Microsoft Should Abandon Vista? 1119
mr_mischief writes "An editorial written by Don Reisinger over at CNet's News.com takes Microsoft to task for the outright failure of Vista. He suggests that Vista may be the downfall of the company as, despite years in development, Vista was delivered to market too early. His suggestion? Support those who are running it, but otherwise ditch Vista and move on. 'Never before have I seen such an abysmal start to an operating system release. For almost a year, people have been adopting Vista and becoming incensed by how poorly it operates. Not only does it cost too much, it requires more to run than XP, there is still poor driver support ... With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around. If Microsoft continues down this path, it will be Vista that will bring the software giant to its knees--not Bill Gates' departure.'"
Freaking flamebait articles. (Score:4, Insightful)
On the one hand, I'm not touching Vista with a 10 foot pole until service pack one at the earliest. On the other hand, any self-professed Ubuntu/Mac guy is not who I look to for advice about Windows.
Yea, it sucks. Yea, included DRM sucks. Yea, their goddamn "Allow or Deny?" stuff is flat awful. Slow file copy, etc, etc. Hell, I'm not even sure if I like anything about it.
But I'm not going to run out and buy a Mac! I don't like the fricking hardware, frankly, and since you have to buy the hardware to use the OS, screw it, I'm not using the OS. And even if I did, the software is still not there, and don't say "bootcamp" like it means something. We've been able to dual boot in linux forever.
And as for Linux, I already USE Linux. If I could use it to run all the software I need to run, I'd toss my Windows machine. So far, that's not happening. I don't see it happening any time soon; WINE is never going to take up the slack, so it's all down to the software manufacturers. Unfortunately for me, one of the software manufacturers I need to start doing Linux versions of software is Microsoft, and that's about as likely as Bush raising taxes.
So no, I'm not happy about the situation. I don't think ANYONE is happy about the situation except irrational fanboys who think that this is going to be the end of Microsoft, completely missing the point that the alternatives are no more attractive today than they were five years ago because the goddamn software is still not available!
Second Edition (Score:5, Insightful)
Make it a logical step from XP so that companies needn't retrain their employees.
Re:Huh? worst start? (Score:3, Insightful)
DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had to trouble shoot computers with it on there. I repeatedly found myself wondering why they had changed things that were so simply on XP to be so complicated on Vista.
Microsoft won't "drop" Vista, any more than they "dropped" their most horrible other operating system - Windows ME *cringe*. They'll just move on. They've already wrote the system. They'll keep updating it. The real question - the critical one - is how long they will support XP. They'll need to continue to support XP until they get a system out that is an actual improvement, and not just a corporate-ass kissing piece of crap.
Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
Feature bloat and reform. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure we're just heading into something of a reform in the world of operating systems. I think that Vista is going to be just one of many casualties of competition. In the end, I feel the users will win.
No! It doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's being bundled with home computers, and your average Joe is NOT going to know about the problems. If he's lucky, he may have a friend who recommends staying with XP for now. But for many, many people, they'll just buy 'the whole thing' from PC World and be running Vista.
Like a lot of things Microsoftish, it may not be a running success out-the-door (Zune, Xbox), but it'll slowly get a foothold until more and more people start using it. Vista is here to stay folks, and in five-or-so years, it'll be the dominant OS. Microsoft won't support XP forever.
(Posted on a Mac mini!)
Doesn't make sense. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft can't be sunk by people choosing XP over Vista. Those people are still paying for a Microsoft OS. Congratulations, you've decided to give Microsoft money instead of giving Microsoft money.
A lot of things could someday sink Microsoft. People choosing to buy one of their products won't be it.
(Unless one of those products somehow combusted and burned down a pack of orphanages, resulting in worse publicity and lawsuits.)
Nah, it will work out ok. (Score:5, Insightful)
Guy goes to an astrologer and he looks at the horoscope, does lots of calculations and says, "Jupiter is in the same House as Saturn. And Saturn will stay in that House for 7.5 years. All through that 7.5 years, you will have misery and misfortune. Your wife will leave you. Your son will usurp your house and throw you out. You will lose all your wealth and fall sick. You will be miserable for 7.5 years."
