Microsoft Pleads With Consumers to Adopt Vista Now 912
SlinkySausage writes "Microsoft has admitted, in an email to the press, that 'some customers may be waiting to adopt Windows Vista because they've heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues, or because they think they should wait for a service pack release.' The company is now pleading with customers not to wait until the release of SP1 at the end of the year, launching a 'fact rich' program to try to convince them to 'proceed with confidence'. The announcement coincides with an embarrassing double-backflip: Microsoft had pre-briefed journalists that it was going to allow home users to run Vista basic and premium under virtual machines like VMWare, but it changed its mind at the last minute and pulled the announcement."
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
What about the poor interface? (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't want to sound like a fanboi here, but I'm more excited about the emerging technologies in KDE4.
Windows XP was actually a pretty decent OS. I found on the same hardware it could be configured to run better than Win 2k, it was relatively stable, easy to use, etc.
My biggest beef with XP was how poorly it was configured out of the box.
Given the poor usability issues, poor performance, lack of drivers, application breakage etc, the financial cost, I just can't see a single compelling reason to get Vista.
I used a beta for less than two days and was really put off.
I'll stick to my XP/Gentoo dual-boot, thanks.
People hate change (Score:5, Interesting)
Once again, Microsoft proves that its previous versions are its biggest competitor.
Re:Um... (Score:4, Interesting)
In a brief moment of sobriety, Microsoft will rebuff Windows XP and possibly even release a new variant of XP such as "Security Enhanced XP." That's my prediction anyway... but hey, I was right about Vista being a flop.
Nonono, we don't fear incompatibility (Score:4, Interesting)
What it comes down to is that Vista has no redeeming feature, aside of the forcefully opened incompatibilities with the previous versions. And so far, those incompatibilities don't really strike. For example, DX10 isn't really out the door yet, so there are no DX10 only games on the market.
It's not that we don't want the shiny, we just don't want the ugly. And so far, I see nothing in Vista that really offers any value for me. I don't care about the flashy interface, it's probably the first thing turned off to reclaim at least part of the performance hit. I don't care about the pointless "allow or deny pseudo security", actually I see more harm than good in it. I sure as hell care about DRM and I don't want it. Yes, yes, DRM doesn't keep me from using my old content and "enables" me to use all that DRM crippled junk, but the way I see it, if there is nobody able to see DRM crippled content, DRM crippled content is an Edsel. If people can't use it, people won't buy it, and studios will be forced to pull the plug or suffer even worse than they already do due to DRM. Either's fine with me.
So far, MS failed to show me any compelling reason to use Vista over XP or 2k. So, why shell out my dough for a new system if it doesn't give me anything I want that I don't already have with the old one?
Re:Um... (Score:5, Interesting)
When ME was released, Microsoft had two very-recent codebases to work with--the NT and 9x series. Both were recent, and both had strengths and weaknesses. There was nothing wrong with picking bits and pieces from each in order to meld XP. Not so with Vista. Now they have the Server 2003 codebase and the XP codebase, four and six years old respectively. And Microsoft are trying to get away from the XP codebase.
So now they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, they have this new, shiny, potentially-better platform in Vista, but it is plagued with average hardware support and multitudes of teething problems. On the other hand, they have the old and busted but very compatible XP. If they were to rush out a new OS, they'd have to base it on one or the other. To base it on Vista would be pointless, as Vista will be updated/patched anyway. To base it on XP would be a humongous step backwards, particularly because of all the money invested in Vista. In other words, I don't think they'll come out with a WinXP SE. I sure wouldn't mind the big laugh we'll all have at their expense if they do, though...
Microsoft is losing it (Score:4, Interesting)
Evidence 1: Their fact-rich sheet for "partners and customers" is in fact locked to only computer making companies who sign an NDA O_o. Yes, their "confident list" of reasons to use Vista is actually a secret. That makes me wanna switch to Vista for sure!
