Microsoft Opens The Door to Linux?

Implications: The “success” of Vista seems largely tied to the fact it is the default OS on new PCs, particularly for consumers.  Enterprise users have not generally adopted Vista and at this point one must question whether Vista will ever be adopted by enterprises.  Unless Microsoft provides an enterprise-friendly OS in the next year or so, they may start losing the desktop market.

Analysis:

When Vista first shipped it was accompanied by both the usual hype and list of adoption issues.  The prevailing wisdom then was that, as with any new OS, the issues would get resolved during the succeeding months and in a year or so Vista would start being adopted by enterprises.  It’s now a year later, and the issues don’t seem to have been resolved.  The release of Vista SP1 may resolve some issues, but as its release date draws closer and more testing is done, it is becoming increasingly apparent that SP1 may not help much.

Vista continues to have performance issues.  The release of XP SP3 has further extended XP’s performance edge over Vista.  This essentially negates any chance of putting Vista on older PCs, and thus ensures the cost of upgrading to Vista includes the cost of upgrading to newer PCs, and those PCs must have mid- to high-level hardware.

Vista continues to have some compatibility issues.  Although the last year has seen many hardware and software vendors release new versions of their products that are compatible with Vista, this adds the cost of requiring upgrades to new hardware and software.

Perhaps most damning, Vista continues to have reliability problems.  These include difficulties recognizing enterprise domains and networks, freezing at random times, and the inability to shut down cleanly.  Another issue is the time Vista requires to “sleep” a laptop.  Laptop users for the most part are not patient people.  They close the lid of their laptop, give it a couple of seconds to sleep, and then carry it away.  Vista frequently requires 2-3 minutes of frantic disk activity before the system finally sleeps.  Few laptop users are going to wait this long, which means the laptop will be getting stuffed into a bag and carried away while the disk is still active.  This will inevitably lead to a high number of disk failures.  Such failures may be covered under warranty, but they all represent lost time from both the IT department and the user, lost data, and general user dissatisfaction. 

At this point many (most?) CIOs seem to have decided to remain on XP for the foreseeable future.  Most CIOs were planning to use 2007 as a year of testing Vista, followed by the release of SP1, and then a rollout of Vista in enterprises in 2008 and 2009.  Such plans now have been postponed and XP appears to be the OS of choice for the next 2-3 years.

The choice in 2008 is between an aging but functional XP, a broken Vista, and not-ready-for-prime-time Red Hat or SuSE Linux, with Apple’s Leopard a dark horse.  This makes it easy to choose XP.  If Microsoft does not fix the issues with Vista by 2010 the choice will be between an obsolete XP, a broken Vista, and updated versions of Red Hat and SuSE Linux, with Leopard perhaps not such a dark horse.  That’s a harder choice to make, but it’s one that opens the door to a new OS in enterprises.  If Microsoft isn’t able to make Vista a solid enterprise choice by 2010, they may well wake up in 2012 and discover they’ve lost the desktop market.