Vista Indicates A Shift in Microsoft's Priorities 499
jcatcw writes "After hundreds of hours of testing Vista, Scot Finnie is supremely tired of it. And of Microsoft. Although 80% of the changes in Windows Vista are positive, there is nothing about Vista that is truly innovative or compelling; there's no transformational, gotta-have-it feature in Vista. But the real problem isn't with Vista. It's with Microsoft itself. His opinion is that Microsoft has stopped focusing on end users. They 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.'"
Yep.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Join the bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
They attempted to improve their security and GUI. Any additional features were already available as third party add ons or with different OS's. Were we really expecting anything else? Time will tell if their attempts were successful. I for one have no interest in Vista other than possibly having to use it at work.
"His opinion is that Microsoft has stopped focusing on end users. They 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy."
Again, no surprise here... Marketing is all about positive publicity and MS recognizes that their bread and butter is evolving into the large, medium, and small corporate entities that are locked into their OS and apps...not the everyday home end user.
Newsflash (Score:5, Insightful)
Like it or not, corporate desktops are Microsoft's bread and butter.
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess they're also trying to sell high-end graphics cards and CPUs, too.
Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
Think Different... (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess this is why Apple is deliberately ignoring the Enterprise market.
Just sayin' (Score:3, Insightful)
Now I'm not saying this [slashdot.org] all came exactly true but if'n you ask me, some serious trolling of blogs for peeved-at-Vista articles is going on
Which makes Slashdot about the only place in the world where anyone cares about it.
Odd logic (Score:5, Insightful)
How can Microsoft simultaneously focus on their large enterprise customers (who have hundreds of thousands of end users) and simultaneously stop focusing on end users?
Second: why would it be a negative to fucus on security and SW quality? Were these not the things MS was criticised the most for --for not focusing on security and quality enough --now this is their bane? What??? Make a straight argument. Or is he trying to say that MS is only pretending to address the issues and their main strategy is really a public relations strategy on security and SW quality?
I get his gist, but he's just not explaining himself clearly. In critizing MS he's using odd logic.
throw that boy some coffee
The thing that really irks me is.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yessiree bob, Apple is looking better every day!
Re:Newsflash (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention the anti-PC Apple advertising that is on the air right now. It's like a political contest - if you don't respond soon people will think the meme is true and stop buying PC's altogether. Particularly because A) Apple is attacking Vista head on and B) the commercials are really funny and easily likeable.
What a load of... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.
Funny, that. I can see how it's bad they don't attract negative publicity and piss off their largest enterprise customers.
But tell me, how do these features fall into any of those two categories:
* New aero candy interface (I bet enterprise customers demanded this!).
* DVD maker.
* Photo processing.
* Live thumbnails.
* Updated Windows Games.
* DirectX 10
* etc etc.
There's a real reason why nobody is impressed with Vista as much: we've been watching it for 5 years. Previews, alphas, betas.
Maybe Jobs is right to sue blog sites that leak product info, and release everything with a ton of hype, of the "Best. Chewing. Gum. Evah!!!".
Because you see what happens now: people who followed Longhorn's development since it's inception are now whining that they're kinda familiar with what's new. Well duh, smartass.
Has stopped? It never started. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's been the case since 2K/XP, and arguably since Win9x and the introduction of IE/ActiveX.
Word and Excel macros on by default? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and all content created by people in the office is trusted!
NetBIOS filesharing on by default in 9x? Of course! Everybody's on a LAN, everyone should be able to share their documents with each other!
ActiveX things that autoinstall and execute when some string on a webpage tells them to? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and the only thing they should be browsing is the company Intranet, and the only web applications are going to be about entering your vacation time into a database of timesheets!
Javashit on by default! Of course! See above -- how else can we be sure to tell those UNIX greybeards that they're fired (because they can't run ActiveX TimeSheet Thingy that the consultant was paid $100K to write) unless they're running IE!
Install IIS by default and make it listen to requests from everywhere? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and wouldn't it be cool if everyone had their own little web server thingy running on their desktop so they could share their Word documents with other people in the office?