Evidence 2: How Microsoft explained that they changed their mind back on virtualization of Basic/Home? "The company said virtualization presents inherent security risks". Oh... My... God... They aren't even TRYING. What kind of damn security risk are we talking about? That people will buy cheap Windows Basic and run it on Parallels on Mac, isn't that the one. Pathetic.
Some things I like about Vista (Score:5, Interesting)
Vista has a few things I could live without (like UAC and mandatory driver signing, both of which I have disabled), but it also has some features that I really miss if I have to use someone's XP box.
And for the programmer in me:
Ok, let's be fair, let's be constructive (Score:3, Interesting)
Many people have MP3 players. A library with an API MP3 player manufacturers can hook into for easy transfer would have offered a lot of value. Interoperability is the current big thing in the home computer market, people enjoy plugging everything and their toaster into the computer, so how about catering to that crowd? A co-op with Nokia or Sony-Ericson would've also gone a long way, with libraries to easily transfer data from mobile phones to computers and back. More and more people have USB drives and sticks, so an easy way to (automatically) sync between stick/external drive and harddrive would've been nice. Or how about a standardized library for photo and movie editing tool makers that allows them to easily suck data from a digital camera, similar to what twain used to be for scanners?
Even if all that and more can be fairly easily already accomplished, it often takes an additional step between raw data and processed, and many people would be happy to eliminate that. Comfort and easy of use has always been a selling point for MS, and with Vista they are definitly moving away from that. And it shows in the sales.
Bad reports of Vista (Score:3, Interesting)
-Lars
Re:MS's greed is there worse enemy (Score:5, Interesting)
I like Channel 9 a lot. It's video interviews with Microsoft employees about the work they're doing in the company. Some of the guys are truly smart, even genius, and have great insight into the way technology works, and will develop in the future.
But some of the videos, on Vista, were very odd.
In one interview, a team of few guys spent working almost 3 years on just the sound volume dialog in Vista. They also said they're just "experimenting with some things" and very far from done.
The WPF/DCE (i.e. the new GUI) team has produced an incredible amount of demos of 3D spinning and "raining" windows, none of which had any practical purpose and none of it ended up in the final Vista builds.
There were a ton of skins produced, just fiddling with the design part, not the technology part, including a "Pro skin", a simpler skin for professionals, before they settled on Aero as the idea and improving that one (for another 1-2 years). They dropped the "Pro skin".
Funny thing is, during XP betas, another "Pro skin" was developed (dubbed Watercolor), and subsequently dropped again. Maybe in Vienna they'll finally ship the mythical "Pro skin", who knows.
The start menu was apparently being in "heavy development" for the entire 5 years of Vista's development, and they had some very hard time deciding how to make the shutdown buttons work. In the end they opted just putting all options in a menu next to the sleep function.
--
Basically, this all started to look like a bunch of (otherwise very smart) developers having no direction whatsoever. The blame for this can only be in the management. I mean: these guys CAN deliver, if given a specific set of tasks to produce, and monitored on their progress in case they stumble in the process. But looks like none of them really had any idea what Vista will end up like and they spent their days playing with the technologies and fiddling and redoing the same things for years.
Truly weird.
And now Microsoft comes and says "proceed with confidence". Microsoft: if we have the confidence to proceed of your developers, we'd be stuck on XP for life.
Vista wanted me to "Validate" (Score:3, Interesting)
First, I called the vendor and started crawling up their butt about how they must have sold me a bogus copy. They tried the "it's outside of our return period policy" line, but I just came back with "Do you really want me telling Microsoft where I got my bogus Vista?"
So they gave me the number to Microsoft's WGA team. Called that number, gave them my story, and they told me I had to "Validate" now. I already activated, now they want me to Validate. So fine, I jumped through their hoop, got the goddamned thing "Validated."
