Vistaphobia drives second-hand PC sales
Plenty of people have gained from Vista’s poor reception: Apple (if market share changes are anything to go by), the advertising world, Jerry Seinfeld, and of course tech writers looking for something to cover. Now it appears second-hand computer salesmen might also be among the winners.
Figures from research firm Gartner suggest the migration to Vista has boosted both supply and demand. Of the 197 million PCs people got rid of worldwide last year, 44 percent were sold on rather than thrown away. There’s no way to tell the precise figures, but it seems credible that many of those working machines got the boot because they couldn’t handle Vista.
Meanwhile, PC World floats the theory that many buyers, particularly those with a lot of software unsuitable for Vista, are going for second-hand XP computers instead of buying new Vista machines (or going through the rigmarole of exploiting downgrade loopholes).
The site quotes a computer repair firm as saying some of its small business customers buy second-hand XP machines because can’t afford to upgrade all their computers to Vista at once, but don’t want the headache of running two different versions of Windows in the same office.
The article also warns there’s a trend for dishonest sellers to exploit this demand by selling machines with unlicensed copies of XP. There’s a particular incentive do so as, with second-hand, lower-spec machines such as these, the operating system takes up a much higher proportion of the price.
Of course, this is all bad news for Microsoft as it doesn’t put any money in its coffers. Still, they could exploit advice given by people such as Mark Minasi of Windowsitpro.com. He points out that with Windows 7 is much closer to Vista than Vista was to XP, you could argue it’s better to get your compatibility problems out of the way now rather than put yourself through the headache of a straight leap from XP to Windows 7.
You can imagine the campaign now: “Vista — It’s not just an operating system, it’s a stepping stone!”
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