The Vista era begins
January 30, 2007Well it’s finally here, Microsoft’s Windows Vista has finally launched to consumers. The marketing is going to be pretty relentless–Microsoft plans to spend half a billion dollars pushing the new Windows operating system.
I bought an Acer laptop just before the holidays, it came with some kind of coupon I can trade in for a Vista upgrade. I’m probably going to at least get the Vista disc, though I doubt I’ll bother to install it on the laptop. But I’ll have it in case I do decide at some point to upgrade.
More likely I will just wait until my next computer purchase, which should be probably four years away. That’s roughly the cycle I’ve been following, a new computer every four to five years. Enough cool stuff comes out that can’t run on my previous machine and that’s when I get the itch to replace it with a new model.
I’m sure that’s not what Microsoft wants to hear. They want me to be so dazzled by Vista–the marketing tagline is “The Wow starts now”–that I just have to upgrade immediately. But there’s no software I want which requires the OS. Everything I need runs just fine, and will continue to run for at least a couple more years, on Windows XP.