IF ITS name is anything to go by, Windows Vista should be something to behold. But computer users eager to get their hands on what has been called the most significant upgrade to Microsoft’s ubiquitous software will have to wait just a little longer to view it.
Last month Microsoft put back the launch of the successor to Windows XP from November this year to next January. But when Microsoft does finally hit the button on Vista, it will be making sure that everyone knows about it.
For, despite all the talk of the Xbox 360 video games console and MSN, its internet unit, Windows remains at the heart of Microsoft’s business. Twenty-one years after the operating system was launched, it forms the backbone of more than 90 per cent of the world’s computers. It accounted for 31 per cent of Microsoft’s revenues last year, 66 per cent of operating profits, and has helped to sustain the Seattle-based company as an entity worth $281 billion (£162 billion).
But the company’s core is under attack. Open-source developers, who work together and distribute their work free, are gaining increasing traction. Linux-based operating systems are increasingly seen as a viable alternative to Windows software.
Indeed, many public sector bodies now require or recommend that Linux-based systems are considered where new operating systems are being installed.
And there is Apple, of course. Some observers believe that Vista is being designed with the express intention of winning back market share lost to the i-franchise.
Open-source software is also offering a rival to Microsoft’s Office product, which includes Word and Excel, its wordprocessing and spreadsheet software. While Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder, insists that software is king and the desktop computer will be the centre of our digital universe, others are looking to the internet.
Google, the internet search group, bought control of Writely.com, an online word processor, last month. Documents saved on Writely’s servers are accessible from anywhere in the world. There are also online spreadsheets, calendars and places to store photographs.
With all these arm’s-length alternatives to Microsoft’s software, could users decide they don’t need a fancy front end to organise what few files they do have on their computer? David Weeks, Vista’s UK marketing manager, dismisses the idea. “People like to share, but they also want to own their content,” he says. “We’re hoarders.”
Windows Vista will be the first new Windows product in five years and the most visually enticing version yet, with impressive 3D and transparent graphics. It includes enhanced security features, addressing one of the major criticisms of Windows XP.
But Vista is about more than plugging security gaps and making users like the look of their screen.
As Bill Gates told visitors to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last January, the desktop PC looks set to become the entertainment hub. The growth in digital photography and the use of digital music players has increased dependence on home computers as an entertainment medium.
The rising penetration of high-speed internet has fuelled that growth, as users share pictures and files. High-definition video content will also become increasingly accessible, alongside robust demand for online services. At the centre of this hub, Gates hopes there will be a copy of Windows Vista.
Microsoft’s shareholders will be holding out for Vista ubiquity. Having traded at just shy of $60 in 2000, the share price has failed to challenge $30 in the past four years.
The launch of Vista will provide the platform from which the company can show off its internet strategy. At the heart of that is Windows Live, a homepage that users can configure to bring up their choice of content including news, information or e-mail.
Vista will process data at twice the speed of previous versions of Windows, increasing the capability for graphics and gaming.
Analysts seem confident, despite the competition, debates and, now, a two-month delay, that within a few years most computer users will be running Vista. Microsoft’s challenge will be to use that base to drive growth across its business.
Looking through windows
IF IT hadn’t been for a former soap marketer, the software that powers most desktop computers might never have been called Windows.
Microsoft’s developers had settled on the technically accurate Interface Manager. But the appointment of the company’s first marketing boss in 1983 dashed that idea. Rowland Hanson, who joined from Neutrogena, latched on to the overlapping “windows” on the screen, and the name was born.
Plans for the first edition of Windows were drawn up in 1983, but the product wasn’t launched for another two years. Between 1985 and 2000 the company released a new version of the operating system every two or three years. In 2001 it launched Windows XP, its eighth edition and the latest release. Plans to launch Vista, then codenamed Longhorn, in 2004 were pushed back, first to 2005 and then 2006. This month Microsoft said the consumer release of Vista would not happen until next January.
