SanDisk CEO: Vista Hurts Solid-State Drive Adoption

Reality: Price hurts sales more than any operating system.

In a tech world where Windows Vista is viewed by many an IT director and (smaller) system builder as unnecessary and bloated, SanDisk CEO Eli Harari has made Vista his personal punching bag, blaming slow adoption of SanDisk's solid state drives on the much avoided operating system.

During SanDisk's second quarter earnings call, Harari said, "As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid-state disk."



Bad grammar aside, I'm the first to agree that Vista isn't optimized to run on anything with less than a dual-core processor and 2 GB of RAM, but Mr. Harari is grasping at straws.

First and foremost, it's the price that keeps most consumers from buying anything with a solid-state drive. At the time of this publication, Newegg.com's cheapest SSD was $165 for 32 GB, and its most expensive SSD was over $3000 for a paltry 128 GB! So anywhere from $5 to $23 a Gigabyte, which sounds unreasonable given one can buy regular hard drives for approximately $1.40 per Gigabyte.

Second, despite Microsoft strong-arming large manufacturers into bundling Vista and ONLY Vista with new PCs, Windows XP still retains the lion's share of the market at a whopping 71%, while Vista is creeping up slowly with a mere 16%. I doubt that Mom and Pop chose not to have solid-state drives in their new Dell because of their concerns over Vista optimization.

Finally, a quick search on YouTube for SSD will return results rife with comparisons of SSD and standard hard drive computers performing various functions, with SSD computers booting faster, opening applications faster, and so on.

I suppose loss of profits will make any CEO scramble for excuses, but this is just ridiculous. Lower prices for more capacity will increase solid-state drive adoption rates more than anything Microsoft can do for you.

You can check out reviews for any kind of computer on the TopTenREVIEWS computer review site.

And you might also take a liking to these other blogs:

Creative’s New Zen Mosaic Is a Step Backward

Apple Reports Potential Profit Loss on Mystery Product, What Will It Be?

TiVo Will Start Bringing You Commercials: The Irony is Unbearable

CherryPal and Cloud Computing a Cheap, Viable Alternative to Your Computer?

The Biggest Threat to Internet Security … Maybe