The prospects of Microsoft's operating system, Vista, appear fuzzy as customers head into the Christmas season on the back of a slowing global economy.
For one, the software giant is already talking of its seventh release - Windows 7 (public beta expected in early 2009) - hardly two years after the public launch of Vista in January 2007.
Vista was released more than five years after the introduction of XP - the longest time span between successive releases of Windows. Second, Microsoft's client revenue - most of it which comes from sales of Vista - grew a mere 2 per cent to $4.22 billion in the first quarter of financial year 2009.
This is cause for worry, given that it is the core of the company's business. Besides, it was the second recent quarter (out of three) that saw Vista sales grow sluggishly or shrink.
Vista's weak growth was in spite of the 10-12 per cent growth in shipments of personal computers (PCs). The sluggishness was attributed to flat PC sales in developed countries and zooming sales of low-cost PCs like netbooks.
Customers in developing countries are more likely to buy PCs with cheaper, basic versions of Vista installed. If they buy netbooks, they are likely to get Windows XP Home or Linux, which implies little or no revenue to the software maker. Microsoft, though, hopes Vista can rebound in the second quarter with 7-10 per cent growth during the traditionally strong holiday season.
It claims to have sold over 180 million licences of Windows Vista worldwide, with India adoption alone crossing over 2 million copies since the consumer launch in January 2007.
The biggest hurdle to Vista's adoption is that it's a memory-hogging operating system (OS). While Microsoft says it requires 500MB of memory to run a machine, user experience pegs it at closer to 1GB for it to work smoothly. Netbooks and other low-cost
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