Last year I was meeting with the CEO of a PC company who offered to
give me a demo of his company's gorgeous new top-of- the-line notebook,
a machine that cost several thousand dollars and came loaded with Windows Vista, the latest version of Microsoft's
operating system. He flipped open the laptop, pressed the power button,
and … nothing. We waited. And waited. It was excruciating. He tried
control-alt-delete. He tried holding down the power button. Finally he
removed the battery and snapped it back into place. The machine started
up—slowly—while the CEO sat there fuming. Speaking in a carefully
measured tone, he acknowledged that he had been less than pleased with
Vista, and confided that he'd visited Microsoft's headquarters in
Redmond, Wash., to express this displeasure in person. I would not have
wanted to be across the table from him at that meeting.
"Nobody
here looks at Vista as a fiasco," says Brad Brooks, a Microsoft
marketing vice president. If that's true, and nobody at Microsoft
thinks Vista has been a public-relations nightmare, then the company is
in trouble. Vista first shipped in January 2007, after several delays,
and immediately had problems. It was sluggish. It had trouble going to
sleep and waking up. It wouldn't work with some printers and
accessories. Users launched a massive online petition begging Microsoft
not to discontinue its old operating system, XP, which is stable, fast
and, after six years of patches, pretty reliable. Many consumers like
me, who'd bought new PCs loaded with Vista, reloaded them with XP.
Microsoft
seems to be getting the message. Working in collaboration with its
PC-maker partners, it says it has ironed out the glitches. It has
embarked on a $300 million advertising blitz aimed at rehabbing Vista's
reputation. But that too has gotten off to a rocky start. Microsoft
teamed Jerry Seinfeld with Bill Gates in ads, and then, after two
weeks, announced there would be no more Seinfeld. Microsoft says this
was the plan all along. More likely, it was reacting to the fact that
the quirky ads made no sense. Also, hiring a TV star from the 1990s
only added to the impression that Microsoft is stuck in a time warp, at
a time when Apple is seen as the king of cool and is gaining market
share.
It's important to point out that the struggle to get Vista on its
feet hasn't hurt Microsoft financially. In fact, Windows revenue grew
13 percent to $17 billion last fiscal year (a record year for
Microsoft), even after the company cut prices on Vista to spur demand.
Microsoft says it has sold more than 180 million copies of Vista, which
is in line with the adoption rate of Windows XP, and Brooks says 89
percent of users surveyed claim to be satisfied or very satisfied. To
drive home that point, Microsoft has launched ads around what it calls
the "Mojave experiment," where it grabs people who hold a low opinion
of Vista and shows them a new operating system called "Mojave." When
the subjects rave about Mojave, Microsoft springs the trick: it's
actually Vista.
Yet the fact that Microsoft has to
run ads like that speaks to the kind of perception problems Vista has
had. Why advertise at all, when almost everyone who buys a PC today
will get Vista on it, whether they like it or not? For one thing, big
corporations—Microsoft's bread and butter—have been slow to migrate
from XP to Vista and need to be convinced that it's now safe to make
the move. It's the same with smaller customers like Mouli Ramani, vice
president of business development at Lilliputian Systems, a tech
company in Wilmington, Mass. He's sticking with XP because he knows it
won't conk out on him. "I'm not willing to risk my career on Vista," he
says.
Meanwhile, Apple's Mac computers, which run
Apple's OS X operating system instead of Windows, have been gaining
share, reaching 11 percent of the U.S. consumer market, according to
researcher NPD. That's a small slice compared with Microsoft, whose software
runs on 90 percent of the world's PCs. But Apple users tend to be the
kind of people marketers refer to as "influencers" or "tech elites,"
the in-the-know folks who adopt the coolest new technology
and set trends. Apple's highly effective "I'm a Mac" ads have done a
great job of positioning Apple as the machine for hipsters, and
Windows-based PCs as the choice for dorks. Remember how AOL used to be
cool, but then became the service used only by people who didn't know
any better? Microsoft is heading down that path. "You fly business
class today, and it's nothing but Macs," says one former Microsoft
executive, who's now carrying a Mac himself, albeit with Vista loaded
on it.
Yet another challenge for Microsoft comes
from PC makers themselves, who are sending mixed messages about Vista.
HP insists it is committed to Vista, but also touts the fact that its
engineers have created little Linux-based software modules so that HP
customers can perform basic tasks, like checking e-mail and playing
DVDs, without booting Vista at all. HP calls this "innovating on top of
Vista," though "sidestepping" might be a more accurate description. At
Lenovo, a team of engineers has been working with Microsoft for the
past year to improve Vista. And Lenovo loads Vista on machines it sells
to customers. For its own use, however, Lenovo still runs Windows XP as
its corporate standard. Make of that what you will.
From : http://www.newsweek.com/
