Microsoft Is Writing Apple’s Ad Copy
It seems everyone these days is piling on the criticism of Microsoft and making outlandish claims about The Borg’s imminent demise. I won’t go so far as the headline-trolling Gartner conference and declare Windows to be collapsing, but I will say the news coming out about Redmond’s future product development has to be making Apple quite pleased.
Microsoft’s Windows OS holds a 90% market share of business and consumer desktops combined, we’re told, and it’s pretty clear there are too many Windows-centric enterprise legacy systems out there for that to change too dramatically in the near future. But in the consumer market we’ve already seeing a significant increase in the number of new OS X machines being sold in the past year or so. With all the bad press Vista has been getting and the news of what’s to come from Microsoft in the desktop OS business, I think a real sea change is coming in the home market.
We know already that Vista, despite all the marketing hype, offers only incremental differences from XP, along with all the performance-killing bloat you expect and deserve from a new Windows version. However, according to a CNET News.com post by Charles Cooper, the next version of Windows, dubbed Windows 7, will offer a “minor upgrade to Vista,” and the version after that, codenamed Singularity, “also is not that brand new Microsoft operating system.” So basically if you want a real upgrade from XP in terms of performance and features you should just sit tight for another six or seven years.
Or you could switch to Apple, of course.
In the consumer desktop market, excluding gamers and haxorz, what do people use their PC for: Sending e-mail, surfing the Web, downloading from iTunes, maybe storing their photos. Most people looking at buying a new or replacement PC just want a machine that’s easy to use and maintain, one that’s reasonably fast, reliable, and secure, and one that fits their budget. Based on new computer sales, it’s pretty clear Apple is doing a better job at meeting those criteria than its WinTel competitors. I can only imagine the forecast gets worse for Dell/HP/etc if the consumer gets wind of what’s ahead for the Windows platform: An endless cycle of expensive upgrades all for negligible improvements.
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