Vista is coming, but is it hasta la vista, baby?

By | December 12, 2006

I’m sure that tag line has been used before. Will Vista score big or drive people to Linux?

I have been a bit of a misoM$ist at times, but I noted this quote:

The report also says that 35 percent to 45 percent of new PCs that ship to enterprises in 2007 will run Vista. “Some thought [adoption] would move faster,” Gantz said. “But to me, that’s relatively quick.”

With most businesses replacing PCs soon, and most individual customers purchasing PCs like dishwashers these days, I don’t think Linux desktop will appear any time soon. Linux hasn’t really made any impression on the average consumer yet, and businesses all pay for large scale licensing schemes, so I’m pretty sure that Vista will be something of a qualified success.

It’s unlikely any time soon that Microsoft will be unseated as the king of the desktop, UNLESS they make a huge mis-step, and Linux is there to pick up the slack. This kind of thing has indeed happened before with M$, but is it likely to happen this time around? I doubt it. Now, M$ has become a multi-footed giant: Business, the Home, Gaming, Servers, etc. so it’s difficult to see them forsaking their lead any time soon.

Linux’s advantage is that it hasn’t reached the tipping point yet, the point at which the constant accumulation of little advantages becomes overwhelming. That, I would suggest, is just a matter of time, time which Linux can use to its advantage to develop the kind of consumer reliability, and ease of use, that we come to expect these days. The other OS now nipping at Windows is of course Apple!

This three-way battle of the OSes could in all likelihood just end in a whimper as everything converges on the Internet, anyway. In that situation, I don’t see M$ or Linux suffering as much as Apple. Hence perhaps Apple’s interest in the Entertainment market as an alternative to desktop? Well…