If your reaction to all of the hype swirling around the launch of Windows Vista this week is less "Wow!" and more "Whoa! Enough already!" then 2007 could be a long year.
Microsoft plans to go all out this year, spending $500 million in 20 countries to market Vista, according to Advertising Age. (A Microsoft spokesperson refused to confirm that figure.)
In the next several months, Microsoft plans to place advertising in various forms of media totaling 6.6 billion impressions--enough ads, in theory, to hit every person on the planet. "I am sure we will be inundated by Vista ads, especially on the Web," said Chris Swenson, a software market analyst at the NPD Group.
The company's media-saturation strategy may seem like overkill, but as late as December, according to a Forrester Research survey, more than 60 percent of consumers had not even heard of Vista.
Evidently, Microsoft isn't looking to convince consumers that Vista is fun (as it did with the XBox) or sexy (as it has tried to do with its Zune music player) or even fresh (as it did 12 years ago with Windows 95). "In hindsight, Windows 95 was flaky, but there was so much pent-up demand, and Windows 95 was such a big improvement [over Windows 3.1] that it really was a paradigm shift," said Gartner analyst Michael Silver. "Today, you're more likely to see that sort of excitement over a cell phone."
How Will Buyers Get Vista?
Though Microsoft is placing high hopes on sales of downloaded copies of Vista and Office 2007 through its Windows Marketplace site, much of its marketing expenditures will benefit PC partners such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell. According to Microsoft's own figures, about 80 percent of of new Vista owners will get the operating system as preinstalled software when they buy new PCs. The rest are expected to buy Vista to upgrade or install themselves.
And while online sales and downloads continue to grow as a distribution model, most Vista sales will continue to occur through brick-and-mortar stores, according to Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder. That's because those environments tend to show off Vista's features to better effect than an online demo can.
"Consumers have to see Aero to desire Vista," Gownder wrote in a report released Monday, referring to Vista's glossy new user interface.
Vista's Biggest Foe: XP
Despite Microsoft's claim that Vista supports 30,000 devices, many components such as video cards, input devices, and printers that work fine on XP don't work on Vista, according to Silver. He suggested that updated software drivers for many of those older components might not be coming anytime soon.
Moreover, he noted, many of Vista's consumer features "are just catching up to Apple OS X." And he said that a true killer application for Vista--as Excel was for Windows 3.1 and as Internet Explorer was for earlier versions of Windows--has yet to emerge. Vista and Office 2007 are "not a 'better together' story," Silver said. "Office 2007 will run on XP fine."
Silver agreed with other analysts that--despite the trendiness of Ubuntu Linux, the competence of Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and the resurgence of the Macintosh platform--Vista's main competition is its own predecessor, Windows XP. Microsoft "has millions of people on XP that are happy with their computing experience," Swenson said. "They need to do everything possible to incent consumers to upgrade."
That endeavor will include talking up Vista's flashier features (like the Aero interface) and touting its under-the-hood improvements (such as improved security), without "badmouthing" XP, said Swenson.
How successful will Microsoft be? Early indications based on launch-week sales are mixed. Microsoft's traditional late-night launch of new Windows operating systems failed to draw a stampede of buyers this time around, according to most reports around the country.
At the same time, sales of Vista to businesses during December were just 3.7 percent below XP's first-month sales, said NPD's Swenson. "Given that Microsoft has spent little on advertising and promotion yet, I think it's done well," he said. "I am fully confident that, once Microsoft's advertising and marketing machine kicks in, you will see Vista sales either match or eclipse XP levels."
Success in the Long Run
Silver predicted that only 12 percent of computers in use worldwide by year's end will be running Vista, even though nearly three-quarters of consumer PCs will ship this year with the new OS. But he also predicted that consumer usage of Vista will eclipse Windows XP by 2009, when Vista will be running on 55 percent of nonbusiness PCs worldwide. In the United States, Forrester said, Vista should overtake XP in 2009, as well.
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