And as if I wasn't already pissed enough, the helpful MS drone told me that if my hard drive died, I'd have to buy a new copy of Vista in order to reinstall on the new disk. My old activation code would not work now. (She acted like this was normal and acceptable to lose a software license due to a hardware failure.) I felt like I must have popped a blood vessel as I "forcefully" told her how I would never buy Vista again, regretted buying this one, and would make it my mission to convert people over to Linux, probably Ubuntu.
Even better than that... (Score:5, Interesting)
And, because I'm not looking at windows while I'm using the programs, XP works perfectly well; why install Vista when it has such outrageous requirements and I'm just going to hide it anyway.
Easier path to take... (Score:3, Interesting)
A) Send developers out to work on site with hardware manufacturers who are having known device and/or software compatibility issues. (nVidia, I'm looking at you...)
B) Redirect internal resources to get SP1 ready by, say, August.
C) Find a way to build an XP style shell on top of the Vista style base. So you get the technology advantages of Vista (like improved app security), but you still look and feel like you're in XP.
Now, to get to why some people are really not upgrading it's cost. So let's address that.
A) Scrap the idea of "same program, with licensing enabling more features if you pay more" nonsense. At the MOST have a home and business edition.
B) Get price competitive. No, I do not mean give it away for free like Linux, but be comparable to what people are paying for OS X. Right now they're still on the Sony mind train of "early adopters will pay anything" and they need to get off it.
C) Take a page from how our government wants to handle illegal aliens. Offer a one-time cheap "Amnesty program" for people with illicit/older versions. "Have a pirated copy of XP, upgrade to Vista and get a permanent license for only $30. Have a legitimate copy? Upgrade for $20. But this ONLY lasts until XX/XX/XXXX..."
Some of step B I have seen already. At the local Fry's you can pick up the "System Builders" edition of vista for under $200, and it's the "ultimate" which I thought was costing upwards of $400. This, I think, was in response to the hobbyists who screamed bloody murder and were one of the most prone to switch to Linux groups.
The problem here is that MS has something along the lines of a DECADE of R&D costs to recoup with Vista. These ideas would cost them money. But at some point they need to ask themselves if they're in this to win it, or in this to milk it as long as they can.
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
Except for the multi-media part there was next to nothing in Vista that I wanted since I rarely play games on a PC preferring console games instead. Ok maybe I am being a bit harsh but I really did not buy the laptop for Vista anyway since my work requires me to have knowledge on Unix and Linux machines and as far as I was concerned I was going to put Fedora 7 on it and virtualise other versions of Linux and possibly Solaris. In addition I normally sell my laptop after about a year so I made up a recovery DVD (2 off) which will enable me to put Vista back on if the buyer wants.
Even though Microsoft is pushing Vista I cannot see any reason for upgrading from XP and if you have seen Beryl on Linux you can have a much more interesting (not necessarily practical but the Wow factor is priceless) desktop than MS Vista. I have put Fedora 7 on my laptop (no dual boot) and I was pleasantly surprised how just about everything on my laptop works including parts of my multi-media controller and the things that don't work I have not put any effort to getting them to work since I don't really need them. I have found Xen virtulisation does work but it is not as easy as Vmware, still it is interesting.
Of course I would not recommend Fedora for a beginner so a distro like Ubuntu would probably be the best one to start with although I have not tried it myself. For those who want to make the move try a live CD then if you like it install a dual boot but (and many would disagree with me) after a few weeks providing you are comfortable then get rid of MS Windows partition otherwise you will back-slide. Gaming IMHO is the only reason for dual booting. If you have a work PC you are dependent on work policy. I do know that HP has a policy of allowing Linux desktops and friends of mine have taken this up.
Rumors? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, and some of us have tried Vista and have first-hand experience with those "rumored" device and application compatibility issues.
I doubt any marketing campaign, no matter how "fact rich," can change users personal experiences.
