Microsoft hired IDC to produce some forecasts (PDF) regarding the economic impact that Windows Vista is going to have on the US economy (other studies have been done for other areas, such as the EU, but I’m in California, so I’ll stick with a more local scope). One impressive-sounding datapoint: for every dollar of revenue spent on Microsoft Vista, eighteen dollars will be spent elsewhere in the “Microsoft ecosystem,” creating a great benefit to the economy.
Presuming that I upgrade my existing copy of Windows XP Home for about $99.00 (the current retail price of a Windows XP Home upgrade copy), my personal projected Vista-related spending would look something like this:
- $965.25 on Vista-related hardware.
- $455.40 on Vista-related software.
- $361.35 on Vista-related services.
Hardware
I’m not a very hardware-intensive guy. I rarely upgrade the hardware on a system I’m using aside from the occasional new hard drive or keyboard. My current home system isn’t on-par with the recommendations for the full-blown Vista experience, so if the $965.25 includes purchasing RAM, a new motherboard, CPU, and so forth, I suppose we’re in the realm of a reasonable forecast here. It turns out that systems shipped with Vista pre-loaded was precisely what they meant by hardware purchases.
Software
I play video games. This is the software I purchase. A typical buy like Mideval Lords (which is excellent, check it out some time) will set me back $29.00 or so. Some I’ll buy for as much as $40.00. A game will generally keep my attention for a couple of months, so while I have never set a budget for such matters, I figure I already spend maybe $200.00 in a given year on PC games. Considering that most of the games I’m interested in are likely to be compatible with Windows XP for at least a few years, I cannot justify this $455.40 figure. At work, I subsist on freeware like PuTTY and a couple of mass-license bundles my employer gets for an unknown (to me) sum, so I don’t know how that sits.
Services
Services? I presume this would mean hiring the local IT guy to come out and wrench on my poor, broken system and things like Internet Access. I happen to be the IT guy, so that cost would be zero in my case. I happen to work for an ISP, so again a zero. I have an itching desire to start up my FFXI account again, which runs about $15.00 per month ($180 for a full year). I suppose if I had to pay for my DSL and I purchase some CDs or what-have-you online, this $361.35 looks pretty reasonable.
Unfortunately, they really just meant management, support, and training for Vista and Vista-related software. This doesn’t even include hardware support. For me, I expect this to me $0.00.
Conclusion
Of all these projected purchases, the only one that directly involves Vista (the purchase being motivated by a desire to run Vista, or by the service or software only being available with Vista) is the purchase of a new computer. That means for every dollar I may spend on Vista next year, I’m likely to spend about ten on hardware. This projection was tantalizingly-close to being quite reasonable in my case. Very close indeed. Better luck next time, boys!
Of course, the scope of this study was not meant to be residential users, but the market in general, which includes many businesses that purchase professional software packages and support contracts. This includes folks that actually spend hundreds of dollars on a Photoshop license, keep their Quicken versions up-to-date at all times, and so forth.