Vista: If Not Now, When?

Gartner Inc., the hotshot analyst firm, is advising its corporate clients to wait until 2008 to begin adopting Windows Vista. (That's presuming, of course, that it's shipped by then.)

The reason, according to analyst Mr. Michael Silver, is that Windows Vista will offer only "incremental, evolutionary improvements" over Windows XP and Windows 2000. If your company paid Gartner big bucks for that opinion, shame on you. I would have told you that for free.Vista is scheduled to ship by the end of 2006, but Mr. Silver advises waiting because you may simply not find Vista compelling enough to upgrade.

Translation: Getting there may turn out to not be worth the effort. If you're a small-office-home-office computer user you've got to lay out the money for the upgrade, maybe lay out the money for a new PC to run it on, disrupt your operation while you install it, and then go through the agony of learning how to use it -- or at least how to turn off enough of its "advanced features" to strip it down to something you know how to control.

The funny thing is, the process is exactly the same for even the biggest corporate customers, because in the end, the cost of the learning curve, the time and aggravation and lost productivity the desktop PC user puts into figuring out how to use it, far exceeds the cost of the software itself.

That's why this is deja vu all over again. I wish I could remember where I read it, but the number is stuck in my mind: Something like 40 percent of corporate desktops are still running Windows 2000. Even though Windows XP has been available since 2001.

Microsoft made nice about the Gartner pronouncement, calling it "balanced." But the company also stoutly maintained that Vista will be the "largest and fastest adoption in history of any OS we've shipped."

Hmmm. We're going to be hearing a lot about the history of Windows over the next week or so -- it's Windows' 20th birthday this Sunday. Looking back on that career, Windows 3.1 may be the record-holder: it sold 3.1 million copies in the first month it was released in 1992. Given the orders-of-magnitude increases in the number of PCs since then, Vista may sell more copies, but I'll bet it won't come close to breaking Windows 3.1's record on a percentage basis.

Mr. Silver (I always call Gartner analysts "Mr." -- they wear such sharp suits) has it pretty much right with his message that if Windows 2000 or Windows XP or even Windows 98 ain't broke for you, why fix it?