Gartner: Ignore Vista until 2008

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And in the meantime???: Windows & related O/S pieces aren't the Microsoft cash cows they once were. MS Office is, responsible for ca. 1/3 of their profit. Despite this, they aren't going to ignore anything they can get from their long-term product. The time between Win98 (6/98) and XP (12/01) was too long (in their financial calendar, and anyone with a financial stake in Microsoft). So they released "pass the hat" versions: SE (6/99) and ME (12/2000). Add a couple of features found in popular shareware packages and *poof!*, they've got a new version of Windows with a small resource (time, people) investment. Anyone who purchases everything which appears on the shelf and any new PCs purchased during that time. (so much for the legal settlement regarding Microsoft's ability to stiff-arm PC vendors)

Now, we face a similar situation. Windows XP was generally made avaiable 12/31/2001. Vista, doomed to be released in '08, should require some interim hat passing. We've already seen a XP strategy of minimizing the number of flavors as much as humanly possible. We're now at: XP Embedded, XP Home Edition, XP Media Center, XP Professional, and XP Tablet.

When|How|what will the plate be passed around? You *know* it's going to happen.

And, as I've mentioned in other feedback sections, Microsoft has a *huge* problem right now in the corporate world: Win2K. There are several hundred thousand (yes, you read that correctly) licensed copies of Windows 2000 Professional sitting on a substantial number of corporate PCs and there is little, if any, motivation (or intention) to change. Win2K + Office 2K + Visual Studio 6, all, of course, with the appropriate SPs, are probably the most stable environment Microsoft has created (no jokes from the peanut gallery, please). These businesses have ASP running on IIS, the remainder of VS6 developing internal apps, users using Office 2K, and Win2K humming sweetly. The TCO is still dropping as a result of time.

This has got to be killing Microsoft Sales, probably second only to Microsoft Marketing in terms of internal power, but unless|until Microsoft finds a way to convince these people to budge, they (clients) have absolutely no need to upgrade and Microsoft has got to be chasing their tails because Win2K went completely out of service 6/30/05, after a couple of last-minute rollup SPs. Microsoft's trying. IE 7.0 won't work on anything less than XP and many other products will require an XP install for openers. I suppose they believe it'll eventually get to the holdouts because services on websites they want to interact with won't work with IE(5,6).

No matter what, this entire scenario has become as interesting as Sony's current DRM fiasco, although Sony's situation is short term. I love watching the corporate conflict.; Posted by: Mihi Nomen Est Posted on: 11/12/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use