Windows Vista at 1 year: A computer maker's view

I've been working for a while on an upcoming story coinciding with Windows Vista's first year on the market, and I've talked with a variety of people who have been using and working with the Microsoft operating system in different ways.

One of the most interesting perspectives came from Jon Bach, president of Puget Systems, a company in Kent, Wash., that makes high-end custom computers. As a preview, I thought it would be worth sharing some excerpts from his comments ...


On the current demand for Windows XP vs. Windows Vista: "Today, we are seeing still slightly stronger Vista demand than XP, but it's pretty close, maybe 60 percent Vista, 40 percent XP. It was an interesting progression of events following the Vista release, because when Vista first came out, we naturally adopted it very quickly, everyone did, as the next prominent operating system. But we're a custom builder, so we wanted to continue to provide all options, so we kept XP around so that customers who weren't all that excited about upgrading had a choice. So we actually developed a little niche for ourselves there when all the big guys -- Dell, HP -- were going exclusively to Vista. We saw extra-strong XP sales during that time just because we were one of the few people still offering it as an option. But as soon as people realized that Vista had some maturity problems in the code, the big manufacturers promptly added it back. ... We're seeing, you could say 50-50, but it's a little bit swaying toward Vista."

On those 'maturity' problems in the Vista code: "We're definitely still seeing them. The biggest problem we're having is with stand-by -- getting computers to go into stand-by and to come out of stand-by. That's an especially large challenge for us just because we are a custom builder. We can't just qualify one set of hardware and then use it. It's different every single time. And so it's been pretty frustrating. ... We had a customer where it was a deal-breaker to not have stand-by, and it was a very high-end system, and he was very upset that stand-by wasn't working, and so we had to have this conversation of what's possible and what isn't, and how his configuration just was not very happy about going into stand-by with Vista. We actually ended up moving him to XP, and it was kind of a frustrating process for everyone, because to him, XP symbolized taking a step back or settling for old software. But really for him, it was the more appropriate choice, because he was looking for stability and things just working -- things you find in a mature product, not in a newer product."

On whether these kinds of problems are normal in the first year after a Windows release: "When XP came out ... I remember there was a certain level of problems. With XP it was the Windows 98 applications that would no longer work in XP, and so you had a lot of people frustrated with that, and eventually all the software manufacturers released updates and got everything working in XP, but that was different because that was something where Microsoft was changing the architecture and it was up to the software partners to stay on top of it and release updates. In this case (the stand-by issue) it's entirely within Microsoft's code -- that is where the problem lies. It has been frustrating, and I think it has been more rocky than in the past, just from the standpoint of Microsoft and what they're putting out. We have, at least, some hope on the horizon with Service Pack 1 coming out. One of the major things that Service Pack 1 is supposed to tackle is stand-by issues, and so we're hopeful to see some updates there."

source: blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com

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