UPnP on by default? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and wouldn't it be cool if you just plugged the computer into the LAN, and it automatically knew about the printer down the hall.
DCOM and RCP services turned on by default, listening on ports 135, 139, 445 or 593 for requests from everywhere? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and DCOM makes it easy for people to stick Excel spreadsheets in their Word documents!
Goddamn near every out-of-the-box remote exploit (and most of the designed-in insecurities in IE and the Office suite) arises from the assumption that everyone's on a LAN, and that all content is trusted.
It's like Kevin Costner's Movie "Nowhere to Run" (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows is not secure......Bad Microsoft
Security (a.k.a, User Account Control (UAC) for Trigger-Click-Happy People who click "Yes" no matter what).....Bad Microsoft
Give me a break....Bashing Microsoft just-because-I-hate-Microsoft (a.k.a, Linux fan bois)
is getting too old and childish. Grow up people!
It is a "No-Matter-What-Blame-Microsoft" attitude.
Overall, I think Vista is a gradual evolution of the Windows platform.
That is why, they delayed one of the most anticipated featuresJust like every other company, Microsoft had to make hard Business decisions.
like WinFS because it is NOT ready and solid yet.
In my opinion, Microsoft is focusing on releasing a STABLE OS rather than an error prone insecure OS.
In other words (Score:3, Insightful)
Booohoo, Microsoft releases a secure system! They are doing it only so that they can avoid negative publicity, let's slam them!
And this is a surprize how? (Score:3, Insightful)
The entire publicity was done to get mainstream media's attention and tell the corporate buyers, who buy not 1 machine at a time but 10,000 to 20,000 machines at a time that the change is coming.
The end-user who's sing a PC at home isn't going to upgade his OS until he buys a new machine, and he's taking what they're giving because he has no real choice.
Unless he buys a Mac or is geeky enough to get a Linux box. (That means YOU reading this, and you didn't give a shit what Microsoft was doing anyway, did you?)
Its all being done for the volume buyers.
A very good thing for MS (Score:4, Insightful)
Fast forward 20 years. Everything is in MS Word format, which may or may not work with a particular version of Word, and is much more likely to work with another Office application. We are nearly 100% connected, but if you do not have the MS Windows only version of IE, there are significant web pages that will not work. It now matters that you have the same computer as work, if for no other reason than you can use the office copy of MS Office.
If there was the fluidity of motion of the 80's, then perhaps the MS strategy would be as disastrous as the IBM strategy. However, I do not see millions of users moving from the WinTel machine to something cheaper, nor do I see millions of users who never bought a computer before buying something other than a Wintel. Perhaps a few hundred thousand will buy a Mac, and few hundred thousand will buy a *nix machine, but that is not going to be a short term problem for MS.
Ultimately Vista does what it is supposed to do, which is to satisfy the contract of those that paid MS for very expensive long term licensing, as well as justify the higher cost machines from MS real customers, the OEM computer people. A positive ancillary purpose of MS Vista is to further isolate MS OS from other commodity products, thus making it harder to switch. This is a risky proposal, but perhaps the only way that MS can continue to amass the huge profits on what is essentially old stock. Good for them.
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it goes a little deeper than that - as another reply points out, they are spending buckets of cash on heart-and-minds right now (anyone else notice the slew of Vista ads on slashdot?). I believe they recognise people prefer to use a single system across all their computing, and if they can get Vista in homes, there will be more pressure for it to be running in the office.
Additionally, corperate users are generally slower adopters (or at least should be!) - validation of existing software on new plaftorms, cost/benefit analysis, beta testing etc. And most corp IT shops have learned to wait for SP1 before giving software a good shake anyway. So for now the majority of Vista uptake will be home users. In 3-6 months, the corps will start coming online with their purchases and the balance will swing.
Pay Very Close Attention (Score:3, Insightful)
I keep having this strange dream where most of the governments of the industrialized nations got tired of the myriad of problems they have when one connects a relatively anonymous PC to the Internet and decided to do something like mount a smart card module on a motherboard to generate a unique, verifiable signature (among other things) for each pc.
