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Ballmer Calls Vista 'A Work In Progress'
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Apr 20, 2008 10:22 AM
from the truth-in-advertising dept.
from the truth-in-advertising dept.
shanen tips us to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story about comments from Steve Ballmer at a conference earlier this week during which he referred to Vista as "a work in progress." He also admitted that the 5-year release cycle wasn't a good idea. Despite the approaching deadline for the end of XP sales, Ballmer's remarks about the older operating system were more ambiguous: "Vista is bigger than XP. It's going to stay bigger than XP. We have to make sure it doesn't get bigger still, and that the performance and that the battery life and that the compatibility, we're driving on the things that we need to drive hard to improve. I know we're going to continue to get feedback from people on how long XP should be available. We've got some opinions on that, we've expressed our views. ... I'm always interested in hearing from you on these and other issues."
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Microsoft Extends XP's Life By 6 Months 278 comments
hairyfeet writes "Despite Microsoft releasing Windows Vista more than nine months ago the adoption rate has not been as Microsoft hoped. Bowing further to pressure from OEMs and consumers, Microsoft has extended the life of Windows XP, which was due to end sale by OEMs on January 1 next year, to a new date of June 30. Asked if this was an indication of a strong demand for XP, a Microsoft representative sought to downplay the extension, stating 'We wouldn't term it strong, we would describe this as accommodating a certain element who needs more time.'"
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The most expensive... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The most expensive... (Score:4, Funny)
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that was my reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:that was my reaction (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not?
Software is never perfect; releases tend to be when it's "good enough". If you wait for perfection it never gets released. Linux is still a work in progress, if it wasn't there would be no more kernel updates. As long as there are patches then a system isn't finished. MS even released a feature pack [istartedsomething.com] for Vista this week for bluetooth and networking. SP1 improved sleep and startup times. Visual Studio is getting regular feature additions these days, the asp.net ajax stuff is a good example.
When *isn't* something that is still "alive" and used a work in progress? Heck if you shouldn't release work in progress goggle wouldn't have any apps; and putting daily builds/feature based check ins on sourceforge wouldn't happen either.
Disclaimer: I was in the audience; the conference in question was the MVP summit.
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Re:that was my reaction (Score:5, Interesting)
That's exactly what happened with Vista. It simply wasn't ready, and worse, it appears that the backroom way which Microsoft works with major hardware companies even knocked it back a few notches. It's not surprising to me, as I had heard some rumblings long before the revelations a few months ago. The marketers wanted an operating system ASAP, the teams didn't think it was ready, but the marketers won, and now Microsoft's credibility has fallen through the floor. Even worse, for most people, there's no point to the upgrade. As awful as it sounds to the marketers in Redmond, and maybe even to a lot of FOSS fanatics, Windows XP is a stable, mature product that works properly on today's hardware.
But Microsoft doesn't survive on stable, mature products. It survives on its unholy hardware alliances and marketing department, which push for unrealistic (and pointless) upgrade cycles. The problem here is that Vista is a resource hog. They say 1gb of RAM should be enough, but I can tell you that Aero runs, but does not run all that well, on 1gb of RAM. Only now are we seeing what I would consider legitimately sufficient hardware being released that runs the Vista "experience".
But it doesn't end there. Rather than admitting that Vista was a disaster, Microsoft still appears determined to kill XP, despite the fact that most business and many consumers don't want Vista. The only reason the operating system can even be considered a success is because of Microsoft's long-standing darling, the OEMs.
Here's a tip to Microsoft. Keep XP on the shelves. You're stuck with supporting Vista, but maybe Windows 7 will be an improvement, but only if a) you refuse to take hardware vendor's calls when they demand support for their low-end shit and b) fire 9/10s of marketing department, they're the incompetent evil morons that have created this disaster, and they should be shown the door. As well, as a sort of sub-point to that, the developments should always win automatically against marketing demands. Vista may have been released six months late, but you wouldn't have the black eye you have now.
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Re:that was my reaction (Score:5, Interesting)
Worried about the illegal acts your company has been engaged in being leaked to the public? Trusted computing can make it impossible.
Hospital behind on their software payments after those budget cutbacks and the legal system won't help you enforce? Shut them off at the push of a button.
Someone at a news agency release information that compromises the governments position? Revoke the signature key, now it will not play even if someone does try to redistribute. Censorship after the fact.
They put the hardware on everyones desktops quite some time ago, just needs the right software support. That is what Vista is. It'll also be embedded in every set-top box after transitioning everyone away from analog television.