The guy, visibly disturbed asks, "What happens after 7.5 years when Saturn moves out of the House of Jupiter?"
The astrologer shrugged and said, "You will be used to the misery."
Same way, in three years the miserable performance of Vista will be defined to be industry standard fast tracked and approved by ISO and users will use 4GB of RAM to browse the internet.
duh. (Score:2, Insightful)
The corporate lifecycle (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt Microsoft will take Don Reisinger up on his suggestion, if for no reason other than sheer arrogance.
Companies kill me, it's a corporate lifecycle that we see again and again, and very few seem to learn from it. Once a company gets so big, it gets it in its head that it's invulnerable. It thinks that it can do anything it wants, and people will flock to it because it's the latest and greatest offering from the King of the (Whatever).
We see it now with Microsoft and Vista. We're also seeing it from Sony on its Playstation 3. Sony thought, "Of course people will buy the Playstation 3. It's a Playstation, for crying out loud!" Anyone remember when Hayes thought that they had the modem market locked up tight? Or when IBM didn't treat clones as serious competitors?
Usually, companies like this end up either going out of business, or at least eventually become relegated back down into the fray because they stop asking themselves, "What do our customers want?" and become totally focused on "What do we want?
I see the same thing happening before too long with Apple and its iPods and even Google, which as recently announced that it's going to start running image and video ads and plastering ads on its YouTube videos. Once a company starts thinking about its own interests over that of its customers, it's the beginning of the end of that company's dominance.
Of course, who knows? They might eventually pull a Nintendo. Go into a slump for a few years, learn from their mistakes, and come back out swinging. Historically, though, that is rare, and we are talking about Microsoft here.
Hyped too soon (Score:5, Insightful)
MS should've followed Apple's playbook. Release the OS according to it's already delayed schedule, let early adopter screw with it, but don't force the new OS on people who simply want new hardware.
Great article! (Score:4, Insightful)
"With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level.."
Of course! It makes such sense!!
This article is unmitigated crap, and I'm typing this on a MacbookPro, so I have a bias towards agreeing with the idiot.
Re:DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
Vista added support for content that already has DRM, which isn't nearly as "invasive" as your trolling/ignorance.
Re:Vista is less important than Bill Gates... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is that and also the fact the guy in charge of development is throwing chairs. Not something to be done when your system is called Windows
Seriously, while some nay sayers might be right they are often proved wrong in the long term. I am not moving to Vista, because I have no need and I seriously have to ask myself what went so seriously wrong. I am suspecting a certain arogance and disconnect with the user base. History has shown us that Microsoft seems to get it wrong every other release and then sorts it out. The way I see it is that people who want to use Vista will and those don't won't. Sure its an obvious statement, but it is one that seems to need repeating so often.
Just another "jump on the bandwagon" article. (Score:5, Insightful)
As a software developer myself I realize the fact that OS's are large and complicated and they all have some issues. I use Linux, I use OS X, and I use Vista. Each has their own merits and their own problems. The problem is that now, just like it was popular in the 80s and 90s to hate IBM, its popular to hate Microsoft. News writers see this as a bandwagon they can use to get articles read and website hits. The real fact is that Vista has no more problems than any other OS at this point in its life cycle.
I truly wish that for the good of all of the tech industry, people would see that every piece of software, and every OS has its place. Vista does a lot of things well... It just happens to have a few flaws and a few "features" that just seem to go against the grain of the most vocal people in the geek world (i.e. DRM) and thus we see articles like this that are ridiculous and inflammatory simple for being as such.
Silly little diatribe (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Unlikely (Score:4, Insightful)
Except "incremental improvements" don't generally require a lot of additional support. What do you do when Joe Blow has pretty much figured out how to use Windows? What do you charge for then?
Re:Progress (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me upgrade now!
Oh Please. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Windows Vista is that the hardware has not yet completely caught up with the potential of the OS. Just wait till 2008, when machines with 4 GB or more of RAM become more commonly available and graphics cards that support DirectX 10 are more widely available.
Re:MOD UP! (Score:5, Insightful)
Tech-writers are like gold fish... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not to say that Microsoft couldn't suffer losses in this generation, but it would be more about the presence of strong alternatives than their failure to adopt a 'move on' strategy.
