Windows Vista is out and the lack of enthusiasm is pretty great. Very few people are upgrading. I know that I am not. Unlike past OS releases this is unlikely to provide a big boost to Microsoft sales. The argument on the other side says that they will sell lots of copies to buyers of new machines. While that is true, they didn’t need to introduce a new OS for that, Windows XP would have served that same purpose (and without the huge development cost of Vista).

I think this provides an opportunity for competing OS’s (Mac OSX and Linux) to make inroads and expect that over the next few years they will rise in overall market share while Windows decreases. In fact I predict that Windows XP will remain the market leader for several more years just from installed base and Windows Vista will take some time to pass the installed (and growing) base of the non-Windows OS’s.