Just a dream though...
Re:Has stopped? It never started. (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I think they've always had a "not invented here" mentality and for that reason, didn't bother to study the lessons of those who'd been dealing with the internet for ages before it exploded in popularity.
There's a reason java applets (lame as they were) weren't associated with the type of security problems we've seen over and over from MicroSoft. Sun understood the "all incoming content should be treated as hostile" principle and sandboxed applets by design from the very beginning.
I've often wondered why some enterprising bottom feeder
Ummm. enterprise are their customers (Score:5, Insightful)
MS's biggest problem is to try justify all the effort that goes into making something "new" that is not perceived to be new by most people looking at it from the outside. There must be a lot of investors/share holders asking why MS spent $5bn or whatever developing Vista when XP seems healthy enough.
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
Not selling the cards directly, just the revinue from the 'Trusted driver' scheme.
Re:Think Different... (Score:3, Insightful)
i think that the focus on the enterprise is because THAT is where people learn about the computers they use at home.
unless you work with images, video, or music for a living, there is a pretty good chance that you are going to use a PC at work. there is a reason that apple runs those "i'm a pc and i'm a mac" commercials... apple wants people to equate PC's with boring work stuff.
the only hole in this whole thing is, of course, games. directX 10 is a vista exclusive... a clear indicator that while the enterprise side is where MS's bread is buttered, it's games that keep them alive at home. i would imagine that this is why bootcamp is such a big deal for apple.
Um, excuse me but (Score:3, Insightful)
Focusing on end users (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is exactly what an operating system maker is supposed to do. End users don't use an operating system, developers do.
If Microsoft finally starts giving developers priority over end users, Windows might actually become something useful someday.
Re:The thing that really irks me is.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you rather try to pick out the right Linux distro? A comparison would be 300 pages long and have a 10,000 point venn diagram, filled with obtuse technical jargon not fit for consumption by the masses.
Re:Newsflash (Score:3, Insightful)
The aim should be improving security and software quality, not trying to make it look like you are improving security and software quality.
MS-Basic ?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lack of Enthusiasm (Score:1, Insightful)
I think what the author meant by no huge breakthroughs, was that all of the big breakthroughs that were promised (WinFS, database filesystem, etc.) were scrapped. Microsoft touted and planned on a huge makeover for the Windows operating system, hoping to do a big change to the core of the OS ala Mac OS Classic to OS X. It proved to be more difficult than they had planned, so they scrapped all of their big plans and went with WinXP with a rework of the gui and tweak to the way it handles file permissions.
The reason people aren't going apeshit over the Vista, is that it's nothing really new. It's just XP with a facelift. It looks pretty, has some nifty new widgets...err, gadgets, and uses twice the resources at idle time. In short, all of the original big promises were dropped, so all of the big expectations were dropped as well. It's all ho-hum now.
Re:Newsflash (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. Making large corporate users happy is the same thing as making CORPORATE IT DEPARTMENTS happy. It's a different kettle of fish.
What sorts of things do corporate IT managers want?
* Standardization
* Security, especially protecting data.
* The ability to set policys, and lock the users out of policy-violating actions (such as installing new software)
* Ability to push required patches/updates out to users quickyl and efficiently
* Ease of recovering from outages/problems
* Easy back up of files.
* Secure communication and collaboration tools.
* Make my employees more efficient--make it easier to find and use tools and shared data.
Basically, make it easy to maintain, secure, and don't let the users do anything I don't want them to do.
What do end users want?
* Ability to get news and information
* Entertainment, be it DVD playback or streaming audio.
* Communication with friends via a potentially diverse array of protocols
* Play the latest games and work with the latest peripherals.
* Share video, pictures, and other content with others on demand.
See the difference in the lists? One of the reasons Apple is doing so well in the consumer market is that they focus on the second list (well, except games per se, but that's a different topic). They focus on what individuals would like technology to let them do.
