John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Vista: The 'Wow' Starts, I Dunno, a Year From Now?

wow.jpgAccording to International Data Corporation’s 2006 white paper, “The Economic Impact of Microsoft Windows Vista in the United States,” Windows Vista was supposed to generate 100,000 new jobs and $70 billion in revenue for U.S. companies in 2007, revitalizing and advancing the long mutualism between the tech industry and Microsoft’s near-monopoly on desktop operating systems. For every dollar of Vista-related revenue pocketed by Microsoft, $18 was to be generated for the technology industry as a whole. “If you add up all of the spending on hardware and software that run on Microsoft operating systems as well as all of the services around installing and maintaining Microsoft applications and solutions, you quickly come up with a number much bigger than Microsoft’s revenues,” the report claimed. “It grows even larger and more significant when compared to the subset of Microsoft revenues for operating systems.”

Quite a claim and one that should, perhaps, be revisited in light of news that fewer businesses plan to adopt Windows Vista than did seven months ago. According to a client survey by patch-management outfit PatchLink, only 2% using Windows have upgraded to Vista. Nine percent plan to roll it out in the next few months. And 87% have no plans to roll it out at all–at least not yet. Windows XP pretty much works and, unlike Vista, it plays well with the hardware and peripherals you already have.

So much for pent-up demand. Looks like Microsoft may have really blown it when it failed to ship Vista in time for the last big enterprise hardware upgrade cycle in 2004.

Twitter’s Tanking

December 30, 2013 at 6:49 am PT

2013 Was a Good Year for Chromebooks

December 29, 2013 at 2:12 pm PT

BlackBerry Pulls Latest Twitter for BB10 Update

December 29, 2013 at 5:58 am PT

Apple CEO Tim Cook Made $4.25 Million This Year

December 28, 2013 at 12:05 pm PT

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik