Only ‘geeks’ line up for Vista system

RALEIGH, N.C. — Retailers around the world stayed open through the wee hours of Tuesday morning to sell the long-awaited Windows Vista operating system, even though most knew customers wouldn’t be lining up out the door.

At a CompUSA store in Raleigh, only about a dozen people braved temperatures in the upper 20s to be among the first consumers to get Vista. The low turnout wasn’t surprising; even Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates said the company wasn’t pushing the midnight sales events for first major Windows update since 2001.

“I think we’ll see sales pick up throughout the rest of the week, especially on Friday and over the weekend when people have more time,” CompUSA manager Damon Didier said.

Employees decorated the store with balloons and set up bright new displays featuring computers equipped with Vista. The store conducted a five-second countdown over the public-address system and offered coffee and discounts on other items such as printers.

“I guess I’m a geek at heart,” said Chad Janko, 29. “I wanted to process the whole thing myself before all the reviews surface about it.”

Microsoft says PC users will want to upgrade to Vista for its 3-D user interface and speedy desktop search function. The Redmond, Wash., software maker also touts Vista’s improved security and parental controls.

But consumers whose computers work fine with XP may not see a compelling reason to switch.

“I want to see how many problems there are, what kinds of bugs are in it,” Kathleen Calvin said after leaving a Best Buy in Brooklyn, Ohio, empty-handed. “There have been problems when softwares came out before. I just want to make sure it’s something that’s going to work well.”

But for David Keller, 40, an IT consultant from Jacksonville, Fla., Vista’s launch ended a two-year wait. He was among the first in line at a CompUSA store in San Jose, Calif., to pick up his new Hewlett-Packard Co. laptop at midnight (3 a.m. EST).

“I’ve been waiting and waiting, and I’ve been using my personal laptop for work — it’s not working well,” he said. “This is a big deal for me. I’ll hopefully get the better performance that I need, and I won’t have to go through the trouble of upgrading later.”

During the past few weeks, shelves in the computer section at one Best Buy in New York have been essentially bare, as consumer lost interest in laptops running Vista’s predecessor, Windows XP, and the retailer cleared space to sell new machines running Vista, which imposes such hardware requirements as 1 gigabyte of system memory, or RAM.

Microsoft marked the Vista launch with a series of celebrations Monday in New York complete with acrobatics and blaring music. At one, dancers clad in Microsoft colors dangled from ropes high above street level and unfurled flags to form the red, green, blue and yellow Windows logo against a building wall.

Vista went on sale in 70 countries Tuesday, along with new versions of Microsoft Exchange e-mail software and the flagship Office business suite, which includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

But unlike the recent launches of next-generation game machines like Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3, customers haven’t been camping out for days.

“When I look at Windows Vista, I see a technology that is interesting, that is relevant, but to some extent is evolutionary,” said Al Gillen, an analyst at the technology research group IDC.

Though consumers can download Vista over the Web for the first time, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told one audience that, as in the past, most consumers will switch to Vista only when they buy new computers.

More than five years in the making, Vista was released for businesses Nov. 30, but the unveiling for consumers only came Tuesday. Vista comes as changing dynamics of computing — notably the rise of open-source software and Web-based services that replicate what traditionally could be done only on a desktop computer — are threatening Microsoft’s dominance in the industry.

But Gates contended that the operating system has a higher profile than ever before, as the PC has morphed from a souped-up typewriter to a networked entertainment center, personal media library and gateway to the Internet.