Vista is having a tough time in the education sector. BECTA have pretty much given it the thumbs down and now there is an emerging debate as to whether Microsoft’s claims that Vista will deliver significant energy savings are correct.

Rising electricity costs have pushed up the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of PCs at a faster rate than increases in educational funding. Microsoft freely admit that TCO and electricity prices are ‘key factors for enterprise customers’, so proving Vista’s green credentials will be vital if they want to ramp up educational sales.

Microsoft say that Vista will deliver significant TCO savings because of new features Hybrid Sleep, Superfetch™ and Power Event Monitoring which reduce power usage. However, Microsoft hedge their bets by saying that power usage is much more than the operating system and is more influenced by a PC’s components and the programmes used.

The concept behind Microsoft’s argument that Vista will save power and lower TCO is contained in an internal document titled Windows Vista Energy Conservation. This sounds authoritative, but even before the end of the first paragraph the author(s) start making sweeping generalisations such as ‘many organizations instruct their employees not to turn off their machines at night’. Really? At a time

of near hysteria about global warming and energy prices, very few companies we have spoken with would ever be so profligate. The subtext to this claim seems to be that corporate IT departments want PCs switched on 24/7 to help with upgrades and software patching. Maybe, but we would bet that 80% of the patches and updates that need to installed on networks come from Microsoft in the first place (these used to issued every Wednesday, but now come out in slightly less frequent but larger bundles).

To make matter worse, the document then relies on a study about PC power usage conducted by the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory back in 2002. Not only has technology changed significantly in the last five years (the iPod had just been launched and Skype didn’t even exist) but energy prices have skyrocketed. EDF Energy’s website says that the cost of electricity in the UK ‘doubled between January 2003 and December 2005’.

Microsoft claim that a kilowatt of electricity costs £0.0475014 (using prices from 2006) and that an average PC draws 102.2 watts. Pump these numbers through Microsoft’s complex formula calculations and they claim that Vista uses £40 per year less electricity than XP and other OS (and produces half a ton less of greenhouse gases per PC). However, when you factor in the costs of a UK academic licence (more expensive than in the US), then even with less energy use by desktops (but not laptops), we doubt TCO will fall or that institutions will ever be better off before Vista’s successor, currently called ‘Vienna’, is released in 2009.

Perhaps of more immediate concern to Microsoft will be BECTA’s review of their educational licensing model, focusing on whether it offers value for money and meets the needs of UK educational institutions. With BECTA recommending that schools don’t upgrade to Vista or Office 2007 for the foreseeable future, we suspect their relationship with Microsoft is unlikely to improve when this new report is published mid-year.

It seems poor old Microsoft can’t turn a trick; rival Apple has advised owners of iPods not to install Vista as it may damage their devices and be incompatible with music purchased from iTunes. With students being one of the largest groups of iPod users, this is unlikely to make many rush out to buy Vista. Microsoft say they have fixed the problem, but Apple advised users that rather than waiting for Microsoft, they would fix the problem themselves by upgrading iTunes.
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