What's really interesting about this /particular/ FUDy article is how quibbly it is. He appears to have three major complaints: the pricing scheme, specifically of the Ultimate edition, the UAC(and specifically, that it doesn't like a specific unnamed third party app which we're assured is from a 'well-known software company'), and DRM. We're not talking about blue screens and security holes here.
There is no compelling reason to move to Vista, and it seems obvious that waiting for SP1 is probably the right move for anyone who wants to upgrade. That doesn't mean that this OS won't succeed, however, and it's shown marked improvement on many counts since launch. Can we just call this FUD and "move on"?
Re:DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
It's no ME (Score:4, Insightful)
My main problem with Vista is that it is a resource hog. As far as I have seen, it isn't a flop in terms of capability like Windows ME was. The problem MS has is that standard computers are designed for low price. Most models still come with a gig or less of RAM and second class CPUs. On those machines, Vista doesn't run well. On a high-end dual monitor machine, it runs well.
The biggest problem they face is that a computer that runs Vista well still costs quite a bit of money. Leaving aside the obvious complaint that people don't want to waste so many resources on the OS no matter what they have, I'd think that waiting is the best bet for MS. Following Moore's law, it won't be too long before bargain PCs are fully capable to run it. Then, I think it would catch on better.
Re:Unlikely (Score:3, Insightful)
MS could even tier their tech support and charge (way) more unless working with someone with current certification.
Vista is Microsoft's New Coke (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes the new product flops. New Coke and the Sony PS3 are well known examples. Automobile models from major manufacturers flop regularly.
The problem for Microsoft is that they now have only one main OS product line. When Windows ME flopped, they had the NT product line almost ready for consumer desktops, and could afford to kill off the DOS/Win3.1/Win95 product line. This time, they only have one offering in the desktop/laptop OS space.
This is certainly fixable from the Microsoft side, but they need to recognize that they have a serious problem and fix it.
Cluestick to Microsoft: Focus on Fundamentals... (Score:5, Insightful)
- A way to customize the File Open dialog box, with the folders you constantly use, gasp!?
- Expose. Enough said.
- A built in spell checker / Dictionary / Thesaurus, with quick access to wikipedia
- A search that isn't broken (Thx WinXP!)
- The ability to re-locate, (or hide) the dam 'close' button
- Title bars that stop sucking up valuable screen space, instead of being small movable tabs like in BeOS
- Virtual Desktops
- An OS that gets FASTER from version to version (again BeOS)
- A proper KILL command -- I'm admin on the dam box, let me kill that process.
- Unified widgets/gadgets: NO, I don't want seperate run-times for Yahoo, Google, Apple, Microsoft, insert flavor of the month company because they decided to do their own implementation.
- A home folder without spaces that doesn't move with almost every version of windows.
- A file system that doesn't suck. YES, I want to be able to start my filenames with spaces for sorting purposes (Thx Explorer. NOT.) have my filenames contain colons, end with a period or question mark. And treat the underscore as a virtual space, so we don't have to quote filenames in our command scripts. A way to "tag" files, so I can visually see BOTH a heirarchy, AND flat filesystem.
- Config files that can be moved from system to system instead of hiding everything in the bloated registry
- Free dev tools would be nice.
- Stop rebooting my dam system everytime you update system software. Or at least give me notification/icon that a reboot is required BEFORE installing.
All I want is an OS that doesn't suck... is that _really_ too much for a programmer to ask?
Re:duh. (Score:2, Insightful)
Real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Whatever (Score:1, Insightful)
Great my 1680 x 1050 monitor can't play HD content, I don't care about it. Oh wait I have a 1080P Plasma TV to do that. Give me a DRMless option to use that may run like xp.
Strip the DRM out of the OS and get rid of the fluff, and it may be as good as some of the linux distributions, to me once they went with DRM in the OS I knew it was going to be slow. I don't want to run 4 gigs of ram , 4 procs , and a $500 video card just to get a decent user experience.
I am sitting fat dumb and happy running Fedora with quad core and 2 gigs of ram. It does everything I need it to as well as run XP in a VM just in case I need the odd Windows app that don't run right in Wine.
