Vista’s Incredible Vanishing Act

Steve Ballmer pulled off a great trick the other day. He made Windows Vista completely vanish. Well, he’d like to, but he needs your help to make it go away like the bad idea it was.

I’ve seen some impressive keynotes, but few can top the sight of the Staples Center filled to capacity for the opening keynote in Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference. With a small stage in the middle, CEO Steve Ballmer addressed a crowd typically only seen for Lakers games and concerts by major stars (and I don’t think he needed a microphone to be heard, either).

It was a bit of a letdown that we got no preview of Windows 8. That, we were told, will come at the Build show in September. Instead, the message from Tami Reller, CFO and corporate vice president of the Windows division, was simple: Dump Windows XP.

It’s rather comical that for the second time in a year, Microsoft has launched an initiative to get people to stop using one of its products. But like IE 6, XP stayed on the market too long and became too deeply embedded to get rid of it that easily.

Reller offered both a carrot and a stick as incentives to migrate. The carrot Reller offered was savings. She cited the example of the city of Miami, which saved $90 per year for each of its 2,500 PCs just from improved power management. The stick was that Windows XP will hit the end-of-life stage, where Microsoft will not provide any more fixes, in about 1,000 days.

She said that of the 1.2 billion Windows licenses worldwide, 400 million were Windows 7 and the rest were Windows XP, which immediately begged the question of where’s Vista? I can’t fault them for wanting to forget Vista ever happened but it’s still a large portion of the ecosystem.

The fact is, Vista is in limbo, which is as good as dead in this business. On the one hand, it’s an abandoned operating system that customers and Microsoft alike want nothing to do with it. On the other hand, it routinely falls into the same bucket as Windows 7 because it uses the same device driver and app model. You often see this in device drivers: Windows XP or Vista/7.

As reviled as Vista was by consumers, it has gained significant share. It was on the market for three years and on average, about 200 to 300 million PCs are sold every year. Many shunned Vista but a lot did not. Steam, the online games sales software, does some interesting analytics. Now I’ll preface this by saying its profile is of home users/gamers, not enterprises. That said, as of May, 32-bit and 64-bit Vista combined accounts for 24 percent of systems running Steam software. Windows 7 64-bit topped the list at 38 percent.

There are other places where XP is embedded and not easily replaced: emerging markets, where XP is an advanced operating system; netbooks, which ran XP until Windows 7 shipped; and companies delaying a rollout for one reason or another. It could be they have custom apps that are still not certified on Windows 7 or maybe they plan to make Windows 7 part of a bigger app rollout (along with Office 2010. for instance) and it’s taking longer to stage.

I realize that the migration away from XP is likely slowed due to the economy and people won’t replace an XP or Vista machine until it finally dies. The bottom line is, you XP and Vista users are rapidly being abandoned. Mainstream support for XP is over, end-of-life is in 2014. Mainstream Vista support ends in April 2012 and end-of-life is April 2017, but really, you want to get off XP and Vista a lot sooner than that.