Re:What a load of... (Score:3, Insightful)
Every one of the features you mention falls into the "avoiding negative publicity" category.
Microsoft needs to keep Windows up to date on eye candy / included basic functionality so that they don't get smoked in reviews compared to Mac OS X (and even Linux desktops). The minor effort that it required for them to add a 3D UI and "live thumbnails" was more than worth it so they could bullet point those things on a feature list.
As for the DX10/Games thing, that's more of an Anti-feature. Updates to Direct X are normal as graphics cards improve. The news here isn't that Microsoft is releasing a new version of Direct X - that's normal, the news is that they're *not* releasing it for XP. It's not that the Vista users are winning, they're getting the status quo. It's that the XP users are getting owned.
Re:Nonsense (Score:1, Insightful)
Stop me if I'm wrong, but the "largest enterprise customers" are end users.
STOP You are wrong. The largest enterprise customers are a handful of PHBs who may or may not actually use a computer. They do have a nice pen that signs those big checks for Microsoft.
The people in their companies sitting at the computers are indeed end-users, but don't confuse the desire of end-users of Microsoft with the desires of those who are the enterprise customers of Microsoft. The customers's decision making is based more on how tasty that steak dinner was in Vegas.
Re:Ummm. enterprise are their customers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If MS really cared... (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree (Score:1, Insightful)
Microsoft is very focused on end users. Yes, corporate desktops are a large segment, but there are millions more citizens than office lackeys, such as people who have a computer at home but would never use one at work--construction workers, janitors, blue-collar workers, etc. Vista Home Premium has many personal user options--an improved Media Center, Windows DVD Maker, a new version of Movie Maker, and more. Do you think that Aero was made for business users? Business users generally don't care about the GUI, save for maybe personalizing the desktop. I keep my office PC on the default themes, not loaded with extra themes and whizbang graphics effects. My home PC, now running Vista, is much better looking than XP and is visually appealing.
I think Microsoft is trying to make money ultimately. To make money, you have to a) have an appealing product, b) avoid negative publicity, c) have a product that works, and d) have happy consumers. Any market segment that gets marginalized will hurt profits. With the amount of money Microsoft has, I doubt they decided marginalizing home users was worth focusing on the exclusive large enterprise market. I am pretty sure they can afford both.
Re:Has stopped? It never started. (Score:1, Insightful)
But if it ain't broke, nobody buys the upgrade.
If you run Windows properly you can still use it in 20 years to write text documents and make fancy drawings.
As it's now 2007, we want an OS that feels like 2012 so that when 2012 arrives we're ready to upgrade again. For a lot of users, in 2002, Windows XP felt like 2007 in terms of stability, features, etc. Even Windows NT feels usable today for people who just do the same work day after day for the last 10 years.
How can one say Microsoft is really targeting the enterprise? Many companies are still running Windows 2000. If the enterprise is such a big goal, upgrades would be sweeping the land.
It appears rather that Vista is a mere stepping stone to the next version. If it ain't broke, no one will buy the upgrade so Vista can't be the be all and end all.
What does 2012 feel like? Will people have giant monitors or an array of monitors? Are they finally going to be able to communicate their commands through voice or pen as well as they can to another person? Will your own personal hard drive and applications be accessible from ubiquitous public terminals or handheld devices? Even if the implementation is clunky, I would like to see some of that futuristic ilk in Vista.
Instead Vista appears to create fear in the user, not from hacker attacks but from information that may be acquired surreptitiously to prod users about software payments. A Trojan horse of a different stripe. So if the argument is that Microsoft is programming to sell to corporates, that idea is bang on the money.
Corporates should upgrade their OS, but maybe not this version, which is a mere harbinger that they'll have to keep their systems clean. This version may be more secure, but the next version should have more goodies. Besides Vista right now slows everything down and ought to have better performance in future editions.
3) Lock us all into DRM hell (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:It's like Kevin Costner's Movie "Nowhere to Run (Score:5, Insightful)
Security (a.k.a, User Account Control (UAC) for Trigger-Click-Happy People who click "Yes" no matter what).....Bad Microsoft
You aren't paying attention. The criticism is directed at the poor implementation, not the fact that it was implemented.