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:5, Interesting)
Aside from being slow as molasses and able to burn through a laptop battery at twice the rate that XP did, it's recently
decided that I don't have permissions to see the network status.. so all I get is 'connection status: unknown access is denied'.. also making it impossible to see whether I'm actually connected to anything without going to the command line and using ipconfig.
Oh and the wonderfully inconsistent permissions don't stop there. 'ipconfig
Oh and there's the utterly broken file copy. Try copying a directory from one place to another when it requires elevation. It'll do one of two things:
1. Ask for elevation, then when you confirm do absolutely nothing.
2. Ask for elevation, copy about 10% of the files then silently stop.
I could go on for hours... Advice for anyone thinking of installing it before SP1 comes out.. don't bother.
Profit$? Please upgrade..... (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't Do It. (Score:5, Interesting)
- Yes, it's slow. I hear the figure 20% tossed around, but it seems much slower than that compared to XP. My new laptop has exactly four times the RAM of my old one that ran XP, and a processor that is over twice as fast. The hard drive is 5 times larger. Yet my Vista machine seems to run at about the same speed as the old one... and that one had four years of installs and re-installs on it, and an 80% full hard drive. What did I just pay for, again? Needless to say, to maximize performance I have turned off the transparent windows and all the other fancy gimmickry, which make my upgrade even more pointless now.
- When Vista becomes "stressed", such as when I open too many apps, rather than simply becoming slower as was the case on XP, weird behaviours begin to occur. Everything still opens and seems to operate normally. But then the weirdness kicks in, the most frustrating example being the disappearance of buttons and other widgets in dialogues. For example, effects windows will open in Photoshop with all the buttons and sliders that let me tweak the effect. But then when I go to apply it... lo and behold, there is no "Apply" or "OK" button. Just vacant grey space. Fantastic. This happens in many applications, though it does seem to be getting less frequent (maybe those daily patches are helping, hmm).
- When application A crashes or starts running slowly, strange behaviours (such as the missing dialogue buttons mentioned above) will start happening in some other random application B. When I close application A, application B starts working normally again. Annoying.
- When apps start to crawl or crash, and I have to kill them, a helpful "Would you like to save your changes?" dialogue pops up. Of course I would. But sometimes the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons are missing. So I can't save my content. Fine, I think, I'll just select the text in the file, copy it to the clipboard, and in a few minutes I'll open a new file and past it back in. No such luck. When apps begin to crawl or crash, copy-and-paste to the clipboard will not work. Bottom line: you're screwed. Notepad is the most frequent app to display this behaviour.
- I can't print to my printer. It's a common, cheapo Canon. Worked fine from the get-go when I plugged it in to my Mac or my old XP machine, but Vista fails to recognize that any printer is installed at all. Spent a bit of time digging around looking for drivers or settings, got annoyed. Now I just email my files to my Mac and print from there. Welcome to 2007.
- When Vista starts to crawl or crash, and I can't close apps normally, I want to open the Task Manager to kill the offending process. About 50% of the time, however, it won't open, either through the CTRL-ALT-DEL menu or by right clicking on the taskbar. Great. What's the point of having a Task Manager if, when you need it most, it is often not available? Reminds me of Windows 95.
- Every few days, the menus in my IE 7 suddenly disappear. If I right-click on the menu area, the menu pops up and there is a checkmark beside "Menu Bar". Strange. But regardless of whether I check or uncheck this, the menus are still missing. So I randomly check and uncheck some other widgets, like "Links" or the "Google Toolbar". Then I recheck the menus bar. The menus reappear! For now. Whether this is a specific IE 7 issue or a Vista one... I can't say.
- Some mysterious key combination - I believe it involves SHIFT or ALT something - causes the keyboard layout to switch instantly from US to whatever else is installed, in my case Canadian French or Canadian Multilingual Standard. For the first month I h
Shiny == Good (Score:2, Interesting)
But yeah, in the geek/corporate market, it'll flop.