Now, imagine you were a powerful government or among the richest companies on earth, and someone approached you and offered to bring this scheme to reality. How much would that be worth to you? Billions? A place in the regime? All of the above?
Connect the dots.
The general population will not believe this is happening until the pieces are all in place. They can't. It's too big, and it means discarding everything you thought you knew about the way the world works. But it's still happening nevertheless.
The end user? Show them something flashy and keep dropping the price. Get it out there into the market at all costs. Do it while you've still got the influence to pull it off.
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Re:that was my reaction (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:that was my reaction (Score:5, Informative)
I work as a dev at Microsoft, although I've never worked in the Windows org. Still, I know plenty of development people over there and have heard plenty through the grapevine about what happened with Vista.
It wasn't a victory of marketing over engineering in so much as it was a total failure of engineering and management.
Too many interdependencies, poor project management and Windows' notorious 'cowboy culture' ultimately lead to delays and the cutting of big features like WinFS. What would become Windows Vista was supposed to originally ship in 2003. By 2006, everybody knew that Vista had to be completed so that the nightmare could end and work could begin on the next (hopefully better handled) version. There's a saying at Microsoft that "shipping is a feature". Management cut other features so that Vista could just be done with and ship after 5 years of dragging ass.
Once Vista was pushed out the door, marketing came in and did what they always do--advertise and sell the completed product. Marketing doesn't drive engineering at Microsoft like it might do at other companies. These failures were not about engineers failing to fend off demands from marketing, but rather about engineering from bottom to top scaling back an out of control project enough that it could actually be completed.
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Winfs (Score:5, Interesting)
Your last paragraph is the critical one. A 5 year timescale is impossible to manage without having milestones. With a 5 year window, people only start feeling the need to integrate and consolidate after 4 years. No wonder Winfs is always killed: too much effort for not enough feature.
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Re:that was my reaction (Score:5, Informative)
I can well understand wanting to just make it go away, but if development made the decision to ship a product that simply wasn't ready just to get rid of it, it's WORSE than caving in to pressure from marketing.
So let's recap. "Longhorn", the killer new OS that was going to crush Unix under the weight of it's power and features went into the shredder after several years of hard work because they just couldn't make it fly. Then, the new killer OS lost feature after feature in a desperate attempt to get it out the door. Finally they gave up and just released the thing ready or not (mostly not).
So in that sense, Vista is the culmination of two failed projects in a row. Seven years of work and thay can't even replicate the quality level of their last success. Unless they make some major changes internally and get them just right, Windows 7 isn't looking so good...
Of course, really, Longhorn was the "lowered expectations" of "Blackcomb". It may not be fair to call that the 1st of 3 serial failures in that line since they at least had the sense to scrap that one before it got too far.
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Re:that was my reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
#1 Never take away functionality in the new version. You will only piss off people who have come to depend on the features.
#2 If you have a tiered product model, i.e. same software with more features turned on for basic, regular, pro, etc, NEVER bump a feature from a lower tier to a higher one, thus making the upgrade more expensive. This will only antagonize.
#3 In general, the new version should AT LEAST work as well as the previous one. But it SHOULD work better and have a compelling reason for someone to upgrade. Playing the "year as version number" ploy and making people think they have to upgrade when nothing new is offered is LAME. Intuit does this with Quicken now and I think it's even more shameful than Microsoft. At least they wait a few years between Office releases, it's not like we have to buy Office '07, '08, '09, etc.
Vista compares poorly with XP, let alone presenting any "omfg I gotta get it!" coolness for the customer. Epic fail.
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Re:that was my reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
All those people in all those buildings for all those years earning all that money. For nothing. It's a crime. A business crime. Especially as your gnat-size competitor has an amazingly superior product for years which they find a way to grow by leveraging the popularity of a portable music player. And, in the far off distance, Linux desktop begins to be something other than vaporware.
Your fly is unzipped and you've got nothing to show.
It wasn't a marketing victory. It was top management desperation to output anything -- anything at all -- to give the appearance of relevance, stave off stock price drops, and otherwise throw glitter in the eyes of those who might point out the emperor had no clothes.
I'd fire the entire line of engineering staff. Baby and bathwater. Wholesale. Cut the cancer out.
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Re:that was my reaction (Score:5, Interesting)
Quite frankly I've never seen the point. C is a powerful tool that has proven its worth for decades now. There's a lesson in all of this, never buy into your own PR.
