A lot of eyes may be fixed on Windows 7, but Microsoft hasn’t given up on Vista just yet. An executive recently spoke out in defense of the operating system, saying that customers’ reactions are improving.
Perhaps people don’t dislike Vista; they just don’t know it well enough, Richard Francis, the general manager of Microsoft Asia Pacific’s Windows Client Group, seemed to imply. He told Ross O. Storey, “Windows Vista satisfaction is actually increasing over time — research tells us customer satisfaction levels increase among those who bought Windows Vista during just the last six months. This data also shows that favourability increases as people become more familiar with it.”
Francis then continued, “We are also on track to a faster rate of deployment in the enterprise compared to past releases including Windows XP and Windows 2000 during the same timeframe.”
Still, “you get used to it” isn’t the sort of slogan that any marketer would suggest, and there’s a potential problem with the deployment statistics. Francis stated that only 100 million or so Vista users have hit Microsoft Update, while closer to 180 million Vista licenses have been sold. So either Vista users are so far from being tech savvy that 44 percent of them don’t follow simple update protocols (and probably don’t have a clue about OS alternatives), or a lot are reverting to XP.
It’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft changes its tune when the release of Windows 7 draws closer.
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