Windows Vista information and thoughts

BusinessWeek estimates it took 10,000 employees about five years to ship Vista. That’s 50,000 employee years. They estimate about 10 billion in cost to develop the operating system.

But is the operating system something that is wanted by consumers in the first place? I don’t think so. As long as people can use the latest applications and play the latest games, do they really care about a different operating system?

I’m not sure why I’d want to upgrade from Windows XP Pro, to another platform where i get annoyed by security popups every 2 seconds. I’m not sure why I’d want to develop software for this operating system and learn an entirely new language, when I know I can use the old languages and it will work on all old and new versions of Windows.

I can’t see vista taking off and making its costs back. Surely it will make in the billions, but I think relatively it will fall flat on its face. I think Microsoft took too long to get it out the door.

What should they have done? They should have released smaller, incremental changes. End users don’t want to have to re-learn everything. They want small sets of new features. I’m anxious to see if Vista ever does overtake XP, like XP did 2000. I don’t think history will repeat itself though.