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Very simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
It was pretty obvious that in the end they rushed it out for Xmas when it really needed another six months/year.
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Re:that was my reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right in the point that you make. There's absolutely nothing wrong with works in progress. I enjoy when my favorite software gets some cool new features, or companies like Google release neat new products. I expect continual improvements from things like the Linux kernel to enhance support for new hardware.
The problem is that this isn't a "work in progress" in common usage, but rather in PR terms. This is a "work in progress" that leads people to question if it is even ready for its intended purpose yet. As other posters pointed out, this is beta-quality software at best; the bugs are getting in the way of your everyday use of the product, rather than it being ready to roll and new things and enhancements being dropped in later.
Worse, it's a "work in progress" that the company is going to force upon you, with no guarantee that it will be ready even then. The fact that people and business see so little value and/or quality in this product that a monopoly is having trouble getting it out is strong evidence that this was not "good enough" for release. Add to that the fact that they removed all of the features that would have made it interesting and still couldn't hit their release dates and there's an even stronger indication that this product was rushed to market before it was ready.
I don't like Microsoft as a company because of the things they do and the manner in which they do them, but I have no problems with XP; I use it on my laptop and linux on my desktop, so I'm not just a Microsoft hater. But this is silly, and calling Vista's shortcomings a "work in progress" is disingenuous at best.
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Re:that was my reaction (Score:5, Interesting)
No. Neither is it a good idea to mention that Linux and Google won't kill off the version everyone prefers to the newest bleeding-edge train wreck just to force upgrades. It's kind of wrapped up in that whole "not charging" thing.
Microsoft's biggest liability in the past decade has been that they are forced to focus primarily on maintaining their monopoly since they are unwilling, in any way, to compete fairly... probably because they will usually lose. Since maintaining an unfair advantage is completely independent of producing good or desirable product, and Microsoft's worst possible scenario is satisfied customers who don't need to, or want to, upgrade, plus the fact that their _real_ customers are media companies and governments who want unprecedented control of the average user's computers, I don't see any way Vista _could_ have turned out good.
The problem is that they screwed up with XP... its customers are generally satisfied and have no desire, nor need, to upgrade.
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Re:that was my reaction (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The most expensive... (Score:5, Interesting)
At the end of the day, other than a few neat things in the UI, I still don't see the point of it. It offers little or nothing that's all that compelling. It's not like it really runs any of my software any better, and simple things like trying to install Apache and MySQL turn into major headaches.
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Re:The most expensive... (Score:5, Insightful)
You've got a point. A point that Microsoft should really be considering. If you can't get past Alpha quality in six years (people like to talk about Visata's five-year cycle, but six years later, we're at SP1 and it's still not ready), then you need to consider some options:
Like a lot of us here, I'm the "techie guy" who helps everyone with their computer problems. Most of these people are clueless and just nod their heads with blank stares when I try and explain what the problem was and how I fixed it. But now, even these Average Folks are talking about how bad Vista sucks, how they feel burned by buying a PC with it pre-installed, and wanting to know how can they get "real Windows" back.
Fortunately, I've made more Linux converts over the past year than I had in the previous five combined.
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Re:The most expensive... (Score:5, Informative)
I have used Vista. I have given it multiple chances. I even gave SP1 another chance. I can't even get audio to play back correctly without sounding corrupted, although in fairness I blame nVidia for lack of Vista support for my motherboard (nForce 2 chipset with integrated audio). Note that I can hate Vista without it being Microsoft's problem, although I hate Microsoft for unrelated Vista problems as well. Don't get me started about gaming performance.
Vista continually underperforms XP every time I try it, and I have never gotten a virus or trojan on XP so Vista's security features are meaningless for me. There's really no contest here. XP wins out for me easily.
I have uncovered various glitches in Explorer and the OS in general which are usually prevalent in ALPHA QUALITY SOFTWARE which, given MS' track record, are unlikely to be fixed until Windows 7 or at least SP2. Hell there are still glitches in XP's explorer which have gone unfixed.
I should also mention I have wrestled with that same audio corruption problem on and off in XP, and it was gone for a bit until I was forced to install new sound drivers to play GTA San Andreas (otherwise I would get BSoDs at the same point in-game) and the problem returned. However, I have NEVER, not ONCE, had an audio corruption problem in Linux. Drivers were picked and installed automatically and I have never had to give a care about them.