Re:If MS really cared... (Score:2, Insightful)
Kris: Vista is a bare bones operating system; additional functionality such as Internet Explorer is available in the Microsoft Plus pack; or alternatively, you can download Firefox...
User: Huh? How can I download a foxy fire if I don't have my interweb?
Kris: Off a magazine cover CD, possibly; or...
User: [interrupting] What about Macs? Do they have interwebs? I want some interwebs!
Kris:
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:2, Insightful)
FUD. A creaky old iMac will run the latest Mac OS (which you can buy in a box at my local computer store, just like Windows, but cheaper) perfectly well.
Re:Newsflash (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is in a major bind with piracy - they MUST make it easy for large-scale, unattended corporate installs. This means no serial number to punch in every time, and no major verification routine. As long is this is the case, pirates (aaaarrr) will just snag these installs and run with them. When you're trying to get something like 50 million corporate installs, your bread and butter, going all streamlined and easily, you're never going to be able to adequately protect against piracy.
At the same time, the harder they make it to pirate windows, and the more people have to upgrade to even do it, the easier it is to "pirate" Ubuntu. Which, with every passing version, adds another couple % of people onto the list of "does everything I usually need to do". That % is nowhere near 100% yet, but it covers a sizable chunk of the largely computer illiterate "email and interweb" crowd. And it's almost easy enough for them to pirate at the moment. Have you seen install.exe [ubuntu.com] yet?Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
all those old XP drivers wont work if you want DRM.
No one wants DRM.
Re:Has stopped? It never started. (Score:1, Insightful)
Now that they're starting to focus more on security they're blasted for not doing enough for end-users. Blasted for not doing enough for security in the past. Blasted for... pretty much everything. I'm certainly no MS fanboi, but it seems that somebody's gonna complain up a storm no matter which direction they go. If other OS's out there are as good or better than Windows for the majority of users who aren't techies then let's see it. But I don't see how anyone seriously complain about the features in an OS that has dominated the market as a direct result of their implementation. Seems to me MS got it right (their general popularity pretty much speaks for itself) and because they're on top everyone's gotta poke em with a stick. Who cares about how MS implemented Windows 98 anyway? That was close to a decade ago!
Re:Newsflash (Score:3, Insightful)
Most end users also pay for Windows. It's called the Microsoft Tax for a reason.
So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Vista contains quite a few very nice new features, volume shadow copy(sure novell's had it for 15 years, but not on the desktop), bitlocker(sure you could do that with third party apps, or if you configured it reasonably well, linux, but whole drive encryption is still pretty new, especially having it work in an efficient manner. Even the DRM is about as "innovative" as operating systems get(that's not to say it's a good thing, but not all innovation is good).
Most of the truly innovative technologies in Operating Systems are really low level, new file systems, new kernel designs, new process schedulers, emulation, etc. We haven't really seen much innovation in any of these things in a number of years, certainly not anything that just changes the whole way we do things.
ReiserFS is just another way of looking at journalling file systems, not a major new step. GNU Hurd has been working on a microkernal design for nearly 20 years and it's still not ready for prime-time, Microsoft has been working on WinFS for a long time too, and maybe eventually they'll have it, but not this time.
In essence Vista is what 2000 was supposed to be and XP almost was. It's a reasonably functional and reasonably secure multi-user operating system from Microsoft. One which is relatively secure, but which can still run most of the programs you want to run on it. Yeah, it took them 10 years to get there, but if you think of what things were like in the NT/9x days, where you had to choose between an OS which wouldn't work at home(and didn't even always work in the corporate environment) or an OS which was about as secure as a sieve, we've come a long way.
Re:In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
Spending six years and six billion dollars to achieve little more than a (debatable) improvement in security and a glossy but irritating GUI is wrong.
Imagine what a company that cared about its customers could do with those resources.
