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A view from the East.

http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=153138

RAKESH RAMAN
Posted online: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at 0000 hours IST

After some excessive hype, inordinate delays and probable bugs, Microsoft’s new software sees the light of day - in the US, on the other side of the globe—on January 30, the scheduled date for its consumer launch. Earlier code-named Longhorn, this Microsoft operating system (OS) was christened Windows Vista in 2005, and is now ready to target millions of worldwide PC users. The feature-laden product comes after almost five years of its predecessor Windows XP, and this has been the longest time gap ever between two successive PC-centric Windows products.
Microsoft, the world’s largest software company with over $44 billion in 2006 revenues, promises a rich digital experience with Vista, driven by the ease-of-use that comes with a new graphical user interface (GUI), apart from simplified file management, better visual effects and a slew of other multimedia aids.

Sure, it may have plenty of bells and whistles, particularly for the deep-pocket buyer who likes bells and whistles, but will it succeed in wooing the serious consumer who wants an economical PC for applications as mundane as word processing, Net surfing, e-mail and perhaps a bit of personal accounting?

Therein lies a market problem. While PC makers in developing countries like India are busy trying to introduce low-cost PCs in the Rs 10,000 range, Microsoft wants consumers to shell out at least four times the money to buy (or upgrade) a PC that supports its Vista. This is because Vista expects you to have a top-of-the-line computer—a Windows Vista capable PC or Windows Vista premium ready PC, in technical parlance—with a high-end processor, more memory and better graphics support.


While PC makers try to introduce low-cost PCs for Rs 10,000 apiece, Microsoft wants you to shell out four times the money

With these pre-requisites, will the Indian home, or even enterprise, buyer be willing to adopt Vista? Let’s check. If you want to upgrade your PC to make it Vista-ready, your computer is supposed to be not more than a year old. And during the last one year, an estimated four million PCs were sold in India (true home users are few and far between) at an average price of some Rs 25,000. If these users want to upgrade, they’ll have to spend almost the same amount all over again. Then, there will be umpteen hardware glitches because of component incompatibility and so on. So, unless one deems Vista a must-have for some special reason that justfies paying an arm and a leg for an upgradation, it makes little sense moving on from a machine that works fine for all your necessary applications. But having the market on a never-ending escalator is part of techdom’s business model. So, vendors will soon start offering Vista pre-loaded PCs. Yet, all things considered, it’ll only be a small fraction of the market—to begin with, excitable and gullible first-time users—that might succumb to the hoopla around Vista.

What does this mean for Vista’s prospects in India? In the immediate future, and in a developing economy with weak PC penetration, it’s not going to be a walk in the park for the software powerhouse, even if it plans a no-frills version for the budget-bound Indian consumer. However, the solace for Microsoft could be a low piracy rate. With so few top-end computers, pirates have no chance.

In the US market, though, Vista fits perfectly into the Microsoft scheme of things. Of late, it has been trying hard to prove its dominance in the imminent world of digital convergence in which the computer, telecom, and entertainment markets are set to merge. Microsoft’s affection for the convergence market is evident from its recent offerings in the fast-evolving markets for digital gaming, Internet-based TV and mobile phones. Zune, its answer to Apple’s iPod, got widespread media attention. Like Microsoft, the focus of most computer and telecom companies is moving from than the traditional base of corporate users to the potentially huge home market. So, a techno-entertainment product like Vista will, perhaps, help Microsoft mark its presence in the living room.

After that, it’s one big rumble. It could take quite a shuffle just keeping up with the an arena of entertainment software in which art, music, football, architecture and everything else seem to be coalescing in ways ever-harder to imagine.