MS needs to get off the high horse and come to the table with a decent OS , to me Vista is the new ME. Hopefully it will die and the Next Os will be as strong as Xp is. Or maybe service pack 1 will remove all the stupid crap they loaded into Vista. I had to remove it from a laptop HDD just to install Fedora , since the Vista boot manager didn't like my install.
Re:Huh? worst start? (Score:2, Insightful)
All businesses SEEK to become arrogant (Score:5, Insightful)
"The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do in reality.... I thought it was part of my uncle's way of talking. But I've learnt differently since. The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that will presently be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy. You buy up land upon which people will presently want to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments, and so on, and so on.... I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to jail. Now I know that any one who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!"
The process has become somewhat moderated by antitrust laws, but the dynamic is still the same.
The phase in which a company produces good, useful stuff, and sells it to pleased customers, who are happy to pay money because of the value the product delivers... is just a temporary phase which all companies yearn to get past. It's just a ploy to expand market share in hopes of getting to the big payoff. The big payoff comes when the company is so dominant that it can stop pretending to be nice, and stick it to their competitors, their customers, and any meddling bureaucrats that have the nerve to try to regulate them.
Companies want to reach the stage where they can be arrogant, like Microsoft. It's not an aberration, it's what every good company is trying to achieve.
We've lost sight of what an OS really is... (Score:2, Insightful)
So, with this in mind, look at some of the 'features' in Vista - most, if not all, of them are outside the "OS" paradigm and are just marketing driven bloat designed to (A) drive sales or (B) force retention.
Now with that out of the way, if anyone needs me I'll be reading my email under BeOS. :)
Re:Cluestick to Microsoft: Focus on Fundamentals.. (Score:2, Insightful)
- A way to customize the File Open dialog box, with the folders you constantly use, gasp!? Available in Linux
- Expose. Enough said.Available in Linux
- A built in spell checker / Dictionary / Thesaurus, with quick access to wikipedia Available in Linux
- A search that isn't broken (Thx WinXP!) Available in Linux
- The ability to re-locate, (or hide) the dam 'close' button Available in Linux
- Title bars that stop sucking up valuable screen space, instead of being small movable tabs like in BeOS Available in Linux
- Virtual Desktops Available in Linux
- An OS that gets FASTER from version to version (again BeOS) Available in Linux
- A proper KILL command -- I'm admin on the dam box, let me kill that process. Available in Linux
- Unified widgets/gadgets: NO, I don't want seperate run-times for Yahoo, Google, Apple, Microsoft, insert flavor of the month company because they decided to do their own implementation. Available in Linux
- A home folder without spaces that doesn't move with almost every version of windows. Available in Linux
- A file system that doesn't suck. YES, I want to be able to start my filenames with spaces for sorting purposes (Thx Explorer. NOT.) have my filenames contain colons, end with a period or question mark. And treat the underscore as a virtual space, so we don't have to quote filenames in our command scripts. A way to "tag" files, so I can visually see BOTH a heirarchy, AND flat filesystem. Available in Linux
- Config files that can be moved from system to system instead of hiding everything in the bloated registry Available in Linux
- Free dev tools would be nice. Available in Linux
- Stop rebooting my dam system everytime you update system software. Or at least give me notification/icon that a reboot is required BEFORE installing. Available in Linux
All I want is an OS that doesn't suck... is that _really_ too much for a programmer to ask? Available in Linux
Re:It's disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
Drivers and kernel aside, Vista changed one huge thing: through UAC, people can no longer write files to Program Files.
It's shocking how many programs did this in the first place. Almost every game in existence writes saves to their folder in program files. For work, I'm forced to maintain 10-15 different programs which allow the users to view "documents" (that's an entirely different story) - and half of them copy the file from the temp folder, to another temp folder... in Program Files.
Vista is trying to be secure. And, if you run Vista and Vista only, it is secure. Other big Microsoft products (MSSQL, Office, Visual Studio) all run happily - as a guest user. Admin to install, guest to use.
Sound familiar? It should. This is slashdot. We all use Linux, right?
So Microsoft comes around and says, "you know, enough of this, we're going to make the OS stable by preventing unauthorized programs from writing files where it shouldn't" - and everything dies. Dies horribly.
