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September 08, 2006
Clientside upgrade rate
Clientside upgrade rate: Owen Thomas, in Business 2.0, on possible Vista adoption rates: "Microsoft gets more than 80 percent of its $13 billion in annual Windows revenue from PC makers, who install the operating system on new PCs. The cost of Windows - estimated at around $70 - is included in the price we pay when we buy a new PC. The proportion of people who buy copies of Windows at retail to install on their PCs is vanishingly small. And the version of Windows that those retail customers have on their PC hardly figures into the equation. By and large, we buy a new PC when we need another one. 'Consumers perceive what they have as good enough,' says Joe Wilcox, an analyst at JupiterResearch. 'A pattern we saw with Windows XP is that people would buy an XP machine and keep the older machine with the older operating system. They don't see the benefit of upgrading the older machine.'" That's part of why missing this holiday season was so critical to its consumer adoption rate... the next bump of people replacing home systems (in the US, at least) won't have Vista systems until early 2008, and it will likely take a few annual hardware cycles to amass a meaningful audience. Downloads & off-cycle upgrades are possible, but for most of us, if a system ain't broke we don't fix it. Browser upgrades get adopted faster, but no brand has more than 80% audience share, so you have to go least-common-denominator. Improving consumer machines quickly is difficult, and to my knowledge only the Adobe clientside technologies achieve it.
Posted by JohnDowdell at September 8, 2006 09:20 PM
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