Experts expect XP to boost PC sales

I've seen the advertisements, I've read the hype and I know that many are hoping that Bill Gates and Microsoft's Windows XP will manage to single-handedly save the teetering PC industry. Strangely, despite the fuzzy, feel-good television advertisements being consumer- oriented, the company is aiming XP at businesses, notwithstanding the fact that chief financial officer Mr John Connors has said he expects retail customers to be the main consumers.

So I'm not exactly sure which target group of buyers is expected to save the industry; but then the technology sector has never been shy about not knowing who its customer base really is and what it really wants, but telling us that it has the product anyway.

The basic premise behind XP is that the operating system is significantly more robust than before, meaning fewer freezes and crashes. The other main feature is that new applications are integrated (which is also the major complaint that everyone - including the regulators - has, since many users want their applications to be separate from the operating system).

However, for both the business and the personal user, the notion that you don't spend half your time re-booting the computer is a tantalisingly enticing one. The downside, of course, is that you need 128mb of memory just to run the operating system and home-users with older machines don't have that much spare capacity.

This is why the industry is putting its faith in XP. They're hoping consumers will rush out and buy new PCs so that they can run XP. Microsoft's share price has risen, so maybe investors think that's what will happen. Or maybe they've been overtaken by a burst of patriotic fervour since the $1 billion marketing campaign began with a choir singing America the Beautiful and the launch was attended by the man of the moment, New York mayor Mr Rudy Giuliani. It'd be hard to short the company in an atmosphere like that.

Microsoft actually needs to make money out of XP, since net earnings are down 41 per cent for the third quarter. This downturn was exacerbated by losses on their cable and telecoms investments. As far as PC sales went - well, they were down about 10 per cent.

At the New York event (which Bill tells us is the most important product launch in Microsoft's history - let's ignore all those other glitzy launches like Windows ME, Windows 98 and Windows 95), he was confident that XP would help to drive the economy forward.

Actually, I hope he's right. God knows how much productivity is lost by people having to reboot their computers whenever they crash. The company has said that XP is 10 times more reliable than Windows 98, which is something of a comfort, I guess - although I bet it'll still crash whenever you least want it to. Crashes happen, after all, because people do things that programmers just can't anticipate.

However, I wonder about the whole premise of consumers rushing out to buy new computers at nearly £1,000 a pop when all they have to do is buy more memory if they want to run XP. Memory is dirt cheap at the moment - I increased the memory on my Mac by 40 per cent for less than £100 recently. Which means I can do pretty much what I like and the computer still keeps going without any application suddenly deciding it's had enough.

Since many of the new features on XP revolve around sending photographs and videos, using a 56k dial-up modem system, which most of us have, still means a lot of time of waiting for those pictures to be delivered. That kind of defeats the purpose for the consumer at whom, let's remind ourselves, the product isn't pitched but who are expected to be the buyers.

Although, as many of you know, I hate most Microsoft products, I do think it's a brilliant company. And the technology industry does need a driving force right now. According to the Financial Times, almost 300,000 jobs have been lost in the past year at companies like Motorola, Dell, Intel, IBM, Oracle, et al. Last week, Hynix Semiconductors announced that 14,000 employees were taking a month's unpaid leave to try and safeguard jobs.

So it doesn't matter where the impetus comes from, the industry needs something. The question is, is it XP? Well, yes, if company president Mr Steve Ballmer has anything to do with it. Mr Gates, in his book, Business @ the Speed of Thought, describes Ballmer as a man who "exudes exuberance".

Forbes magazine, taking a somewhat different approach, has dubbed him the "George S Patton of software". Both are undoubtedly right.

There is a video clip doing the rounds at the moment of Steve at a Microsoft event. Pink, glistening and totally pumped-up, this middle-aged, balding bloke leaps across the stage like someone auditioning for PopStars, whooping and hollering to cheers (because it couldn't be anything else) from the assembled employees.

Standing behind the podium and gasping for breath, he fixes them all with a steely glare and, pointing to the sky (thus revealing that he could have lashed on the anti-perspirant a bit more freely before gyrating under the lights), he roars "I love this company" in a way that makes you know that he means it. And in a way that would terrorise you into loving it too.

The contrast between Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs of Apple couldn't be greater. Steve Ballmer threatens you to love the company.

Steve Jobs demonstrates something cool and exciting, and expects you to like it as much as him but, hey, if you don't, that's kind of OK.

If you want to see Steve in action - which might help you make up your mind for once and for all about the prospects of Microsoft - you can check him out at www.ntk.net/media/ dancemonkeyboy.mpg. It's an absolute classic - in every sense of the word. But it's about 3mb in size so, if you have a 56k dial-up modem, it'll take a while to download ... even if you've just bought XP.

However, in this case, it's worth every minute!