Non-working apps killed Vista for me (Score:5, Interesting)
The big kicker for me was that I was completely unable to use Ulead's Media Studio Pro, which is my video editing software. The laptop has a Firewire port, so that made it a big plus for me to be able to do some editing on the laptop when I'm not at home. Thanks to the new way that Vista talks to the hardware, MSP was useless for all but basic editing. The Preview window didn't work and the audio didn't work, which made it impossible to be able to sync up audio and splice video segments together. Changing the compatibility mode in Vista made no difference.
On top of that, I needed to download a Vista-compatible DVD of Stuido 10 Titanium from Pinnacle's site. It was a free download and it worked fine as far as I could tell, but I'm glad that I have FTTH/FIOS because it was a 1.4 GB download!
There are also a number of other issues with Vista that cumulatively made me decide that enough was enough, like the initial issue that I had where my account would work fine but my wife's account, which I set up as an administrator-level account, couldn't log on stating that she didn't have the rights to log on. (!!!) I bought a 160 GB hard drive from NewEgg, threw it into the laptop, and installed XP. All of my hardware and software are working just fine. And now Microsoft is trying to push me to go back to Vista? They can kiss my ass. It's not happening.
Re:Why Microsoft Fears Virtualisation (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Um... (Score:5, Interesting)
I ran a couple of Vista betas and RC1. Vista's UI (sans Aero) is definitely an improvement over XP but that isn't saying a lot. Out of the box XP's desktop looked like a bag of M&Ms.
What Microsoft has yet to fix is all of the clutter. Yes Vista, I know a new USB device has been plugged in, I'm the one who plugged it in. Great, you have determined that its name is OEM CARD RDR 4-in-1. Now you've installed a drive. Now another. And then two more. Now you are notifying me that my hardware is ready to use. And if there are files on the card in the reader it keeps going. And if the files happen to be photos it is best to just unplug the machine as fast as possible.
Even with a 21" widescreen, desktop real estate (not to mention my attention) is too precious to waste by continuously blitting little messages at me from the system tray. And I'm trying to work up here, I don't want to read about participating in the User Experience Improvement Program.
Don't even get me started about managing focus stealing in any kind of intelligent way.
For my desktop purposes, OSX is well ahead of everything else. Ubuntu's latest release is quite nice, and it finally seems to be improving at a faster pace than the competition. But Windows seems to have stalled out. I haven't enjoyed using a Windows machine since the early Win2K days.
Re:Bad "word-of-mouth" among ordinary folk (Score:2, Interesting)
I have Vista on my laptop, came pre-installed on my Toshiba. It works fine with the exception of needing more RAM, but 1gb of ram was never enough to run Photoshop and Illustrator at once on Windows XP either (let alone City of Heroes and anything else...).
My desktop was another story. My hard drive crapped out and I said what the hell, lets give it a try. My problems with Vista on my desktop had nothing to do with the OS itself. nVidia has no nForce3 support so I had some performance issues with the hard drives, the reason it worked at all is because Microsoft (possibly through partnership) provided a functional SATA IDE driver. My DX1 input pad needed home-brew drivers because ErgoDex can't seem to get 64-bit drivers through the door. My older ATI X800 Pro worked flawlessly though. Long story short, I went back to XP. I PLAN to get back to Vista as soon as I get a motherboard that is actually supported by the manufacturers.
Oh, and that bit about "attending to needs"; try to say that to your average Linux-zealot and see what kind of reaction you get.
We're just not ready for that yet. (Score:2, Interesting)
As far as Vista, there is at this point absolutely zero reason for us to want to deploy it, as far as I'm concerned. The reason I deploy any version of Windows is because people are already familiar with it. Otherwise there are other systems I would prefer to support, because they're easier to maintain -- but they are unfamiliar to people. I deploy Windows XP in many cases because it cuts down on user training and support, because people are already comfortable with it. If I were willing to give that up, I wouldn't be buying Microsoft. So Vista needs to be out for at _least_ two years, preferably three, before I want anything to do with deploying it.