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Re:And if they said this about linux? (Score:5, Informative)
Tagged release/distro = Finished release
There is a difference between always working on a project and releasing crap.
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Re:And if they said this about linux? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:And if they said this about linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:And if they said this about linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux is at its core a community effort, rather than a commercial product (though many have been made from it). As such, it is constantly changing and evolving, and is quite difficult to "keep up" with for most who aren't enthusiasts (Windows version upgrades gives most people a hard time to begin with). There exist shiny, polished distros like Ubuntu and Fedora that are meant to be a "whole product", being almost literally a snapshot of stable, tested software bundled with a stable version of the kernel, but these OSes are generally non-profit or free (as in both these cases).
The core difference between them at first glance is that Windows costs money. Coupled with what Ballmer went on record with in TA, that basically means that Microsoft doesn't consider Vista a "complete" product as yet, but has no problem charging inordinate amounts of money for the privilege of running it. That said, my experiences with Ubuntu in the past have always been a lot more polished than my experiences in Windows, and I would consider Windows to be an inferior product on most days. I still use Windows XP (my X-Fi doesn't yet have a driver for Ubuntu and Wine still isn't perfect), but I doubt I'll be making a jump to Vista "Just Because". There don't seem to be any compelling reasons to make the change (aside from having Aero and DX10 support, the latter of which won't run on my system and the former of which is a memory hog for a decrease in desktop CPU usage), and a lot of people feel the same way - Even Joe and Jane Average.
Another difference between Windows and Linux is that while the Linux kernel itself may be in perpetual development (as is the general mindset of Linux), this is because it falls under a different development model than the Microsoft mindset. Linux' greatest trait is that it IS in perpetual development - Because this is desired and necessary. For Microsoft, it's supposed to be one spit-shined, heavily-tested operating system every few years. A different model; Not necessarily better or worse, but different, more similar to Mac OS and most traditional software development cycles. In this model, however, being in a state of perpetual development is something that is absolutely catastrophic, because as with the XP->Vista jump, more development time is spent fixing holes and bugs in the previous generation of software to bring it up to spec than is spent working on the next big release. This is what we're looking at with Vista, which Ballmer confirmed.
The very fact that most of the more impressive features of Windows Vista (hi, WinFS!) were ripped from it later on in its development stunted its ability to really compete against even its own predecessor, and for me, cast doubt upon its legitimacy as a valid entry in the product line.
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Re:And if they said this about linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Linus made this statement about Linux, it would be within the context of operating systems whose kernels and other low level components have an established history of successful upgrades with minimal negative impacts on userland. However I doubt that Linus would ever make this statement since he rarely casts glittering generalities before the public.
But the statement was made by Ballmer, and needs to be evaluated within the context of Microsoft's history of software releases. Within that context, the statement is clearly a piece of spin doctor legerdemain to cover the damage that Vista does to the userland experiences of those unfortunates who have had Vista inflicted upon them.
I suggest that author of PP sell off his MSFT stock and invest in something with a better future, like maybe a recycling and disposal company. It should be obvious to everyone with a brain that when a stockholder has to take up fanboi behaviors to protect his investment, there is something wrong with that stock.
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Re:And if they said this about linux? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know if I'd call Ballmer a fanboy. He is the CEO after all, and he would certainly know how bad Vista is. If anyone has the right to bash MS, it's him.
I don't think you can complain when he takes an opportunity that's handed to him on a platter.
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Re:And if they said this about linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
is linux not a work in progress?
Yes and no.
YES:
The Linux souce code/kernel is release on release improving, so it could be called a work in progress if you look at the bigger picture - You might draw a comparison by calling "Windows" a work in progress as in progress from 98 to 98se to ME to XP to Vista. Every Windows release has (supposedly - I am not an expert on that subject) a new kernel, architecture updates. Similarly the progress can be shown by comparing the progress from Edgy to Feisty to Gustry to Hardy.
NO:
Every release of the Kernel, and every full public release of a distribution is supposed to be a finished product (excluding testing, alpha and beta releases.) Hence Feisty was a finished product, and Gutsy was a finished product and Hardy upon release should be a finished product. Similarly Win98/98se should have been finished products, Me -> XP -> Vista should have been too.
GREY AREA:
Now, as to your comment quoted below;
isn't ALL software these days not a work in progress?
There is a gray area in the use of the term "work in progress" that lends some weight to your statement. It is difficult to determine how it is used in each scenario - by Mr Balmer and by you - language by nature can be very fluid, it is actually a beautiful thing but I digress...
