Charles on… anything that comes along

This week in The Independent I’m mulling over the renaming of Longhorn to Vista, and more importantly the question of who will buy Vista? Consumers hang on to their machines for about four years, and generally don’t update their OS. Windows XP is only now achieving two-thirds penetration (going by the stats at http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp - scroll down, pausing only to gape at the stats for Firefox, but noting that the visitors to the site aren’t representative of the Web as a whole). Businesses are only gradually moving to XP. That’s four years after XP launched.

Plus there’s the thorny question of quite what Vista will do that XP doesn’t. It all adds up to a big questionmark. But of course, there’s a long way to go.

(One editing slip is that it suggests that Microsoft’s naming video “tells us that “using Vista will, at last, enable you to: sit in front of a computer, show someone your tablet PC, show someone else your mobile phone, get into cars while carrying a laptop and walk through sun-soaked rooms with highly polished floors, even while being buffeted by pulses of multicoloured light.” Actually, that was Joe Fay at The Register’s take on it. Mm, pulses of multicoloured light…)

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