No change, really. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not exactly a revolutionary observation. Ever since the PC entered the corporate market Microsoft has been this way. The "end user" has been nothing more than a cash cow to be milked.
Re:In other words (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you serious?
While Vista and IE7 may or may not have the problems that you indicate, I disagree with your reasoning. This application failing to install does not indicate anything about stability of Vista operating system. Further, nearly any browser can be made to take 1 GB of RAM and 99% of CPU time. I'm a regular Firefox user and experience occurrences like those detailed in your screenshot every few weeks. However, none of this provides any real detail about either Firefox or IE7. I do not think that the information that you provided substantiates any meaningful judgment of Vista and/or IE7, particularly in terms of stability or security.
Either this is a great example of what FUD looks like, or I'm a real dork for being had by a troll. (I'm a dork anyway, so it doesn't matter.)
Re:In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:MS-Basic ?? (Score:5, Insightful)
QBasic was one of the first languages I ever played with. For me it was just a toy, so I didn't need it to be tremendous -- but as a toy, I actually thought it was a lot of fun (that's why I taught myself C ;-)).
I think Microsoft's biggest mistake wasn't anything they screwed up with the language per-se, but hiding it on the Windows CD instead of giving it to everybody in the Start Menu! Imagine how much more computer literate everyone would be if their OS shipped with an easy-to-use programming language visibly installed! I'd argue that it'd do more than increase understanding of computers; playing with logic I will swear actively increases intelligence.
Programming is great fun. People need to get into it before they're too old or they won't see it. It'd be like expecting a 40-year-old to play with Legos... (We get the creative spark trained out of us as we age. I'm trying desperately to hang on to mine! [Got any pointers?*])
*(I can see those jokes with punchlines like '0xd3adb33f' coming from here already!)
Anyway, Windows needs a dead-simple BASIC or LISP or whatever, with a dead-simple graphics library, and some cool little example programs with source, and it needs to put them all in a folder on the Desktop with a good searchable helpfile. The world needs more Legos.
Re:In other words (Score:3, Insightful)
I do agree with Bob.A above about the image. My sniff test involved looking at the programs shown in Task Manager -- this guy is running everything under the sun (Photoshop, Apache, BT client, WinAmp server, Dreamweaver...and on and on and this screenshot only shows about 25% of the programs running on his system). I think he was deliberately trying to make it croak and probably had 76,000 RAM-intensive windows in IE7.
I'm going to dislike Vista as much as the next geek but there is no sense in lying about its faults.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, no, we have not come a long way. Perhaps it is correct to say that Microsoft have come a long way, but nothing more. MS are just now implementing features that were commercially available in the bad old "NT/9x days" from other OS vendors. The truth is, we've basically tread water for a decade waiting for MS to catch up, while watching MS (unethically, if not illegally) strangle better technologies the whole time.
Re:In other words (Score:3, Insightful)
The "Vista" we see now is a step for Microsoft. Let's look at them for just a minute not as "corporate jerkoffs" but as the "special kid" in the class.
A sampling on what that hard spent development cash was good for:
-UAC: at least they took a clue from the rest of the community by utilizing the principal of a strong user / non-admin account.
-New IE7: Time will tell, but the new feature of running in a low-rights mode in zones other than "Trusted" is another step forward.
-Firewall upgrade: Incoming AND outgoing! Finally they grasp the concept... Plus the stronger grp policy tools for it.
Is something better than nothing? I suppose. Are people purchasing this "freshmeat OS" simply morons? I suppose. In the end is it still far too early to render final judgement? Yes.
Re:Yep.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Newsflash (Score:3, Insightful)
AFAIK, it just gives an "allow/deny" prompt, by default anyway. users will simply treat it as a click-through and it will have basically no effect.
what they should have done is have it prompt for the password (similar to what ubuntu does). it makes them (some of them anyway) think for a moment before giving their password.
granted, there is an option for the latter, but it should do that be default.
Re:Urinal Ads (Score:3, Insightful)
Advertising on the scale of Vista, though, seems like a huge waste of money. I think everyone who's likely to buy Vista already knows what it is, and that it's available now.