Defining the term "work in progress" might go as follows:
To say a Linux release is a work in progress could be defined as I used above - but a detractor might say that the constant refining and bug fixes that takes place after release in the OS, and in any OS (a good example are Microsoft service packs), could point to a "work in progress" scenario. Did Steve Balmer use it this way? If he did, then he is essentially saying the following: Linux is essentially just as good and "desktop ready" as Windows Vista is.
However, the detractors of Linux desktop operating systems are continually saying "Linux is not desktop ready" hence it is still an unfinished work, and thus can be said to be a work in progress. Because this statement is used in a comparative sense with Windows operating systems it infers "Windows is desktop ready" and thus should be a finished work upon release. If it were the case that the term was used thusly it would be a bad thing for Mr Balmer to say that about his own product.
software design can respond to user experience and feedback, and move with the times.
Yes. That is quite correct - that is how it should be. However I contend that the five-year release cycle of Windows hinders this a bit. The service packs might smooth this over a bit, but as I see it response to user complaints - with the possible exception of security alerts - is almost non existent. Bear in mind that as a Linux user my view may be skewed - a lot. Would you think that if enough customers/Vista users complained that DRM is not wanted in Vista that Microsoft would issue a patch to completely remove it? I would think no. In fact when DRM is disabled by a third party "hack" Microsoft is quick to release a patch that disables said "hack", pointing out to me that the wishes of the customer does not come first.
Is Vista a work in progress? Okay - then define exactly where the "progress" is needed.
Was it desktop ready when released?
Was it user ready when released?
Was Microsoft satisfied that it was ready for release when it was released?
I contend that it was not completely desktop ready when released - this might in part be due to the slow reaction of third-party vendors to release drivers so let's set that aside.
I contend that it was not user ready when it was released - partly this is because users needed to "learn the software" before being able to use it properly. This is in part due to newer features, not a bad thing, and (arguably) questionable interface design decisions - lets strike that one because it is really a question open to debate in the end.
Did Microsoft think it was re
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Re:And if they said this about linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
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So... (Score:5, Funny)
That's great Steve. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:That's great Steve. (Score:5, Funny)
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Translation, please? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Translation, please? (Score:5, Funny)
Marketing translation: "Like any other release, there are occasional issues, but we're working to resolve those issues."
Real-world translation: "It's buggy bloatware, but it's our buggy bloatware, and if I catch you even thinking about another operating system I'll start throwing furniture again."
Hope that helps.
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Re:Still Not My Native Tongue (Score:4, Funny)
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In Other Words (Score:5, Insightful)
Like a Turd (Score:5, Funny)
5-year release cycle (Score:5, Insightful)
Ballmer is right -- it shouldn't be a five-year release cycle. It should be 10 years. 64-bit is a good reason to have a new release after NT 4.0.
640k or ram is all anyone will ever need... (Score:5, Interesting)
Granted applications have become more integrated thru the operating system improvements but as technology and its use changes from the mainframe to the cell phone, the cycle of programming should be moving from the packrat (use all the memory and resources you can in your application) back to compactness of providing the right functionality only.
Where does this put Ballmers statement?
He is in essence saying MS will remain stupidly behind the times while claiming to be the forefront.
As the user base becomes more and more adapted to computing in a second nature manner, the more and more the user base will perceive the obvious babel of MS and as such move to alternatives for which third party commercial development will not be able to ignore and stay in business.
And we all know from experience that this is not going to happen over night but more at the rate of evolution via human generations, where each generation will put up with the babel less and less.
Leadership... (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista changed a lot (Score:5, Insightful)
-Actual security (UAC); breaking a shed-load of applications that would write to C:\Windows and think nothing of it
-64 bit. It's the first serious consumer Windows that's 64 bit. XP 64 bit is rare at best; Win2003 isn't for consumers.
-New driver architecture. Video, audio, and network driver stack has been re-written from the ground up after nearly 10 years to being more or less the same. New changes are worthwhile too; a bad video driver should (in theory) never be able to bring a system crashing down like in XP, for instance.
All these things had to be done; all these things broke stuff. They are massive and necessary changes, and in the long run will pay off, but in the short run have been a bit of a system-shock.
Things are changing though; but Vista has been as much a change from XP under the hood as 98 -> 2000 migration was in my opinion.
