Referring to the article on The Hindu on 27.07.2008, Forrester Research Inc., has concluded from a survey that 87.1% of the computers still run on Windows XP while only 8.8% have migrated to Vista. This is opposed to Microsoft's claim stating that they have sold 180 million licenses for their new baby. From the looks of it, users are actually reverting back to XP, while Microsoft has announced that XP will get service packs till 2014 and is also trying in vain to convince dissatisfied customers abt vista.
Now this reminds us of one of the greatest market fiascos ever pulled by the US soft drink giant Coca-Cola. On 23rd April, 1985, New Coke was rolled out with all fanfare and prime TV ads claiming that it was "smoother, rounder yet bolder" making it sound more like some vintage wine rather than a flavored soda. But customer response was so adversarial that on July 11, 1985, the company made a red-faced about-turn and the old coke was back under the moniker "Coke Classic", thus leading the company to where it stands today.
Now this reminds us of one of the greatest market fiascos ever pulled by the US soft drink giant Coca-Cola. On 23rd April, 1985, New Coke was rolled out with all fanfare and prime TV ads claiming that it was "smoother, rounder yet bolder" making it sound more like some vintage wine rather than a flavored soda. But customer response was so adversarial that on July 11, 1985, the company made a red-faced about-turn and the old coke was back under the moniker "Coke Classic", thus leading the company to where it stands today.
New Coke was actually sweeter than the original product and had blue shades added to its ads in order to attract pepsi consumers as well, but resulted in losing its own. What Microsoft is trying to do sounds similar, considering the fact that all it has produced is a heavier, slower and flashier imitation of the Mac OS. N it doesn't look like the Mojave Experiment is helping it any further. Btw, I js couldn't help noticing that the site (http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/) runs on Flash rather than its own SilverLight :-). Looks like its gonna be a uphill battle for Microsoft to make Vista the true successor of XP rather than an addition to the growing list of 'Greatest Blunders of the Century'..!!
neat parallelism!
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