Social Determinants Behind Consumer Choice of Windows Vista

Introduction

When considering consumers' choice of Microsoft Windows Vista over other operating systems — particularly given that in April 2007 the new system was responsible for a profit surge through upgrades (Birmingham Post, 2007, p. 21) — the question becomes one of consumer motivation. What are the social determinants that drive consumers' choice of Windows Vista? This is a question long studied by marketing analysts and manufacturers, and Microsoft appears to have a firm understanding of those social determinants, given that Windows Vista drove the company to profits amounting to billions of dollars (Birmingham Post, 2007, p. 21).

The Social Determinants of Windows Vista Adoption

The first social determinant is ethnicity, and specifically the increased purchasing power of the Black community (Chin, 2001, p. 1). The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s served as a catalyst for Black consumerism in areas beyond technology and computers. However, as entertainment has become increasingly technological in nature, so has the need to understand and become proficient in technology.

Simultaneous with the increased income of the Black community has been the rapid technological advancement of personal computers. The purchasing power of the Black community over the past two decades has been especially significant among young Black adolescents, teenagers, and college students. While few studies address the Black community and Microsoft Vista specifically, the measurable increase in Black family incomes — combined with technological advancement that has made computers a product found in most American homes — makes it reasonable to conclude that the purchasing power of the Black community has contributed to the success of the Microsoft Vista operating system.

A second social determinant is that the computer has become an important symbol of contemporary culture (Lally, 2002, p. 2). As Lally notes, computers "are brought into the domestic space as mass-produced objects, but they also provide a point of articulation into the outside world, through the channel that they establish into the home for mass media and other messages" (p. 2).

Computer technology is taught in most schools today, beginning as early as kindergarten. Microsoft's operating system is used by most state and federal government agencies, including schools. Consequently, when children learn computer technology, they are effectively learning Microsoft technology. Researchers Collis, Knezek, Lai, Miyake, Pelgrum, and Sakamoto (1996) observed that within a few months in 1994, popular newspapers across countries as geographically dispersed as the United States, Canada, Brazil, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, China, and Hong Kong were publishing on an almost daily basis articles referring to the Internet, to working and learning at home via a multimedia "information highway," to new computer products such as CD-ROMs, new operating systems, and new types of computer software to support group work and distributed computing. They noted: "We have come to expect that we can communicate with people around the world, at our convenience, in a variety of ways. These of course include ordinary postal service, but increasingly just as likely, are the telephone, facsimile transmission (fax), electronic mail (e-mail), and now, just emerging, new forms of 'telepresence' such as desktop conferencing" (p. 1).

Through the educational system — which trains children as young as kindergarten in computer technology dependent, in most instances, on Microsoft operating systems and their upgrades — young children have become, like the Black community, a new market segment with real purchasing power in the sales of computers pre-installed with the Vista operating system.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Windows Vista benefits from the social determinant of convenience rooted in familiarity. The fact that the Microsoft product comes pre-installed on most new computers is arguably the single biggest factor driving consumer use and choice. On older machines, when consumers update their operating system, upgrading from Microsoft Windows XP to Vista is a natural progression, since choosing a different operating system would require reconfiguring their system and risk losing vital data and work. To that extent, the choice consumers make is less about the product itself and more about convenience — and perhaps what the consumer perceives as a necessary choice, in that they feel they have no real alternative given the costs of switching. This dynamic also illustrates the degree to which "personal computers" have become truly personalized: consumers cannot easily risk changing operating systems once they have grown accustomed to Microsoft.