Yeah long development cycles suck (Score:5, Insightful)
The landscape changed a lot between when MS started Vista and when they released it. They were behind the times, trying to play catch-up, and they botched it. I had high hopes for Vista when they were planning it...new file system, powershell, lots of unfulfilled promises. They ended up delivering something that is passing fare IMO but is behind the times, and I don't see them changing the tune with their next release. They are wed to this beast now.
Re:Software "architects?" Ha! (Score:5, Informative)
"The current embassy, which opened July 1, 2004 in the "Green Zone", is being replaced with what has been described as the largest and most expensive embassy in the world. The new embassy has been mired in construction delays, but is expected to be completed in 2008."
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Re:XP SP2! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem being your description of the phrase "it just works" as "mythical" is correct. Even with a limited number of hardware targets to run OS X on (and a relatively small software universe), Apple still can't get upgrades not to screw up on a regular basis.
The real problem, to correct a poster a few P's above is:
"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy all of civilization"(Weinburg's second law).
Despite all of the truly gifted programmers, the wonderful development tools and several decades of experience, computers still aren't toasters (except Pentium IV's of course).
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Re:XP SP2! (Score:5, Informative)
May I present to you my second favorite web site, Mac Fix It [macfixit.com]. Seriously, not everyone has problems with OS X, or XP or Palm or whatever. But as a recent switcher (and I still like Macs and OS X despite the glitches), it's much less stable and problem free than I expected. This is on bolt stock, 99% Apple Certified parts (I added my own HDs to my Mac Pro - they've been fine). Four Mac Books and a Mac Pro (along with a Linux server). The 7.4 Quicktime upgrade hosed Premiere Pro on two machines. I had to back out of the last security fix to get SSH to work again. Now, just as when I was responsible for an XP network, I don't touch an "update" until it's out for a couple of weeks.
YMMV.
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Re:XP SP2! (Score:5, Insightful)
If Microsoft is going to make its users go through that sort of transition, it would have been far better to make a completely fresh start on a better foundation with a compatibility layer for older software, just as Apple did.
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Re:XP SP2! (Score:5, Informative)
I also doubt that Steve meant hardware support when he made that statement. There are more fundamental changes needed.
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Re:XP SP2! (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft does operate a Winlogo program. You know, the 'Certified for Windows Vista' stickers you see on every box at Best Buy and Newegg? If Microsoft isn't operating that with the same 'iron fist' that Apple is, would you say that the Winlogo program is nothing but a marketing scheme to spread the Windows logo on every box in the store?
And enough with the 'wait until SP2' or 'this happened with XP too' excuses. XP came 2 years after Windows 2000. Vista has been in development more than twice that amount of time.
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Basic analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
According to this basic analysis [debconf.org](pdf), debian Etch is an order of magnitude larger and more complex than Vista. And yet it doesn't require this "new hardware" you're speaking of.
In fact in addition to the x86-32 and x86-64 targets Vista aims for it also runs on alpha, sparc, arm, powerpc, hppa, ia64, mips and s390. From the toys [google.com] to spacecraft [linux.com], from webservers [netcraft.com] to 85.2% of the world's top 500 supercomputers [top500.org] it'll run on almost anything. That's engineering.
You have been able to buy PCs preloaded with linux from Walmart [walmart.com], Dell [dell.com], IBM [ibm.com], HP [hp.com] and many others for several years.
So switch. It's time. Ballmer [slashdot.org] says Vista is a work in progress. Gates [slashdot.org] says its replacement is a year out. Let's take their word for it. This is a great window of opportunity to justify looking at alternatives.
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Re:Lies, Lies and More Lies... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Vista isn't the emperor's new clothes... (Score:5, Interesting)
THAT was when they were building a new house from the ground up, and that's when they decided to build the same house pn the new foundations, leaky roof and swinging open front door and all.
Vista is not a new foundation, it's the same basic foundation as NT3, NT4, and NT5 (Windows 2000 and XP). The majority of changes in Vista are just there to stop the end user from running cable from their neighbor's CATV box to their own TV set (or at least figuring out you did it and scrambling the signal). It's not the Emperor's New Clothes, it's the Telescreen from 1984, with the indows logo instead of Big Brother.
And it's got the same basic Win32 house built on that foundation.
And the roof still leaks, it just tells you "Your roof is leaking... do you want to stay sitting under the drips or move to another chair?".
Windows 7 is rumored to be a new house, with a big old storage shed in the back yard with all the bits of the old house packed away in it so you can unpack the leaky roof only when you need it.
We'll see.
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