You’d think a company that owns more than 90% of its primary market would understand how to sell its products and services. After all, isn’t that how they made it to the top?

Well, it appears Microsoft hasn’t found the going terribly easy when it comes to convincing individuals and companies that Windows Vista is impressive enough to make them upgrade. As it stands, many still prefer XP, which has been tested and proven for seven years and has, after service packs and other fixes, proven to be fairly secure (with proper malware protection installed) and reliable.

In contrast, Vista has been shown to be a bloated, rather buggy beast, with lots and lots of driver conflicts. While the bugs and driver issues are supposedly largely resolved, most older PCs will have difficulty meeting its extraordinary resource requirements without costly upgrades — or replacement. Worse, some of the interface changes, which seem arbitrary rather than logical, will likely require retraining.

So businesses are showing an understandable reluctance to migrate until absolutely necessary, and that might be years away, since it’s still easy to roll back the operating system on new PCs to XP.

As far as Vista’s successor is concerned, well Windows 7 will still be largely based on the same code base, so it’ll be just as bloated, if not more so, assuming Microsoft wants to pour lots more features into it. That will probably be a given, since they want to entice people to upgrade. That is, after all, their way of doing business.

That takes us to Microsoft’s questionable efforts to boost the image, and, of course, the adoption rate for Vista.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

This article was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 6:30 PM and is filed under News and tagged with: Apple, Bill Gates, downgrade, HDTV, Industry Analyst, Iphone, Mac, Mac Os, Mac Os X, Mac Sales, Microsoft, Night Owl, NPD, sales prospects, Security Updates, Vista, Wall Street, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Xp, XP.