Microsoft has many sins upon their heads, in the software realm. However, countless program incompatibilities because software designers have no clue what "multi user" really is - is not Microsoft's (direct) fault. Vista was in beta for an extended period of time. Then they pushed an open beta. It's not like they made these changes behind closed doors and shipped it.
The day that the complaints will stop is the same day that the third party developers get a clue how to design a program around the fact that they can't always write files everywhere they please.
It could be a while.
Re:Oh Please. (Score:5, Insightful)
Win98 to Win2k was a great upgrade. Suddenly, I didn't need to reboot every few days. And it supported multiple processors once everybody got their act together on drivers. And stuff.
I just finally upgraded to WinXP at home, largely because WinXP handles hyperthreading properly and I have a hyperthreaded CPU and because I figure it'll last slightly longer in the market than 2k since I'm avoiding Vista.
But before that, I was running XP at work and 2k at home and noticed no real difference other than a few bits of eye candy.
Vista was doomed as soon as they realized that all of the really innovative features weren't going to work out and dropped them... so it ends up being a few fairly marginal improvements and a bunch of features that nobody wants.
Re:Freaking flamebait articles. (Score:1, Insightful)
err...how is that MS's fault? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:sigh (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that so many of us are sick of being snakebit by MS, having them tell us how great their OS is and then spending the next eight months trying to get used to it. I'm trying to think of something, anything that I couldn't have done on an XP (or even Win2k) box and I can't think of a one. However, I don't make the purchasing decisions. Ideally, in a user environment, I'd virtualize everyone or run them from a term server and call it a day.
Regardless, there are performance problems with Vista, and it's not all about Aero either. I seem to remember some fancy nonsensical arguments from MS about streaming audio not too long ago.
ME had no chance (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually Windows 2000 Pro was MS greates OS (Score:3, Insightful)
I am glad you brought up the fact that everyone here (and elsewhere too) bitched about XP. I recall TONS of articles & discussions asking why XP was slower on the same computer compared to Windows 2000.
The only reasons I switched to XP from 2000:
1) Much better USB support
2) Remote Desktop built in
Otherwise, there was not anything in it I cared about...
I still turn off all the XP GUI crap and using Windows Classic to keep my Windows 2000 interface (or close to it).
Re:Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
The OS itself is becoming less and less relevant---to have a company spend billions on developing a NEW one is mind boggling. Look at how quickly Apple caught up in this business; without putting in nearly as much effort as MS!
Re:Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vista is less important than Bill Gates... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think Vista is the end of the company. The problem is that the software engineers are the second-class citizens of Redmond, and it's the marketers and the strategists who rule the roost. The dev teams certainly knew Vista wasn't ready, and delayed it as long as possible, but because Microsoft's long-term strategy absolutely requires a major operating system and Office upgrade every five years, and the delays were already fouling up The Plan.
It does create the rather unique event that Microsoft has generated its own major competitor. By folding to the demands of major manufacturers like Dell on continuing to allow OEM licenses of XP to be sold with new machines, they essentially ave created a situation in which Windows XP and Windows Vista are actually in competition with each other. If XP was like, say, Windows 98/ME and Vista was Windows 2000/XP, then Microsoft wouldn't have this problem, because there would be clear technical and feature merits. But XP is sufficiently mature, sufficiently well-supported and sufficiently popular that it actually directly stands in the way of the Vista upgrade path.
I'm not sure this has ever happened to a major software vendor before. Most other operating system manufacturers are as much in the service industry as in the licensing and distribution industry, so if someone sits around still using a ten year old operating system, you make your money with via support and maintenance contracts. You really don't expect systems to have a lifetime of just four or five years, so you build a business model that permits you to make $$$, support your R&D and keep the shareholders and customers happy. Since Microsoft has never been a support-oriented company, but rather a shiny widget company, they don't have that sort of model, and I think, after twenty years, they may be reaching the economic limit of their business model.
They haven't made the case for upgrading. They clearly haven't convinced a lot of peripheral manufacturers to pull their driver teams off of other projects to make Vista high priority. Computer manufacturers, at least for the business consumer end of things, are the 800lb. gorilla.
