Nobody loves Vista - who loves WPF or Silverlight
According to Bloomberg and Taipei Times the chairman of Taiwan-based Asustek Computer, the world's largest producer of motherboards (Asustek ranked 10th largest global PC vendor in 4Q 2006), is disappointed in vista sales. Jonney Shih said that Vista sales have trailed Asustek's estimates without providing numbers.
"Some commercial users do not want to jump to Vista, they may still want to have the XP option"
As Acer Inc president Gianfranco Lanci said, a new operating system does not encourage customers to buy new computers. They will buy a new PC only "when they need it. Specs are becoming less important than in the past". What a fascinating conclusion on this issue, because the same costumer will love to buy a new PC or at least a video card for a brand new game - but not the enterprises, "quelle surprise" (sorry for some french in my german english). Not really an astonishing thought for me, but what took me by surprise is the way the Windows Presentation Foundation took the market. It is my impression, that more design companies than software developers saw the market opportunities of WPF and Silverlight. Design companies loved Expression and Silverlight from the start. Not that they will ever give up there beloved Flash, but they saw the chances right away. They are moving toward getting solution providers for Rich Client Applications. And they will be there in only few months.
Time is money and the software development companies should be aware of that. If Vista is for the customer with the new gaming hardware, software for Vista has to be cool, fancy and good looking. If you want to have a share of the early Vista market your application needs a designed graphical interface. If you want to take part in the potential Silverlight market, the software must have a "equal or better than" flash appearance. Partnering with a design company is one option, getting a foot in the design market another (there are a lot of freelancers in that business). We cooperated in one project (the otto shop) with a design company and started a tentative partnership for our new t-online project with another. Some experiences in that cooperation are funny and some bothering (designers are working more like advertising agencies than like software developers), but mostly it is an awesome productive way to produce good looking applications with a perfect usability.