Longhorn a tough sell?

[stoid]

I was reading a MacBytes C|net article about Sony wanting to make the iTunes-of-movie-downloads and ran across this article talking about Longhorn and why even once it's through development Microsoft may not be out of the water. Apple has updated their Mac OS almost annually and every time the users are salivating over it for months before it's release. Microsoft hasn't updated in over 4 years and their users are content to continue to use XP and simply not care. I guess that's what you get when you convince users that your product is good-enough, they feel it's good enough, and don't upgrade.

Link

Longhorn has already survived several major delays, intense scrutiny from the industry and a radical redesign of its features.

But the toughest test for Microsoft's next release of Windows is still to come: Will anyone buy it?

 

[MisterMe]

I was reading a MacBytes C|net article about Sony wanting to make the iTunes-of-movie-downloads and ran across this article talking about Longhorn and why even once it's through development Microsoft may not be out of the water. Apple has updated their Mac OS almost annually and every time the users are salivating over it for months before it's release. Microsoft hasn't updated in over 4 years and their users are content to continue to use XP and simply not care. I guess that's what you get when you convince users that your product is good-enough, they feel it's good enough, and don't upgrade.

Link

This is hardly a revelation. The last Windows release that made much a retail impact was Windows 95, possibly Windows 98. Windows XP owes its success to the OEM market. I expect Longhorn to be no different. It will overtake Windows XP because every vendor of Intel-based computers will switch to Longhorn.

 

[Savage Henry]

It will sell, primarily because MS will spend gazillions on publicity, praps getting the Pope to tapdance in stilettos on the moon, but I think it will suffer the kind of time-lag that OSX had upon the 10.0 release.

Longhorn may be technologically more advanced than it's previous incarnations, but I can't think your average user cares when they just want to surf the net, get emails and write letters ... stuff which they do quite adequately with broadband and old versions of Office.

Give it about 18months after full release and the Wintel hordes will start moving as their current PCs become knackered.

Interesting article though, thanks.

 

[Applespider]

There are some companies only now updating their PCs to XP from 2000 or even 9x. I can't see all of them jumping on the Longhorn wagon immediately.

As far as consumers go, I'd imagine most of them will wait til they get a new PC. I know I never updated a Windows OS on an existing PC. I survived on 95 and got 98 with a new PC. And I survived on 98 until I bought my PB.
A big part of the reason for not upgrading was the increased hardware requirements that would have required adding RAM, HD or upgrading the processor. That was too much hassle for me - and I figured I'd be cheaper buying an entirely new system in a year or two's time.

Tiger will be first OS that I buy and install on an older computer. I not only expect it to work on my existing hardware, I expect it to improve it from what I've read.

 

[stoid]

A big part of the reason for not upgrading was the increased hardware requirements that would have required adding RAM, HD or upgrading the processor. That was too much hassle for me - and I figured I'd be cheaper buying an entirely new system in a year or two's time.

Tiger will be first OS that I buy and install on an older computer. I not only expect it to work on my existing hardware, I expect it to improve it from what I've read.

Hrmmmm, add this to the if OSes were motor vehicles....carry the one...

If Windows was a car, it would have a huge gas tank that would last you for years and when you had to fill up again, the attendant would give you a confused and frustrated look, ask you at least 5 question that you couldn't even understand because they were too technical much less answer and tell you that to accept the new gas you had to take your car to a mechanic and get a new engine, new tires, and a new transmission installed, but it would probably be cheaper to just buy a whole new car.
If Mac OS X was a car, it would have a smaller tank that needed to be filled every 12-18 months, and when you went to the gas station the attendant would greet you with a friendly smile and after filling the car up it would run better faster, more efficient. Unfortunately though each time you filled up, you'd need a slightly biggest gas tank and if yours was too small you'd have to get a new car, though it'd take many years for your tank to be too small.

 

[edesignuk]

There are some companies only now updating their PCs to XP from 2000 or even 9x. I can't see all of them jumping on the Longhorn wagon immediately.