Then there's the situation on the home front. My family is still using Windows 98 SE, and I have talked to them about upgrading, and they want no part of it. As far as my mom is concerned, anything that changes the computer's OS in any way is distilled evil. She was not, at the time, very happy with the move from DOS 6 to Windows 98 SE, even though she only ever learned three or four things to type at the command prompt (none of which she now remembers I'm sure). It has taken her years to learn how to use Windows 98. She doesn't like when dad changes the wallpaper, because she gets confused about where the icons are that haven't even moved. I'm afraid the OS on that computer is almost certainly going to stay the same until the computer physically gets replaced. (Which will probably not be very many more years, but we'll put it off as long as we reasonably can.)
The long and short of it is, we wouldn't upgrade to Vista right now even if Microsoft paid us $100 per computer to do so. Naturally, they'd prefer to charge us for the upgrade. They can go to Redmond. We don't want it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to Vista. There are some significant improvements there, not least UAC. I'll be happy to replace XP with Vista, when it's practical to do so, i.e., when the users are as comfortable with Vista as they are with XP. But that's going to be a while, so chill out, Microsoft. Learn some patience. We've certainly been patient enough with you, listening to your Longhorn announcements for five years or so now, waiting for it to actually materialize. Time for you to return the favor.
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:3, Interesting)
Even without the performance and compatibility issues, DRM is the stopper for me. I've made the decision to not use any product that uses DRM. It goes beyond a simple technological issue for me. The decision to shun DRM is ethical, political.
And I can't see how any product with DRM could possibly run faster/better than a system without DRM, so I imagine it's also a technologically sound decision as well.
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:1, Interesting)
Moving to full interruptability and virtual memory for the GPU is a huge step, but as new GPUs with full support for interruptability begin to catch on, and software moves from DirectX 9 to 10, the benefits will become more and more apparent.
Vista User Here.... (Score:3, Interesting)
At home, I have a 3.5 year old machine. It was beefy at the time: 3.2 Gig Pentium, 2 gigs ram, 160 gig hd, etc. I have replaced the video card, since those tend to go out of style from time to time. XP on that machine was fast. As fast as I'd ever need for daily use. I was starting to need to crank down resolution in games to get acceptable framerate, but that's standard fare in the gaming world for computers getting long in the tooth. I installed Vista. Wow, is this machine a pig. It takes LONGER to boot (clean wipe install), takes forever to do file copies/moves, really creeps and crawls with anti-virus enabled, and popups galore with UAC enabled. It looks clunky, it feels clunky, and it runs clunkily. One would think that a 3.5 year installed XP would be slower than a fresh Vista install: not so.
At work, I have a dual core 2.4 ghz with 120 gig hd and two gigs of RAM. Under XP, it booted in like 10 seconds, but using it for work didn't feel much faster than my home machine. It has, of course, a crap-ass graphics card, but I don't play games at work. I install Vista (clean wipe) and have the same issues as above. It takes almost 3x longer to boot, file copies around the network are painful, even moving files around on the local machine takes forever. Symantec does have a version of their corporate av product, but it will spin the cpu at 100% for 24 hours during a simple av update (not Vistas fault, per se). I've had to run un-manged in order for that not to happen. Scheduled scans make the computer unusable where under XP I could hardly notice anything happening.
I recently recieved a questionaire from Microsoft asking when I plan on deploying Vista to the rest of our environment; my response, "I'm not planning on deploying this software this year or next year." This announcement certainly sounds like Microsoft must have gotten a lot more professionals stating the same thing.
We are buying Vista, though. We don't have another option with our computer supplier. Fortunately, we have Software Assurance on our copies of Vista. This allows one to run OLDER versions of software for which you have a license of a newer product. A license on Vista, we're told, allows you to run XP if you choose. So Microsoft thinks we're running 20+ Vista computers, but really we only have one.