Just the hardware requirements alone mean that 99% of customers will not and should not buy the upgrade. It's just not cost-effective to buy the $99-$270 upgrade, get new memory and a new video card and still be stuck with your old computer.
I notice that it still costs about $850 to buy a "Premium Ready" computer that will run Aero. One thing Vista will do is to increase average selling prices for PCs by quite a bit, since I can't see people getting excited by the features in Vista Basic.
D
Here's a comparison.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
What you see here is Microsoft slowly boiling frogs.
The main reason for Vista (or any MS Windows/Office release) is so that Microsoft won't end up "Yet Another Windows XP Compatible Vendor" just like the BIOS market - lower margins etc.
If Microsoft didn't keep introducing new APIs and try to force people to migrate to Vista for DirectX10, people would gradually come up with viable compatibles for DirectX9 and Windows XP. You can already see signs of that with Cedega and WINE.
If Microsoft waited too long to change stuff, a lot of people might go, hey I can still use this WinXP Compatible O/S for my stuff and I don't need all that bloat and DRM. And then it's bye-bye high profits etc.
If people would just think long term and kept telling Dell, HP etc, and software vendors (games) that they don't want Vista and stick to XP for a while longer, then there's hope for change and after that _real_ innovation.
But I don't see much hope for that - hardly anyone listens to me
People will switch to Vista just because Dell/HP/IBM/OEMs preload it, even though Vista has significant disadvantages (DRM bloat etc) and mostly insignificantly improvements.
Re:In other words (Score:2, Insightful)
i can't see any feature that actually makes vista distinguish from xp. i would be willing to bet that apart from bundled consumer/game related purchases nobody is going to clamour to get their hands on vista. xp already ladens my machine with stupid loads from buggy and bloated system software i don't see any point in bloating it any more.
at my work they still run win2k. in 2001 i was using nt3.5 in a government department and at that time the military was still running win3.1. i really don't see major take-up of corporate use with vista, the only market they may get something out of is the computer game market and microsoft fans. everyone else is not gonna go shell out some several hundred dollars for a trivial amount of improvement and if history is any indication, 2 years of nasty internet worms exploiting its weaknesses. the market is already wary of microsoft's 'new improved' label for it's new releases. it boggles my mind that in 5 years microsoft has achieved exactly zero. id software could have done all of the 'improvements' in vista in about 3 months.
it sorta reminds me of the recent 'upgrade' of the dbms in the place i work at. so far no benefits, and insoluble bugs that 6 weeks of live operation has failed to address. no improvements in usability and the most incredible array of mindbogglingly stupid bugs and, in actual fact, losses of features.
what the hell is going on with software development these days? have all the good programmers sworn off working for large corporations and do custom programming for small companies which sell hardware that utilises good software? i am very puzzled. i have not yet seen a machine running vista but frankly, i only started using xp a year after it's initial release and it was painful for 2 years before it became something i wanted to use. i switched back to win2k for about half of that period of time, but by the end of the 3rd year of release xp became good. imho microsoft should have just thought 'extend xp' rather than 'reinvent the wheel' xp is the best windows ever, after 5-something years.
excuse my long post but it boggles my mind that vista isn't in any way compelling. why did we not get winfs? what about improving security? how much of xp did they rewrite during this, it's pretty obvious to me that they must have rewritten half the OS when it was already working.
Re:Um, excuse me but (Score:3, Insightful)
This means that, for the most part, the end-users in the enterprise are generally *not* the customers, which leads directly to the issue raised in the article. Namely, that MS is focusing on their (corporate) customers, and all but completely ignoring their users.
Re:In other words (Score:4, Insightful)
> What you see here is Microsoft slowly boiling frogs.
You know that doesn't work, right? The frog eventually does jump out of the water. If you extend the analogy to consumers, raising the heat too much does in fact make them leave.
> If Microsoft didn't keep introducing new APIs
> [...] people would gradually come up with
> viable compatibles for DirectX9 and Windows XP.
