Interesting comment in response to Darren Waters’s post about Windows 7.

I would hesitate to call Vista a failure. A lot has been made of a perceived poor uptake by businesses but it’s worth pointing out that in early 2005 – four years or so into XP’s lifecycle – only 40% of companies were running it, the majority of the rest were using 98, 2000 or NT. In it’s first year XP was only installed on 10%.

Personally I think the hype around Vista has created a perception that isn’t supported by reality – it is selling well both to individuals and customers and it’s actually a pretty good OS. Businesses won’t move to Vista until there’s a compelling reason to do so, which was the same for XP.

Perhaps Vista can be considered a victim of XP’s success rather than a failure in its own right?

Darren wrote:

the biggest question about this public demo of Windows 7 is: what harm will its promise do to sales of Vista?

I just received an interesting note about Windows 7 from the Microsoft PR team. In it, it states: “Microsoft absolutely recommends customers deploy Windows Vista today.”

In other words, Microsoft are telling XP customers not to wait for Windows 7 but to grab Vista now.

Despite issuing more 140 million licenses for Vista worldwide, it’s seen by many as a failure.