactive, open and frank messaging and education on the part of MSFT could very well ameliorate some of the harm caused by negative publicity and performance to date. On the other hand, amid mounting evidence that the product’s reputation has been badly tarnished and that there are looming usability and satisfaction issues, we believe that continued assertions that everything is fine with Vista will not only fail to bolster the upgrade cycle but also could serve to damage management’s credibility and the interests of MSFT’s shareholders. …

So there you have it. An unfavorable economic forecast for the OS you either love or hate. Hopefully Windows 7 will have a better reception than its younger brother Vista has.

Maybe we should start a ‘I Love Windows 7′ campaign now! 

Comments welcome.

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