Dean Takahashi writes in the San Jose Mercury News the complexity of the Microsoft Vista Project, the spiraling costs, the amount of labor it took to complete the project, and the product’s potential in a monopolized market. As much as 10,000 Microsoft employees have worked on the Vista project totaling to about $10 billion dollars in development labor cost alone. It’s just a drop in the bucket for Microsoft since it has money to burn.
Speaking of profits, how much money will Microsoft make from this product? An estimated 20% of businesses this year will move over to Vista, that’s roughly 76 million computers. Most of it is due to technology refresh as new computers coming in are fitted with the new Vista operating system. Microsoft expects to make $11.5 billion next year in Vista sales alone. I am sure profits will continue to trickle in the years to come due to the lack of competitors in the desktop operating systems market.
No doubt Vista will be successful. It will be around for a number of years. Maybe, Vista will be the last of its kind. It took five years to develop Vista. I can’t imagine Microsoft launching another Vista-like project in the future. In the meantime, I plan to use the Fedora desktop, a free Linux variant courtesy of Redhat. It is stable, robust and most of all, the price is right, it’s free. To me, this is the future of the desktop operating system.