At my previous two workplaces (both LARGE investment banks) they were running NT4 up until the last year. Pretty much skipped 2000 all together apart from a few systems here and there. A full rollout is such a HUGE task it's not done lightly. With Longhorn supposedly being a move away from Windows versions of old this will only be made harder. It took long enough to test the several thousand apps that these kinds of companies use would be OK on XP (coming from NT4), never mind going to Longhorn with is supposed to be new from the gound up.

 

[DavidLeblond]

Well look at the big Longhorn features:

WinFS - Allows for Spotlight-esque searches... not only canned for the Longhorn release, now will also be available for Windows XP

Avalon - Woo now Longhorn will be able to start competing with OS X with their new Quartz Extreme-esque presentation engine... oh wait... thats also going to be available for Windows XP

Indigo - New messaging framework (I think... its hard to tell what "frameworks" in MS-Land do because all the documentation for them has been written by the marketing department)... also available for Windows XP

Why buy Longhorn when all the big features will be available for Windows XP. Thats like Apple updating Panther with Spotlight, Automator, XCode 2.0 et al and saying "But the interface for Tiger looks a bit prettier! Spend $129 on it!"

 

[Nickygoat]

If it has little heritage with previous Windows OSes they could promote it as "less bugs and virii than before" - at least for the 2 weeks it'll take before someone cracks into it

 

[AtHomeBoy_2000]

OS X for PC?

I know this has been mentioned before and i am not looking to spark a debate about whether it is possible or even smart for Apple to do this, but what if Apple went and made OS X available for PC before Microsoft released Longhorn? THat would put a HUGE dent in whatever marketshare Longhorn would have.

 

[DavidLeblond]

I know this has been mentioned before and i am not looking to spark a debate about whether it is possible or even smart for Apple to do this, but what if Apple went and made OS X available for PC before Microsoft released Longhorn? THat would put a HUGE dent in whatever marketshare Longhorn would have.

Won't ever happen, it isn't in Apple's best interest.

 

[BornAgainMac]

Consumers that buy a new PC after Long-in-the-Tooth-Horn will not be a big deal. It will be the corporations that will take years to migrate. It seems like the Micrsoft customer base really doesn't need anything better than XP. They will just use whatever O/S that is pre-installed on their new PC when they feel it is time to buy a new PC.

Windows real strength today is the apps that are available and not the operating system itself.

 

[stoid]

Won't ever happen, it isn't in Apple's best interest.

Exactly, while this move might undercut Microsoft's Longhorn, at least Longhorn will have some backward compatibility and OS X(86) would have zero. Therefore, it wouldn't sell all that well. At the same time, Apple makes much more profit on their hardware, so if Mac OS X was available for the dime-a-dozen Dell machines, not only would Apple lose their tight bond between hardware and software but the iPod switchers and the like would be less likely to buy the Apple hardware.

 

[Steven1621]

I recall the system requirements on longhorn to be somewhat significant compared to what most people are presently computing with. Very few people outside those that purchase new computers will be using longhorn when it comes out.

 

[aloofman]

At my previous two workplaces (both LARGE investment banks) they were running NT4 up until the last year. Pretty much skipped 2000 all together apart from a few systems here and there. A full rollout is such a HUGE task it's not done lightly. With Longhorn supposedly being a move away from Windows versions of old this will only be made harder. It took long enough to test the several thousand apps that these kinds of companies use would be OK on XP (coming from NT4), never mind going to Longhorn with is supposed to be new from the gound up.

It's such a huge task that some companies go out of their way to delay a systemwide OS switch for as long as possible. The company my father works for decided years ago that Windows 98 was their standard and was uninstalling the default OS on new PCs as early as last year to maintain that consistency. As you can imagine, that created its own headaches.

Even now, most Windows OS users are still using a version older than XP. It's hard to believe that Longhorn will be so amazing that it will do better than XP on that score. MS has put so much effort into convincing the masses that Windows meets all their needs that they have trouble convincing the average Windows user to upgrade an existing machine.

My guess is that eventually Microsoft will try to force existing Windows users to go to Longhorn. For all of MS's evils, they have a genuine problem with all the legacy issues they have. There are so many old Windows versions that they still have to support in various ways and it really drags them down. I predict that Microsoft will force the PC makers to adopt more proprietary technologies in an effort to get users to buy new hardware.