Customer Satisfaction with Vista

Every year we do customer satisfaction studies to see how the market feels about Microsoft and its products and services.  One of the things we ask them about is Windows Vista and there are some interesting results to take note of.

When we asked IT Pros about their satisfaction with Vista, scores were low with those who were not using the product yet high with those who were using the product. 

Interesting.  There's no denying that Vista has had a difficult time in the press over the last year but I think much of this negative coverage has left a hangover with customer perception.  Many of the reasons for the negative press, things like application compatibility and device driver coverage are things of the past.  The research done in the survey supports this theory.

It also supports what I find talking to customers out there in the field - those who have a negative perception either tried Vista in the early days and had problems or haven't actually tried it and have based their upgrade policy based on what they hear or read in the press.  To those people, I challenge them to have another look. 

The ones who are actually using it are now having positive experiences! I presented to customers last week and asked them who was using Vista - all their hands went up.  "Great", I thought.  Then, the big question - "who's had a good experience with Vista so far" - some hands went down, but some remained up.  To those who put their hands down I asked, "Are these recent bad experiences?" and people were shaking their heads. 

So more hangovers from the first year of Vista there then. 

One of the other things I often get questions about is performance.  People often say to me that XP out performs Vista on their new machine.  Well that should be no surprise really.  Guess what, if you run Windows 2000 on that machine - it will be extremely quick! Quicker still will be Windows 95 and Windows 3.11 will be faster still.  So would you install Windows 3.11 on your machine? No of course not, because although performance is great, you sacrifice security and functionality.  Windows XP will continue to run faster on newer and faster hardware - it's no surprise - but so will Windows Vista. 

After you get over this fact then you can have a discussion about what the security and functionality benefits of Vista are over XP.  You want me to talk about them here?  You should read my blog more often! :-)

Sorry for the rant, I've been wanting to get that off my chest - I'm done now!