Re:MS's greed is there worse enemy (Score:5, Interesting)
I found it [blogspot.com], and the related [joelonsoftware.com] posts to the menu [joelonsoftware.com] by Joel.
That' far worse than Channel 9 hinted at and apparently a big problem that grew with XP and exploded during Vista. Some comments I selected.
Moishe, the dev who worked on the menu:
The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week.
Also each team was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature [: the shutdown menu].
By the time I left the team the total code that I'd written for this "feature" [in a year] was a couple hundred lines, tops.
approximately every 4 weeks, at our weekly meeting, our PM would say, "the shell team disagrees with how this looks/feels/works" [...] Then at our next weekly meeting we'd spend another 90 minutes arguing about the design, [...] and at the next weekly meeting we'd agree on something... just in time to get some other missing piece of information from the shell or kernel team, and start the whole process again.
Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. [...] the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. [...] it [took] between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes.
Stanely Krute, ex-Microsoft developer:
In 1989 I worked on Windows UI for a brief period. [..] Even then one could see that what MS did to IBM would eventually happen to MS [..] Vista is a bloated baroque thing that adds some kernel security and eye candy at the cost of doubling a machine's RAM and adding a high-end graphics chip.
Anonymous ex-Microsoft manager:
I was a manager at Microsoft during some of this period [..] [There is] promiscuous dependency [, including circular dependencies, ] taking between parts of Windows without much analysis of the consequences. [...] There was much work done analyzing the internal structure of Windows [suv4x4: note they're not familiar with the structure of their *own* OS]
As others have mentioned, the real surprise here is that they managed to ship anything.
Anonymous developer working at Microsoft:
Slavish adherence to the "rules" as a means of CYA, a desire to build kingdoms (people/hardware/process), an inability to adjust as circumstances changed, and an irrational fear of breaking "something" were the real problems with many branches in Vista.
teams constantly harped on BS "rules" as the reason why they couldn't move or make progress. "My PM tells me what bugs I can/can't work on". "I can only check into branch vvv_www_xxx_yyy_zzz - I have no idea if/when my changes will migrate up". "We need a N-week test pass before we're allowed to make a change - there's no way we could do that in any other branch".
Anonymous developer who worked in Vista UI in a small company hired by MS 2002-2004:
Microsoft wanted to avoid some of the problems that cropped up with XP and told us they were going to do Longhorn "right" this time. After years of slaving away to supposed exacting standards of UI elements, the project was pulled from us and (I assume) taken in-house. [..] Now we see the result and I can tell you it is not
Re:Why Microsoft Fears Virtualisation (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:5, Interesting)
The most braindead part of Vista copying? You can't copy from a network share to a local subdirectory -- you first get an elevation, and then it's refused. But you CAN copy from a network share to the desktop, and then from the desktop to the local subdirectory without an elevation. As afar as Microsoft is concerned, it's not about where you're coming from, or where you're going to -- it's all about the journey
DEC: all your network are belong to us
SUN: the network is the computer
Microsoft: the network is evil! EVIL!
Re:MS's greed is there worse enemy (Score:3, Interesting)
You say that like it's a bad thing, but that's not far off from Google's own spectacularly successful unprocess. Not to mention the cat-herding controlled chaos of FOSS development.
Didn't we just spend the past ten years criticizing Microsoft for quashing innovation and discouraging creativity? I'm just sayin'...
Vista not from scratch (Score:4, Interesting)
In the control panel clasic view open Fonts. Hit the alt key to show the menus. Select File => Install New Font...
Notice the style of the dialog box. This is the old 3.11 dialog box style. Notice the drive selection method. Hey, it still works.
Compare this to the dialog box used to select a file in notepad.
Re:....Or not. Some facts here, please (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, I noticed a while back that a Windows XP Pro workstation license that has not been used for a year or two could be reinstalled on a new machine without a hitch.
Re:Microsoft: the network is evil! EVIL! (Score:4, Interesting)
They couldn't replace it with MSN.
