Why Vista failed - suicide by not fearing Linux enough
Throughout XP's lifespan Linux was never a viable threat because the price wasn't different. XP was possibly the most pirated application I can think of and it's not an unreasonable thing to say that it actually wasn't difficult to pirate. It was all too easy to give it a "special" serial number and leave the rest to fate. Even SP2 didn't make life difficult. Even the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool was bipassed easily enough - meaning anyone who didn't want to pay for Windows didn't have to.
Linux wasn't a threat because a more familiar system was available for the same price - free. Open source applications and pirated software tend to cost the same amount. Microsoft prospered like never before and maintained their astonishingly comprehensive grasp on the operating system market. Clearly this wasn't good enough and they made sure that their next product (Longhorn as Vista was known back then) was going to be INVINCIBLE!!
When you take your product and enforce a price on it (by making it nigh-impossible to hack) then you need to be VERY confident that the world will be happy buying it.
But Microsoft didn't. They developed Vista to be overly secure and *very* difficult to crack and that artificially welded the price firmly to the product. If you wanted Vista you had to pay for it. Sure there were cracks but they were complicated and often beyond "average" users.
Microsoft clearly did the maths of: XP statistics * Vista price = Massive profit. However there's a massive proportion of users who like to pirate software and are very unlikely to spend large sums of money on it.
So putting a sensible pricing structure on the product would be the best action... No?
If you're concerned about the uptake of your "unhackable" product then maybe you'd do best to price it competatively to ensure that more users try it. Because once you've got a generation happy paying for your product then the battle is largely won.
Nope. Microsoft landed a massive price-tag on the Operating System and artificially increased the price of the product by offering a basic package (Vista Home Basic) so basic that no-one would actually buy it.
So I see it that Vista commited suicide.
Microsoft didn't fear Linux enough. XP won over Linux because it was more familiar for the same price but they just assumed that Vista would carry over in the same way but they assumed wrong. Linux isn't the unusable mess they seem to think it is and what Microsoft have done is forced a lot of people to reconsider their options for operating systems - and that's the worst thing they could do. I think Microsoft wrote Linux off as a non-viable solution for the masses and therefore felt that their pricing structure would force buyers into paying.
I think not. While people haven't moved to Linux yet they sure as hell haven't been moving to Vista either - so unless Microsoft has a secret operating system that they were developing on the side then people are going to eventually move from XP to *somewhere*.
As each day passes I half expect Microsoft to jump out and shout "SURPRISE!! LOL!! Vista was just a joke, here's the REAL thing we spent the better part of a decade working on
That hasn't happened yet though and I don't expect it will. Shame really, because I find it hard to believe it took that long to re-skin XP using WindowBlinds.
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