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While
I am willing to give Billy and The Kids credit for helping the PC crowd
out of the dark ages of the mid 90's with their operating systems and
software, I have to point out that, in all honesty, many technology
consumers are pretty fed up with having to purchase new computers
and/or peripherals, or drop big patch/fix bucks, every time Microsoft
oozes a new "Stealth Beta Product" onto the market.
In a recent blog post, Yves Roumazeilles , quotes Steve Ballmer's (Microsoft) perspective that sales of Vista are "not reaching projections due to piracy." Yves makes the point that maybe the horrendous cost of Vista is more responsible than piracy. How can we not agree with this perspective? While I agree with Yves, I also firnly believe that Microsoft has slipped up and fallen seriously short of that thin red line called business value in the business technology acquisitions arena. Bill... Maybe it's time you and the gang just kinda got with the "scarce revenue meets genuine value" program.
Let's think about this from a business technology acquisition perspective, shall we? Just what is the genuinely useful improvement in functionality in the entire range of MS products over the past three years? Maybe 15%? 20%? Precisely what business benefit will the average computer technology consumer genuinely receive from Vista? Other than creating unnecessary hidden business technology support expenses (or increased consumer technology costs) what functionality does Vista deliver for us that XP won't? (And don't get in the habit of confusing whiz-bang with useful functionality.)
Here's a surprise Microsoft: Please accept my apologies but, in my experience, business technology consumers that have a serious software asset management or technology asset management program in place do not purchase your new products simply because you tell them to. Smart businesses wait until you have worked a majority of the bugs out--say in year two or three after release...or until they determine that the improved functionality--actually useful functionality--is worth the investment.
Money's tight, Microsoft. Out here in the real world of "We're-Not--All--Billionaires" we have to actually make business technology purchases based on how they'll impact our own bottom lines--not how they'll impact yours!
While Yves is correct in his observations – Many of us will not purchase an overly priced product that has to be patched and fixed right out of the box – I’ll also add that one of the so-called benefits of Vista is supposed to be its level of anti-piracy security.
So a significant portion of the Vista mystique links directly to the software industry and their friends investing a great deal of our money and their time inventing, playing, and obscurring the highly lucrative anti-piracy shell game. These folks seem to have virtually everyone conned into believing that the fate of the free world hangs in the balance due to software piracy (and music piracy) and that their funded piracy statistics are the Gospel According To (pick a name). Their efforts are so effective that everyone from Santa to our elected legislators are quoting these figures as if they were a perfect rendition of reality. Guess what? The figures are not particularly statistically accurate.
In other words: Wake up, Steve, Billy, and The Kids. Sales are not up to your WAG expectations because many of us – the prospective consumers – are not all that impressed with your idea of the product value. While you might try and continue forcing new systems purchases (from the office supply and tech superstores) to include Vista, people are beginning to "Just say no" and simply move on to a hardware provider that supplies XP or even--foresooth!--Apple products. At least we all have a general idea of the problems we'll encounter with XP... Well... Kinda...
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