Virtual Vista: Try Before You Buy (or Sell?)
We start today with an e-mail from Peter, who writes to us from Melbourne,
Australia, mate, in response to our recent query on whether partners are making
money off Vista. His news is not good:
"Vista might be booming in Redmond, but in our town it seems to be
a lead balloon. We do not know any other partners running it internally, and
none of our customers have the slightest interest in it whatsoever.
"One of our BI [business intelligence, natch --LP] customers,
a large bank, is just now upgrading from NT4 to Windows XP and is very seriously
looking at Linux. Personally, I am quite happy on XP SP2 and have no plans
to move until high-function machines are common.
"The bottom line is we are making nothing off Vista and, frankly,
getting nothing much from the Partner Program either."
Right, that's a good reminder -- we're still looking for your feedback on the
Microsoft Partner Program. We've had some very good comments so far, but we'd
love some more. We'll run the best in Friday's newsletter.
Back to Vista for now, though. Microsoft, perhaps sensing that the new operating
system isn't catching on as well as it had hoped, or perhaps just wanting to
look cutting-edge, has developed a try-before-you-buy program that gives potential
users a 30-day
trial of Vista using virtualization. The trial, which lets users test applications
on the new OS, is part of a little
package of sweeteners aimed at boosting Vista adoption.
We're hearing through RCPU and other channels that partners aren't yet making
much money from Vista sales. Granted, it's still a bit early in the sales cycle
for a new OS. For instance, lots of businesses are talking about looking at
Vista next year (maybe). Now, we want to know what Microsoft needs to do to
help its partners profit from Vista now. Or, is Vista just a dud that's destined
to never add to your bottom line? Share your thoughts at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on June 07, 2007