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.'"
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:5, Interesting)
If they are not interested in the everyday home user then why on earth would they be currently in the middle of ploughing through half a billion dollars woth of mass market TV adverts trying to convince people to go "Wow" when they first see Vista?
Couldn't have put it better myself (Score:5, Interesting)
New Vista Audio Tweaks (Score:2, Interesting)
"Vista redefines the audio landscape, but is it a landscape of forced obsolescence?"
http://pc.ign.com/articles/759/759538p1.html [ign.com]
In this blog there is video about how the audio stack in Windows Vista has been rewritten so people can have per-app audio control.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=116
I don't have Vista and am not in a rush to get it, but I think perhaps in time there could be more benefits to Vista than meets the eye. Certainly the 64 bit security functions don't seem exciting but if they block remote code execution then that's something to like.
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes!
I've been waiting for WinFS for like 12 years now. I thought, this time for sure! But no. Maybe next decade.
"largest enterprise customers" (Score:3, Interesting)
Fast forward to 2007. In order to install the current version of Exchange you pretty much have to become a directory services expert. You need to know Active Directory pretty well, and basically be at the MCP level of Microsoft-brainwash. Sure, this is great if you're running something like Ford Motor Company and you have 100,000 users at dozens of locations, but what if you're a small to medium business and you just want to set up a basic mail and calendar server?
Disclaimer: the reason I know about this is because I'm involved in the development of Citadel [citadel.org], an open source groupware server. One of the things we focused on was making the installation as easy as Exchange 5.5 used to be. That's my "full disclosure".
Re:It's like Kevin Costner's Movie "Nowhere to Run (Score:1, Interesting)
is getting too old and childish. Grow up people!
And assuming everybody who disagrees with you are "fan bois" is mature?
Overall, I think Vista is a gradual evolution of the Windows platform.
Just like every other company, Microsoft had to make hard Business decisions.
Apple threw away their OS, and then changed architectures. That's a hard business decision.
What hard decisions did Microsoft make? Cutting WinFS? Congrats, I guess. But if you want to survive for long, you have to be known for delivering, not cutting.
That is why, they delayed one of the most anticipated features
You misspelled "a dozen".
In my opinion, Microsoft is focusing on releasing a STABLE OS rather than an error prone insecure OS.
So the reason Windows 95 was error-prone and insecure is because in 1995 Microsoft was focusing on delivering an error-prone insecure OS? Good thing they changed their focus, then!
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:5, Interesting)
Or remember Enron saturating the airwaves with ads for their new bandwidth commodities market? How many of the viewers were really commodities traders? I think it's just a "show of force."
Is Microsoft really trying to accomplish anything or spread any message, or simply maintaining their larger-than-life image?
Re:Here's a thought (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft cares more about their revenue stream... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's like Kevin Costner's Movie "Nowhere to Run (Score:5, Interesting)
This took Microsoft over SIX years to send out. People aren't saying it's not a gradual improvement, people are asking why the hell it took Microsoft SIX years to make such gradual improvement, how long its going to be before they make their next incompatable "gradual improvement", and whether or not Microsoft even has an R&D department. Most of the things they did were very clearly innovated by someone else.
-Security's a problem? Let's create something that will let us blame the user. (UAC)
-Games going to other OSs are a problem? Let's rewrite an incompatable DX10.
-Third party drivers for video crads are crashing our driver model? Let's just gimp the third parties so that they can't and do it ourselves. (Bonus for gimping OpenGL.)
-GUI/useability is a problem? Let's just slice and dice some Linux and OS X elements.
The problem is not that Vista is incremental in change, it's that its incremental, it took six years, and Microsoft is forcing the incompatability anyways.
Re:In other words (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, look at this error message you get when installing Apache on Vista: http://cse.unl.edu/~mpeters/Site/lulz.html [unl.edu]
IE7, which forms one of the cornerstones of Windows Vista, also suffers from some pretty serious problems. Here's a screenshot showing IE7 consuming 99% of some fellow's CPU time, in addition to over 1 GB of RAM: http://www.allsorthost.com/is_ie7_ment_to_kill_my
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:4, Interesting)
My thought when seeing those was it was more geared towards potential investors. If you've never heard of the company you're less likely to buy stock in it yada yada.
Of course, that is just what popped into my head when I tsaw the ads, so it could be completely wrong.
Re:Ummm. enterprise are their customers (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked in retail once. We sold Office 2003 for $199 NZD. We made about $14 per copy, so we stopped selling software. The computer industry in general never gave retailers much in terms of margins. Laptops etc. would make sometimes less than half of what other products would at the same selling price.
Still . . . if you don't stock it, that's $14 in someone else's till. Well at least that's what my boss always used to say. I told him it's not worth the time and effort for $14. Software and IT weren't really our clientele anyway.
[Insert a story that goes on and on about a guy who works in a retail store here.]
So the moral is . . . if you work in retail (or in my case, an independent retailer belonging to an appliance group), then don't stock software. Bananas, bonsai trees, and corrugated iron sheets also don't seem to belong in retail, but I found that out the hard way.
M$ started focusing on 'the enterprise' with WinNT (Score:4, Interesting)
CIOs and Micro$oft have been an evil combination. CIOs gain authority by fielding systems that have some sense of 'business case' but that require expensive tech support staff. Windows moves capabilities away from end users and to CIOs and corporate overhead. End users get stuck with problems that only CIOs can fix, but the CIO -never- has to pay for employee downtime when the computer goes south. In the meantime, the Microsoft monopoly grows, and no CIO gets fired for buying Microsoft, no matter how bad the crap from Redmond is (and there has been some -real crap- from Redmond.)
This clearly started with WinNT's focus on 'the managed user experience' and was obvious to me by 2000. So I'm only surprised it's taken others so long. Geez, and they talk about -Steve Jobs'- reality distortion field!!
dave (they get my Mac when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers, -or- they indemnify me against all of the delay, downtime and inconvenience of the alternatives...)
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:3, Interesting)
"...This reminds me of some ads I've seen "BASF... We don't make the things you buy, we make the things you buy better." Remember those? It was like they were purposely saying, "99% of you within the sound of our voice, we don't care about you... you can't even choose to buy our products or not, because they're everywhere in everything. To the other 1%... look how much we can waste on this - that's how big we are."
I disagree. The purpose, in my view, of adverts like this is purely to spend money on advertising. Lots of money.
They're spending monay on apparently pointless advertising, but what they're actually buying is leverage.
"What? You're going to run a story about a chemical spill at our plant in NJ / boardroom shenanigans / etc etc etc...? We'll might have to re-examine our advertising strategy!".
Much like the dead tree games mags of old, the big advertisers of today never seem to get a bad write up.