Microsoft has put 10,000 people to work for a period of five years spending roughly $10 Billion only on the payroll costs and has developed a product named Vista.
This gamble of Microsoft will debut today for Businesses and in January for consumers.
Will Vista be a success or Microsoft will have to think that they have flushed billions of dollars down the flush.
Since Bill Gates is retiring from Microsoft and will undertake philanthropy in 2008, experts say that this may be the last operating system from the Redmond giant.
The main threat to Microsoft is that they have developed Vista the traditional way that is they have bundled the package on a disk and customers will have to buy the disk and then will have to install it to their systems. On the other hand other software makers such as Google are creating software that you can directly download from the computer server.
The basic changes that Microsoft has brought about in Vista are added security and some desktop enhancers. All these upgrades can also be done in Windows XP using some third party software and applications (Many of them are free!). Why does Microsoft think that people will want to upgrade to Vista if all that Vista features can also be done on its predecessor XP?
If someone wants to install Vista on his computer that is presently running Windows XP then he will first spend some money to upgrade his computer and then will have to purchase the OS from a vendor. Since XP runs comfortably on even 128 MB RAM, Vista will need about 1GB of RAM for a smoother performance. Every customer will first have to think that is Vista worth spending so much on an old computer!
Moreover Vista is likely to face stiff competition form free Operating Systems such as Linux. To keep up in the race Microsoft will have to develop smaller upgrades every year.
Since the start of the Vista project Microsoft has had some problems. Firstly the code name of the new OS was Longhorn, the company tried to pioneer on a lot of fronts, trying to change the code language used to write the OS and fiddling with the basic file system that the software uses as foundation, not everything worked and after some years of development the company brought its aim down from the stars to the moon.
Microsoft has more than 500 early business customers for Vista and they would probably repent at least till the time Microsoft releases a service pack and patches some holes in the OS.
Still some hope for the company is the predictions of some analysts who believe that Vista will run on more than 90 million computers world wide by the end of next year. Well we will have to wait until next year to check that how many people try and convert to Vista. However what the OS’s fait might be it does not look like a product of 10,000 brilliant minds and some $10 billion in resources.
Via: topix