In the long run (over the next two or three years), I'm sure Vista will pick up the slack, but what has got to be filling guys like Ballmer with fear (and ought to be concerning Wallstreet) is what happens in four or five years, when the next Windows comes out.
Re:Freaking flamebait articles. (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux is FREE, you don't have to shell out your life savings in order to get it and use it effectively.
This is a really tired and lame argument in favor of Linux (FREE as in BEER). Only a moron would choose an operating system because it's free (as in beer). If Linux cost as much as Vista did and Vista was free, I'd still use Linux. For a lot of reasons, but for one thing, it runs on EVERYTHING-- a 15 year old PC, Mac hardware, the Power PC chip in my networked drive (Kurobox). When I need to automate on one I can write a script that will run everywhere-- write once run everwhere works for me and I don't even need Java. Then again, I like the command line as it allows me to do a lot of stuff in parallel. And for another thing, it's pretty darn reliable and I can easily make it conform to my workflow rather than me having to work around bogus assumptions (as is often true on the Mac), or buggy & inconsistent design (as is often true on Windows).
Choose Linux when it's BETTER, not because it's FREE (as in beer)...
Re:leave it alone!! (Score:5, Insightful)
How the hell did that get so many views?
Re:Freaking flamebait articles. (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft is not NEARLY at that point yet, and there are few indicators that they will be. Hardware manufacturers are certainly not giving up driver development for XP, but that doesn't translate into them launching new development for OSX or Linux, because they still don't necessarily see a return on investment.
I think they are there. I'm not saying Microsoft's OS dominance is threatened yet, but I think that the Vista problems have contributed to vendors/developers questioning whether Microsoft's dominance will continue in the long-term view. Dell has started selling desktops and laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed. AMD is opening the source for the ATI graphics cards. More and more governments/organizations are using open document formats instead of MS Office formats.
So it's happening already. There are questions about how far it will go, how quickly, and whether Microsoft can reassert their lock-in in these areas, but progress is already being made.
Re:woa wooooaaaa woah (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe, maybe not (Score:4, Insightful)
Not true. Vista is quite capable of "competing" in the same way that all Microsoft software has always competed with higher-quality software from competitors: Microsoft's marketing budget is larger than the marketing budgets of all its competitors combined. This is what made MS-DOS the instant success it was over the much better (at the time) CP-M. It's what made MS Windows more successful than the better Apple and unix (X-Windows) offerings.
Microsoft has understood from the start the lesson that IBM (their initial funder) pioneered in the 1960s and 70s: If you have a big enough marketing budget, it doesn't matter whether you have a quality product. Computer customers mostly can't judge quality; they buy entirely on "reputation", i.e., marketing.
Consider the piece of crap that were Windows ME and Windows 2000. They did just fine, despite the long list of quality problems reported in the tech media (but never noticed by 90% of the buying public). There's no real reason to believe that Vista will do any worse. All it takes is the right marketing, and Microsoft has the budget to do it.
I'd love to be proved wrong, but
Downfall of Microsoft? NOT! (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean Microsoft released an operating system before it was really finished? It costs too much? Requires "more" than their previous OS (I'm guessing you mean resources)? Poor driver support?
NO!!! SURELY NOT! - That has NEVER happened before! Well, except for the last time they released an OS...oh, and then there was that time before last too...and the time before that...
No. In order for Microsoft to be "[brought]
Re:err...how is that MS's fault? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Huh? worst start? (Score:5, Insightful)
For most of the life of MS Windows, the product has been a hack. It was intended to provide added functionality to MS DOS. As MS evolved Windows, MS bolted on more bloat to compete, for instance MS Windows for Networking. Therefore MS Windows worked not unlike those old jalopies with an air intake clamped on the hood, bad bondo job, and, in modern terms, a rear wing made from an old hockey stick.
All this was true until NT. This is the first time I was impressed with MS, and considered it more than a toy or cheap workhorse. The improvements continued through 2000, and I gave XP a lot of slack. MS did a good job producing a real OS, and the fact that it ran on cheap commodity kit made it a valuable product.
