Michael Dell says he’s working closely with Microsoft on Windows 7 and likes the way the OS is shaping up, but can understand why many people will skip Vista entirely.
Dell Computers founder and CEO Michael Dell says that Microsoft is eager to avoid repeating the mistakes of Vista by working more closely with the PC industry, including his own company, on the evolution of Windows 7.
“We’ve been been involved (with Microsoft) from a very very early stage and are much more pleased with the way the co-operation (around Windows 7) is occurring” Dell told APC at an international media briefing in Shanghai last week.
“I think Microsoft is responding to a lot of the challenges that were present by customers in the XP to Vista transition and so we’re feeling pretty good about that. We’re spending a lot of time with Microsoft on the features and drivers, and ensuring that when we as an industry bring Windows 7 to market that this is something that is widely adopted”.
None the less, Dell understands that Vista wasn’t perhaps the silver bullet the industry hoped for. “We know there are many users that will go straight from XP to Windows 7. We know of customers that are going right ahead with Vista, too, but we also know of customers that are waiting.”
“I think the consumer has obviously already moved to Vista as they buy new PCs, a lot of small to medium businesses have moved to Vista, but larger companies tend to be much more selective, or you could even say slow to move” Dell observes, “although I think you’ll see a fair number of them start to go to Vista as the Service Pack 1 release settles down. A lot of the issues early on, particularly with drivers, have been resolved in a large part”
Dell also tagged the growth in power of home computers as a pain point for companies when people have to work on systems far slower than their own PC.
“As time goes on the PC that consumer buys for home is dramatically better than the PC in the office. When you buy a new PC you get a dual-core or even quad-core processor, a big screen, these great features. Then you go back to the office and it’s ‘
Oh!’.”
When APC points out that Michael Dell himself is perhaps an exception to that rule – we’ve seen his desktop monitor, and it’s large enough to warrant its own postcode – he laughs and admits “Yeah, well, we
all have pretty good PCs here at Dell!”.
David Flynn travelled to Shanghai as a guest of Dell.