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Pent-Up Demand for Vista Apparently Still Pent-Up

by John Paczkowski
Posted on October 17, 2008 at 7:47 AM PT

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An interesting metric for you: Of the products listed on Amazon’s Top 10 Bestsellers in Computers & PC Hardware, five are Apple MacBooks. One is an ASUS Eee PC running Linux. One is a Samsung HDTV monitor. And the remaining three are netbook/mini laptops running Windows. Windows XP Home, that is. None run Vista. In fact, Microsoft’s next-generation OS doesn’t appear on the list until No. 25, and puts in just two more appearances after that in the top 50.

An anecdotal observation, to be sure. There are other online PC retailers. Still, Amazon (AMZN) is generally a pretty good barometer of consumer sentiment. Perhaps that sentiment will change with the debut of Windows 7, which, according to Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, is what Vista should have been. “[Windows 7] is Windows Vista, a lot better,” Ballmer said yesterday. “Windows Vista is good, Windows 7 is Windows Vista with cleanup in user interface [and] improvements in performance.”

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  • Nice find. Maybe not so anecdotal when you think of Apple's primary customer base: home users.

    Microsoft has to be quite close to panic mode.

    For people who think panic mode is an overstatement because MS can fall back on their lock of corporate earth: Wrong. MS wants it all. And they owe nothing less to their shareholders.

    They're under attack in the home market by Apple, and they don't have the products to fight back.

    They're under attack by Google, and their failed attempts to acquire Yahoo! wouldn't have helped anyway. They'd still be a distant second to Google's formidable arsenal in the cloud.

    MS is fighting a two-front war, not counting linux, and that's a lot of war for a company used to sitting back on its monopoly.
  • Eli Bensky
    Quoting Mr. Ballmer, "Perhaps that sentiment (re Vista) will change with the debut of Windows 7, which, according to Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, is what Vista should have been"

    Anything, including children's wooden blocks, would be better than Vista. Our version of Vista crashed after 6 whole weeks.

    I guess that it wasn't designed for complex operations like email, surfing the web and using Google.

    Whether Windows 7 is any good, I won't know since our next computers will be an Apples.

    If five out of ten of Amazon's best sellers in computers are Apples, maybe it's because Mr. Ballmer and the rest of Msoft are Apple's best salespeople.
  • Sam Harrison
    i have used vista since it came out, vista business edition, and it has performed flawlessly

    i have xp, vista business (own about 6 computers) and have used computers for 25 years now...all the operating systems and more

    vista isn't that bad, try the business edition
  • Sam, I'm sure there are many people happily using Vista. That's not really the story here.

    With the market share that MS enjoys the lopsided Amazon numbers as reported are quite remarkable.

    Let's forget about which OS is "better". Given these numbers which stock would you rather be holding? One that has leveled out and doesn't have many growth markets? Or the one with the hot products and a market share that's climbing rapidly?
  • I have not used the business edition. In a comparison of Vista with XP, performance issues aside, the Vista user interface still puzzles me -- it's not intuitive to me.
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About John

John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »

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