The product with MS Vista is that, as far as I can tell, it returns to the bad old day of hacking together a toy OS. I give it no slack. After the experience with XP, there is no reason why MS Vista should be of pre XP quality. To quote the parent, there is no excuse to produce an OS of the poor quality not seen in 10 years. The problem is not that MS broke every promise that would have made MS Vista a superior product. The problem is that MS has not even been able reach the level of respectable inferior product that made MS Windows 3.11 to 95 at least tolerable.
Slashdot logic (Score:4, Insightful)
Abandon it! Kill it! It's had its chance, but it's too late!
Linux has been slow to gain acceptance and adoption in the sixteen years it's been available
Linux is improving! It's getting better! Give it a chance! Yes it has problems but these things take time!
Re:leave it alone!! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what we do now. This is our culture.
spare us the advocacy (Score:4, Insightful)
"Hot on Vista's tail" would mean that OS X has a market share close to Windows, which is obviously not true even under the most optimistic assumptions.
There is also no sense that I can see in which Microsoft has anything to fear from Apple. Even if Microsoft got out of the OS business tomorrow, Apple simply could not fill the void. Most likely, a disappearance of Microsoft would benefit Linux and BSD much more than it would Apple, because people can run those systems on the hardware they already have.
Microsoft is horrible because XP is still good? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is question -- and boy is it questionable -- says things like "vista is too expensive" and "it sales are lower than xp's were". Welcome to economics. Just because you lack the funds, doesn't make it a bad thing.
As a business, I've had wonderful times with Microsoft licensing over the last six months. Where I thought I'd have to pay $300 per kiosk, I wound up having to pay $200 one-time licence. Umm, that's basically free.
I'm using both XP and Vista for the kiosks. XP is missing a number of features that Vista has perfectly --
all on the IT side.
I've been reading slashdot for well over a decade now. You guys have it all wrong. Windows is much more flexible than you give it credit for -- and all without having to re-compile a kernel. Absolutely every OS tweak and alteration is possible just as simply as changing a registry key. And each and every one is well named and documented. Just start reading.
Deploying a few hundred configurations is a breeze -- as easy as plugging in a UFD.
There are more tools, support, documentation, and details available for Microsoft's corporate professional solutions than Linux users have all but hoped for. And when they aren't free of charge, they are impressively within budget.
Sorry that your budget is absolute zero. Some of us actually operate successful businesses, and simply love the idea of spending one dollar to make ten. Spending zero to make ten is actually worse, not better. And spending half a dollar to make ten isn't significantly better than spending one.
Do something legitimate, with actual business intentions, and Microsoft is a dream to work with. Want to do something all on your own? That's a different story.
I have no problems with Vista. And any problems that you have with any features, are easily solved by disabling those features. I can't believe that linux users are upset with a default configuration -- freakin' change it. The only difference is that you aren't starting from scratch. You're capable, just do it. And if you do it for someone else, they'll pay you for it.
And no, you don't have to want to get paid. And no, they won't be paying you for your time, or your skill, or your abilities. They'll be paying you for the sole reason of not having to do it themselves. Welcome to the wonderful world of profitable business -- you don't do anything by yourself.
Re:Cluestick to Microsoft: Focus on Fundamentals.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Or have it open in same condition you left it. I have a lot of situations where I need Recent Files, Detail view, sorted by date, and I have to set it every fucking time the file browser opens.
Expose. Enough said.
My single most used feature under Mac OS X, especially on a laptop.
A home folder without spaces that doesn't move with almost every version of windows.
And ditch the whole "My Documents", "My Music" and "My Pictures" Playskool crap.
Some more:
An Escape key (or some other key) that IMMEDIATELY returns control to the user no matter WHAT is happening. PREEMPT IT, DAMMIT! I've lost count of the number of times Windows has been out on the network looking for something, or loading an application I didn't really want, or loading Acrobat plugin, or something, and I can't do ANYTHING.
When I simply click to highlight a shortcut to a network resource, and the resource is down for some reason, there's a big, unescapable delay. Many time I am highlighting the icon to delete it because I KNOW the resource is gone or moved. Do not try to talk to the remote computer unless I double click. Until then that icon is just a picture.
If I drag something from one window, across a window looking at something with a slow pipe, to another window, my drag freezes in the slow pipe window for a bit. Fucking STOP that! Do not access a network resource unless DROP the item into it. Until then it is just another window. Stop trying to anticipate me.
