The wider Vista

So the first month of the Year of Vista has ended, and sales were double the sales of Windows XP in its first month. What's this really telling us?

Is everybody twice as keen to get Vista as they were to get XP? Or perhaps, are there twice as many people in the market for a PC than there were five years ago? And if you buy a new PC you're going to get Vista unless you squeal very loudly and demand XP. So what we should be celebrating is the doubling of the PC market since 2002.

And, if you're a system builder, you're probably not celebrating at all because SMEs and enterprise customers are not keen on joining the Vista juggernaut until at least service pack 1 is released. Ah, but Dell and others are shipping PCs with Vista preconfigured I hear you say. Indeed they are, but businesses who buy their PCs from Dell aren't customers of systems builders anyway.

It looks like we must wait until 2008 for systems builders to cheer about their Year of Vista.