Wasn't five years long enough? XP came out in 2001, DX9 in 2002, why couldn't the industry produce compatible alternatives over that five year period? Doesn't it seem reasonable to conclude that a market which couldn't produce alternatives in five years is not going to produce them at all?
Microsoft are constantly innovating. A day doesn't go by that we don't have thousands of people looking at our products and saying "how do we make this better?" - because that's our job. That's not going to stop. Even if we wait ten years to produce an upgrade, we're going to be innovating and improving for that entire ten years. So if the industry does happen to produce a clone of our current generation, we just have to look back and find the last RTM-quality build. Then we dump it on the market, and your alternative immediately becomes obsolete. You may as well have never had one at all.
Copying other people is a road to failure. It doesn't lead anywhere else. It's the major reason companies don't want to go open source, because their competition could copy them more easily, and the open source community has a huge body of very intelligent explanations as to why this reason is STUPID. Copying doesn't work. It's a bad business model. It doesn't serve consumers.
Besides, why would I buy a cheap copy of Windows instead of the real thing? After all, you get what you pay for - or, more precisely, you pay for what you get. What am I not getting when I buy this cheap Windows clone? Clearly I'm not getting SOMETHING, or it would cost the same.
> hardly anyone listens to me
I'm listening. I have roughly the influence of a hemorrhoid, but I'm still listening.
Re:In other words (Score:3, Insightful)
1. All of your software is installed
2. All of your devices are configured
3. All of your personal preferences are set
That's about as non-intrusive as it gets. I'm also rather worried that so many people who are, apparently, considered qualified to review software in this industry - can't seem to figure out that the first week or two on a new system IS NOT NORMAL USAGE.
Re:In other words (Score:2, Insightful)
Bashing Microsoft is fun and all, but you have to consider the fact that nVidia's latest drivers are quite possibly some of the most abysmal things to ever come out of the company and some of the faults you encounter could be attributed to those or other drivers you may have installed (it's poor that Microsoft included dodgy drivers but they have to work with what they're given, right?)
In the event that people hadn't noticed, I feel obligated to point out that almost everything is released incomplete these days and then patched up to speed. There's always several issues that miss the release and with a project on the scale of Vista you really can't seriously expect it to come out perfect. That doesn't mean Microsoft shouldn't aim for perfection of course, I really hope that they do, but if it's not met exactly within the first couple of months it doesn't mean the system isn't ready for a wide variety of people, it's just apparently not ready for you.
I'm not going to pretend that I think Microsoft is god, I'm well aware that the company has serious shortcomings not least of which lie in their copious layers of management and willingness to treat all their customers like criminals with their anti-piracy schemes, but a one sided argument is never fun. You can find faults in everything if you look hard enough, even your dreams of perfection, and people tend to focus on the negative more than the positive - news sites don't gain readers by raving about how Microsoft 'did it again!' when they could rave about how Microsoft 'screwed it again!' and get a better response.
On the subject of visual style, it really is a matter of perspective. I think Microsoft went overboard with the effects and that the dark colour for the task bar was a horrible mistake, but at least they provided a way to fairly easily disable those. Personally I can't stand those theme programs that obliterate the UI and replace it with some form of highly detailed, dark and distracting piece of artwork yet some people appear to adore them - there really is no accounting for taste, one man's trash is another man's treasure and so forth. I think their user interface design is going slightly backwards though, while presentation is very important you'll find time is more so, wasting it with animated appearances will only lead to excessive frustration on the part of the end user. In short, expecting Aero to be fantastic for everyone is silly and it's only natural that some people dislike it, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing; especially if it paves the way to a better version next time.
Re:In other words (Score:3, Insightful)
My brother-in-law is a 6 year veteran tester at microsoft (FTE not contracter) on the Vista project and his Vista advice was, to quote "leave it alone, it sucks and is not worth upgrading to", he also questions "what exactly have we been trying to work on for the last 5 years?" and has explained to me that of the 3 original pillars for Longhorn, which would've made it innovative, only 1 one made it into the product and that was the GUI - in a reduced form.