If you can believe The Wall Street Journal, the main reason Microsoft suffered reduced sales is because of the \u201cPC Blight,\u201d which refers to the economic downturn affecting the PC industry. They sell less, so it means Microsoft distributes fewer OEM licenses, from which they earn most of their software income.<\/p>\n
However, millions of netbooks with Windows XP preloaded on them are selling, so didn\u2019t that make the difference? Not quite. You see, in order to get PC makers to ditch Linux and still keep the prices ultra-cheap, Microsoft had to dump cheap XP licenses on them. In other words, they were forced to push an eight-year-old operating system, because the current one, Vista, was too sluggish to run acceptably on these little boxes and, of course, too expensive.<\/p>\n
Supposedly Windows 7 will be beefed up enough when it comes to performance to run acceptably. At least Microsoft is banking on that to gain decent sales in the final quarter of the year, but is that true? It\u2019s hard to know, because there\u2019s not much beta experience to depend on. Even then, you can\u2019t assume that a beta version of an operating system represents the final product, or even that some of the people reporting great performance and fewer problems aren\u2019t paid shills quietly doing Microsoft\u2019s bidding.<\/p>\n
Vista wasn\u2019t such an obvious train wreck until it was actually released, and the truth was clear to one and all, although it\u2019s also true the beta experience was less favorable. Or maybe Microsoft didn\u2019t recruit a sufficient number of hacks to boost Vista\u2019s prospects with impossibly positive spins instead of genuine reviews.<\/p>\n
Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you can believe The Wall Street Journal, the main reason Microsoft suffered reduced sales is because of the \u201cPC Blight,\u201d which refers to the economic downturn affecting the PC industry. They sell less, so it means Microsoft distributes fewer OEM licenses, from which they earn most of their software income. However, millions of netbooks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[8389,443,1275,9823,425,11312,8662,1613,3638,9325],"class_list":["post-4032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-linux","tag-microsoft","tag-microsoft-windows","tag-netbook","tag-operating-system","tag-the-wall-street-journal","tag-windows-7","tag-windows-vista","tag-windows-xp","tag-xp"],"yoast_head":"\n