Guy Kewney

Let’s make a resolution: let’s put some money in Microsoft’s pocket.

Specifically, let’s go out sometime between now and June and buy a copy of Windows XP Pro.

It’s insurance: it means that if we find ourselves stuck with a dead PC after June, we won’t have to use Vista unless we want to.

Vista isn’t quite as bad as it is painted. There’s a lot of ‘anti-hype’ about, and this is pretty standard when a new version of Windows comes out. People are familiar with Windows 95, so they don’t like Windows 2000 (W2K); people get familiar with W2K and regard XP as unstable; and finally, people are happy with XP, and find Vista confusing. It’s human nature to like what you are familiar with and to be suspicious of change ­ and quite a lot of anti-Vista comment really doesn’t amount to much more than this.

But beyond that, there is evidence which can’t be avoided.

Is it true, for example, that Microsoft deliberately put ‘Vista Ready’ stickers on new PCs which were not up to the job? If so, was this done to keep on the right side of Intel, which was getting snugger and snugger in bed with Apple at the time? I think the evidence, on balance, suggests that people were buying machines which would give them a bad Vista experience, certainly, and Microsoft can’t escape blame for that.

It’s certainly the case that Microsoft badly wanted Vista to be a success. Mainly, I think, it wanted to have the new package out there because it would be much harder to make illegal copies ­ again, the evidence is that this strategy to reduce piracy has been a success. Did this make Microsoft blind to serious problems with the rest of the Vista strategy? It’s clear, a year after the Vista launch, that the sceptics were correct.

When the people at the top of Microsoft are discovered to have been writing memos asking why there are so few device drivers after so much development time, we’re entitled to point to their public statements in the same months. Those public statements said “there will be drivers” ­ a statement they knew was wrong. A year on, there are still serious issues for people in running software they need on peripherals they spent money buying and those issues should be history.

I knew Microsoft was living in a state of denial a few months before the launch, when I sat through that famous pre-launch presentation, where senior execs explained their strategy:

“We will sell loads of Vista to corporate buyers, and then they’ll go home and they’ll want to run the same great software on their home machines, and that will boost sales,” they said. They knew, as well as I did, that this was fantasy.

Corporate sales have always lagged domestic sales, and company IT departments have been dragged into the new era specifically by the opposite trend: by senior execs who have the new software on their home machines, and want to run the same software at work. Heck, I know corporations still running Microsoft OS/2 and Windows NT4.

All this, and more, is public record stuff. Wishful thinking of that sort is heavily documented and cynical propaganda talking about the number of copies sold ­ as if the customers were given any choice of buying anything else by anybody except Dell impresses nobody except the Microsoft PR department.

What will happen, of course, is predictable. June will come, Microsoft will stop selling XP, and those who really can’t run Vista on their two-year-old PCs will get a new PC, and want XP on it. And the only copies available will be illegal pirate copies. So they’ll either buy “genuine official XP” off Ebay, or they’ll just use their original XP and not activate it. Either way, Microsoft will be able to stand up and say that there’s no market for XP.

So why don’t we prove them wrong?

Think of it as money spent on a spare tyre. You hope you’ll never need it, and you will try to avoid having to use it. And yes, it puts money in the bank accounts of people who probably don’t deserve it ­ but in the end, it will tell Microsoft, more clearly than any number of press articles, something terribly simple: “There’s still a market for XP. Please satisfy it.”

This article appeared in the May 2008 issue of PCW

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