Windows Vista® is an operating system released on January 2007 in several variations by Microsoft for use on personal computers. The release of Windows Vista came more than five years after the introduction of its predecessor, Windows XP. Windows Vista includes many changes and new features: updated graphical user interface and visual style (Aero), multimedia tools including Windows DVD Maker, and redesigned networking, audio, print, and display subsystems.
Unfortunately, adoption of Windows Vista was limited compared with other operating systems released from Microsoft. To understand better why this operating system was not successful as the previous windows versions, we are going to list the technical and marketing issues. Before start analyzing the technical reasons, i should clarify something: an operating system is a really complex piece of software that many developers work on it. Mistakes are easy and debugging hard. So let's see the biggest technical problems:
1) Increased code size compared with Windows XP: The vista was really huge project and maintaining the code is really hard. Vista has over 50 million lines of code. In contrast, XP had 40 million when it was released. At first glance these are huge numbers. On the other hand, Mac OS X 10.4 has 86 Million lines of code [1,2]. Thus, the problem here is the architecture and the "Spaghetti" source code. Windows 7 later decreased the code side down to 40M [3].
3) Missing drivers. It seems incredible that some of the Windows drivers that worked with XP did not necessarily work with Vista. Even some drivers for Nvidia graphic cards were not available.
5) Low Performance: This was the biggest technical issue. The performance was unacceptable in many aspects. The memory consumption it was huge even after clean boot. Moreover, most of the games had a performance hit compared with the execution in the Windows.
Next we are going to discuss the Marketing issues related with the launch of Windows Vista.
6) Delay of the release: Initial release date was mid-end of 2006. Unfortunately, Vista released on January of 2007. 7) Decoupling Office and Windows. Microsoft usually ships these products together. For example . For example, Microsoft used Office to propose the application transition from 16-bit to 32-bit software. Meanwhile, Windows 95 helped drive up Office penetration. In contrast, Microsoft should have been able to do something similar with Office 2007 and Windows Vista. They did nothing about this.
8) Apple strikes back: Apple used the "I’m a Mac" ads to successfully driven the perception that Windows Vista is buggy, boring, and difficult to use.
9) Market confusion: too many versions of the OS for sale. There are six different versions [5]:
- Windows Vista Starter
- Windows Vista Home Basic
- Windows Vista Home Premium
- Windows Vista Business
- Windows Vista Enterprise
- Windows Vista Ultimate
10) The "Vista Capable" sticker mess: Microsoft let PC makers to add a sticker on Windows XP machines that seemed to say they were good to go for Vista, when all they could handle was the basic version that lacked the Aero interface.
11) The rise of netbooks: Again here is more performance issue. Netbooks don't have the power and the memory to run Vista.
Summary
Note: Microsoft, Windows Vista, and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
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