The Arrogance Of Multi-nationals

What's the deal between Windows XP and Vista? Where do they stand in comparison to each other these days? Is one really better than the other? Any information you have would be great!

A:
It's interesting that you ask this, because just last week, I came across an article online that talked all about this. I figured a lot of you would be interested in hearing about it, so when I saw this question in my e-mail, I had to run it right away. I hope this will give you a good idea of what's been going on between Windows XP and Windows Vista in the last few months. Let's check it out!

To begin, basically what I found was some new tests were done on both XP and Vista and they revealed that XP, along with its new Service Pack 3 (beta version), has twice the performance ratings of Vista. And that's even with Vista's beta Service Pack 1 as well. That's pretty intense, isn't it?! Now, the full version of Vista's SP1 is supposed to be released early next year (2008), but the beta version was still tested and it didn't really do much to outshine its predecessor.

So, what exactly did the tests find? Well, for one, Vista, with and without its SP1, performed much slower than Windows XP. It took the Vista operating system 80 seconds to complete the test, while it only took XP 35. Like I said before, Vista was tested both with and without the Service Pack and that brought up some interesting results as well. With the SP1, Vista's performance increased less than two percent and that was rated next to XP's improvement of 10 percent with its SP3. Wow!

Unfortunately, if the Vista SP1 does not improve significantly, that could lead to another huge setback for the Vista operating system. Several businesses and individuals are waiting for the SP1 to be released before they make the switch over to Vista. As of right now, only 13 percent of businesses have already started using Vista and it doesn't look like that number will change much, unless the SP1 makes some big changes. According to Microsoft, the service packs are "still in development" though, so hopefully that will help Vista in the long run. "It has always been our goal to deliver service packs that meet the full spectrum of customer needs," a Microsoft spokesperson said. Let's hope they do!

The article also went over how Microsoft feels about the initial release of Vista, which occurred almost one year ago. According to Microsoft's corporate vice president Mike Sievert, the launch of Vista did not go as well as they thought it would. "Frankly, the world wasn't 100 percent ready for Windows Vista." And that may be true, but it doesn't seem like Microsoft really did enough to inform the users about the new features and benefits of Vista. Windows Vista comes with a lot of complex features and Microsoft didn't really educate the world about them. NPD analyst Chris Swenson said that Microsoft should have done some more advertising for Vista when it first came out through TV, radio and print ads. The amount of advertising done for Vista rated poorly against what was done for Windows XP.

Maybe we're all just used to XP, but the sales show it's much more popular than Vista as well. During the first six months of retail sales, Vista fell 59.7 percent below what XP sold when it was first released. That's a huge difference! PC manufacturers are also still selling XP computers, because the demand for them is so high. Microsoft set a deadline of January 31, 2008 for all XP sales to end, but they have been forced to extend that until June 2008, because they are still very popular among users. According to Microsoft, 88 million copies of Vista have been sold, but that still doesn't stack up to the numbers XP has brought in.

So, as you can see, Windows Vista is having a hard time getting past the craze of Windows XP, but hopefully with some additional updates and changes, it will be a top notch operating system one day as well. We can only hope!