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12/11/2006: "Vista will create new jobs?"

TG Daily in a recent report states that Windows Vista will create 100,000 new jobs. This is apparently being reported by a report from IDC. Unfortunately, IDC has a reputation for churning out reports specifically taylored to their sponsors, and this one is no exception.

Throughout the report, one very basic economic fallacy is being made, most commonly known as the broken window fallacy. Simply put, the parable used to introduce the fallacy claims that breaking windows is a net economic benefit. In the report, IDC trumpets that mass adoption of Windows Vista will "create" 100,000 new jobs and pump dollars into the IT industry.

While that may be true on the surface, there is no way to ascertain where those people would have been working and those dollars would otherwise have been spent if Vista was not adopted. There are some significant changes in the Vista OS that will cause porting efforts for companies that want their products to stay compatible with the new OS. It also has much higher base hardware requirements, meaning many new computer purchases. Unfortunately, the consequence of these two items alone means that less effort may be available to produce new software, and more money spent on both purchasing hardware that otherwise would not be necessary, and on disposing of the old unusable hardware (since it is becoming expensive or illegal in some places to just throw out computer equipment).

Obviously, at least some (and probably a large part) of the economic activity apparently "created" by Vista would otherwise be directed at other activities, most of which would be considered to be more productive efforts. Whether or not Vista is a good or better operating system is actually completely irrelevant to both the IDC report and this discussion.