Click to Save up to $300/yr on callsScary news for Microsoft in HP's earnings call
HP never saw a "Vista moment at any time over the past year" declared HP CEO Mark Hurd in yesterday's earnings call. Think about what that means for HP, and what it means for Microsoft. As it turns out, it means essentially the same thing:
Microsoft's dominance of the PC industry may well be fading.
For Microsoft, this is a Very Bad Thing. For everyone else on the planet, it is a Very Good Thing.
Including HP. As CIO.com reports, HP's growth is increasingly coming from developing nations:
HP was happily announcing that revenue for its personal systems group has spiked to $10.1 billion; that's up 30 percent compared to fourth quarter a year ago. But that success sure isn't because businesses planned a Vista upgrade and refreshed systems at the same time.
On the contrary, Vista did not play into HP's sales uptick, Hurd declared. That uptick is all about sales in emerging markets including China, he says. In fact, HP says that revenue from Brazil, Russia, India and China increased 37 percent; it's now nearing 10 percent of HP's $104.3 billion in sales.
Think about that. These are markets that don't need Vista, that have no institutional memory of Windows (over the Mac or Linux). These are markets that are wide open for real competition (and real innovation).
Again, this is great news for every person on the planet...except Microsoft shareholders.
Matt Asay is general manager of the Americas and vice president of business development at Alfresco, and has nearly a decade of operational experience with commercial open source and regularly speaks and publishes on open-source business strategy. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
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At least in Brazil, the decision makers know Windows as well as anyone in the States. They didn't pay for it, mostly they pirated it, yes, but they do know Windows.
What I'm seeing is that, when MS tries to avoid piracy, forcing the world to go legal, the population in these countries can't afford to pay for the OS, so it's beginning to try Linux.
Government and education sectors lead in trying to be completely legal, so they're the first with big migrations to Linux. After them, the private sector (mostly in fear of legal/financial troubles) is experimenting.
Once the kids are used to see Linux in the school desktop, and the parents are used to work with it at the office, they become confident to deploy it at home, even against the zero cost that the pirated Windows has to them.
Customers win when there is more choice (within reason). They win when costs come down. They win when they, not the vendor, own their data.
The fact that Vista sucks doesn't mean Linux is going to get a boost. It means people will buy a blank system and throw their old XP disk in and use that. Chances are far greater that someone will install XP on their new machine than Linux if they choose to avoid Vista.
So while Microsoft takes it in the shorts for poor Vista sales, this in no way is going to break the dominance. Emerging countries like China sell Vista on the street corner for $1. Honestly, tell me if you lived there that you would install Linux over a $1 copy of Vista and lose out on all of the Windows software out there that is also being sold for $1 on the street corner?
I like your enthusiasm for Mac and Linux, but let's be real here...
But I store my data in OpenOffice and on the Alfresco content repository. Open source. Open standards. No lock-in.
And yes, people have always had choice, but let's be clear: when 95% of the market is eased into Windows, that's not real choice, and it impinges on the choices that everyone else makes. The kinds of OSes that apps support. The kind of browsers that web sites support.
We really are better off with even just a little bit of choice, because it forces application providers to not be lazy and to develop for more than Windows.
Also, how much computer experience does Ballamer have? I know Bill Gates had a lot, but I don't know about Ballamer.
Only 20 minutes into setting up my shiny new Vista system did I start noticing some very annoying issues. First, I had issues with Samba network drive connectivity, but I was able to resolve that problem. Ok. Then I find out the version of Outlook XP (2002) cannot keep saved passwords for accounts. I encountered this after having to re-enter my password every dam time I strated upo Outlook. I find out later that this is a known issue with Outlook 2002 you will have to upgrade to Office 2003 or higher. Ok.
The lastest issue was one that supirsed me the most. I had heard from various users about the copy files issue with Vista. That it was slow, that copying a slew of directories from one location to another did not work so well, and that the speed was terrible. Surely this was an issue to a few users. Right? Wrong. I finally understood what users were complaining about. If you have Vista, try copying a bunch of files to another network drive, or try copying some directories with new files over to another location containing directories with the same name. Ugh.
The sad thing is that MS was closing in on perfection with XP Pro. It was such a successful merge of stable NT core with the plug and play simplicity of 98. So what the hell is up with Vista?
I will say, I think some of the faults in Vista are attributed to the whole Linux/nix world nagging at MS about building more security into windows. The irony is that soem of the security alerts and prompts get so damn annoying. Please MS whatever you do dont listen to the Linux world in regards to building functional usability, especially in regards to the file system. Sure disable features that dont need to be on by default, but chill on all the damn prompts and the "supposed auto tuning etc". I hope the next Service pack fixes some of these issues because Im already about to re-install XP Pro.