Windows 7: Recognizing Vista’s Brand Issue
View Comments Published by cory January 10th, 2009 in Brand Strategy, Windows 7.
Windows 7 is launching in Beta and not soon enough. Generally, Vista was a bad launch in that it was years late, obsoleted in-market PC’s, and wasn’t well adopted. Honestly, Vista gets positive impressions from users that have done the switch, but the company struggled with getting demand for its system to make the switch. The passion to switch to Microsoft products back in the early 90’s was based on ubiquitous backward compatibility has been lost to incrementalism and a heavy user belief that everybody buys a new PC every 2 years.
In areas of tech equipment, I’ve tried to buy high end and less frequently and with Apple, that has paid off because OS X is improved frequently in small doses. With Microsoft, big steps are taken in 2-4 year steps with the belief that the 2-4 year old PC isn’t worth keeping. That ignores a user reality, even in companies, that the older PC gets downgraded to a kid or a new employee (sad, but true). Microsoft would do well to take heed to this trend as it isn’t about losing out on new upgrade revenues, but more about the expanding use of PC’s.
Instead of driving new PC pricing into the ground to further substantiate throwing away the slightly older, but still usable machine, software and hardware providers should embrace this new market with replacement parts, service programs and software support (for a value fee).
With everyone hoping to get better value, maybe companies in the PC and software markets will embrace a reality for 2009 and 2010 that the new PC and software market are going to be traded off with extending the life of the equipment we’ve already got and wished we didn’t have to upgrade to use. This is blog post is written from a focus group of one. I bought a Dell Precision 670 in 2005 and now have a graphics card that isn’t compatible with Vista, and won’t ever be (thanks, Adaptec). Upgrading now is another $500 or I just never do it. Bummer, its a really good machine that has been forced to the dump bin years earlier than needed.
Updated thought: Wouldn’t it be cool if Microsoft, Apple, or some open sourcer figured out an lightweight way to make a media box that used an old PC?