All unpatched MS systems directly connected to the Web get infected in minutes.
Web apps are making some desktop apps obsolete.
They are afraid... very afraid.
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:3, Interesting)
- You Apple's BootCamp which sets up a dual-boot for you. It is very easy to do. This lets you run a "real" version of XP/Vista and all the needed drivers come with BootCamp. BootCamp is a free download.
- You some virtualization software such as Parallels [parallels.com] or VMWare (which I think is beta for OS X).
I personally setup both. I dual-boot if I want to play a game that only runs on WinXP. For my VS.Net dev environment with SQL Server 2000, Crystal Reports, SourceOffsite and a bunch of other tools, I use Parallels. Parallels is probably 90%+ the native speed, so my WinXP VM is very snappy. Parallels also has some nice integration features like clipboard works between VM and OS X and bunch of others. Go read the site. Oh, and Parallels 3.0 just came out with 3D support and says you can now play games in the VM! I have the previous version without this feature, that is why I still dual-boot for some games. However, I plan to try 3.0 and see if the game speeds are good.My Intel Macbook is a late 2006 model and it is the Core Duo, not the Core 2 Duo. My iMac IS a Core 2 Duo and there is a nice speed difference between the two procs. If you get a new MacBook, you will get the faster Core 2 Duo now. If you are not getting an iMac and want to use your MacBook for dev stuff, I would recommend putting 2 GB of ram in, 1 GB for you XP VM and 1 GB for OS X while you are running the VM. This lets you do all the stuff you want in OS X while you are compiling and stuff in your VM. Don't buy the memory from Apple, way over priced. Get it from newegg.com [newegg.com], much cheaper. One other thing you can do for the MacBook (or any laptop for dev work) is to purchase a 7,200 RPM laptop hard drive, again, not from Apple. Big difference.
The only problem with the MacBook is the graphics card is an Intel card. It is plenty good enough for your typical laptop and for any dev work. However, if you want to play some games, especially in WinXP, you will have a hard time since most games need a better video card. For a few hundred more you can get the MacBook Pro which has a good ATI or NVidia card in it. I have found it is worth spending a little extra on a Mac. The hardware is very good and looks great and OS X is a joy to use. I haven't enjoyed using a computer this much in years. I am glad I took the OS X plunge 6 months ago.
Oh yeah, VNC works great on OS X and there are two good Remote Desktop clients, one from MS and my favorite, TSclientX [desktopecho.com]. TSclientX requires you to install Apple's XServer which is very easy and comes on your setup DVD's.
Re:Do I need it? ??? No. (Score:5, Interesting)
One of my friends calls me every other day begging me to put XP on his computer because nothing works in Vista, and I've told him he needs to atleast wait until his 30-day warranty period expires, and I don't think he's going to make it. He bought a brand new HP desktop with 1GB of RAM and the GeForce 6150. He only runs two progams, WoW and Picture Publisher Pro 10. Both of them failed right off!
I've wasted two evenings now trying to get PP10 to work correctly including setting the app to run in XP compatibility mode. No good, cursors get corrupted, screen refresh fails, no end of problems. Since this is what he uses for his secondary income, this has to be resolved. The program does everything he wants so "get him to buy a new paint program" is not on the table. He was also loosing his mind to get back into WoW so he's already bought an extra GB of RAM and upgraded the system to a GeForce 73xx series card just to get a barely tolerable frame rate.
Contrast this with my wife who bought the exact same systems spec but with XP preinstalled and the system screams. Games run great, 3-D apps run great. It's like night and day. MS can go screw themselves. They want people to run Vista, they better start sending out some major checks to us "family and friends technicians" to put up with this BS, I don't have time for it and 100% of the time I'm slicking Vista off every computer that comes to me. The real kicker is MS is still profiting off of this because of the people that have to go out and by a copy of XP to make their computer work.
Grumble grumble grumble