Speaking of anticipation, and to be fair, do not start a search or other activity until I have given you all the information I intend to give. I'm looking at YOU Mac OS X Spotlight. Typing should not s tu t te r.
Enough with the 8.3 filemane system. So many times when I need to do some deep troubleshooting in Windows, I have to poke through directory after directory of ill-named files in the 8.3 style. Why are you still doing that, developers? Why?
Cancel buttons that are not cruel hoaxes like unconnected crosswalk buttons.
Progress bars that don't say "5 seconds left" for ten minutes. If you don't know, just fess up.
Re:I use Vista daily. (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista itself, meaning the kernel and the shell, seem bulletproof to me (in terms of stability not security.) Also, I've never experienced any driver problems while gaming, probably because my only Vista machine has integrated Intel graphics, and Intel usually has their shit together.
However, for months I had to disable fingerprint-only authentication because the stupid driver, made by some no-name lamers too embarrassed to even brand the thing, didn't recover properly from sleep, the original reason S3 was disabled be default in XP.
Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place here. On the one hand, people want major changes from XP. On the other, they want everything to just work after upgrading. This would actually feasible if hardware makers would write solid drivers that follow the rules, but they don't.
Re:Microsoft is horrible because XP is still good? (Score:0, Insightful)
The history of computing is littered with the corpses of Microsoft's "partners". Enjoy the documentation and support, but watch your back.
Re:How Software Companies Die (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Huh? worst start? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nor would a public abandonment of WinVista be a first. Win95 itself was an admission that WinNT wasn't the everybody-upgrade successor to Win31 that Microsoft promised it would be. Before that, Microsoft had hitched its wagon to OS/2 as the successor to Windows, until they backed off and announced WinNT instead. And is anyone else here old enough to remember when Microsoft overhauled the interface for MS Word 5.5 for DOS and touched off a user revolt?
Re:It's not *that* bad (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand why people can tolerate this and not complain so much about "retraining issues" when yet another version of Windows with gratuitous changes comes along but when you talk about putting Linux on office workers desktops people say it will never work because of the expense of retraining everyone. I have put Fedora and Ubuntu in front of a number of former Windows users and they figured it out quite readily. And we are talking low level minimum wage earning employees here. Not rocket scientists.
Re:Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
Too expensive? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd say that's pretty good going given inflation would suggest it should be 10-12% more expensive.
Re:Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, all of those things you downloaded have samples, diagnostic tools, functions for unrelated things (not just video), and other goodies that you may or may not use in a million years.
I hate Microsoft just like anybody else. I use Linux at home. But one thing Microsoft does not do is treat developers poorly.
Re:It's all just a misunderstanding. (Score:5, Insightful)
And some of it is both.
Re:Whatever (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who has ever taken a screen cap of a video would know that the problem with your joke is that you've probably never taken a screen capture of a video playing in a video player in Windows. When you notice that the video isn't fixed to the active video player window, you suddenly realize that doesn't work so well.
There's a reason why there is a screen capture option in Windows Media Player, it's not there because Microsoft figured no one would ever use the print screen key.
Re:Whatever (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that sarcasm? (Score:1, Insightful)
XP was a big step-up from Win98; decent security, NT base, better look, at the cost of needing more RAM, and not much more when you think about it.
Vista adds almost nothing to the desktop experience that hasn't been done long before. Desktop effects? OSX has some, X11/Linux have a lot. Security? UNIX had sudo for decades.
And are you seriously willing to see the day where 4GiB of RAM is needed to browse the web? I can do that from a 486DX with 16MiB of RAM. I remember the days when 640k of RAM was enough for anyone (And oh how long that lasted).
Vista is just bloat. Microsoft had a chance to do something smart, XP 2.0 or something, by not putting in DRM, adding in the \Program Files restrictiveness, and releasing it around 2004-2005. But no, they fucked it up. And because of that, they'll slowly start to tank. We all know that though the desktop wars are over, Microsoft will eventually lose its spot, and stability will come. (In the form of a more diverse OS market.) And for the trolls who doubt that, where is IBM today? Consultancy.
'Microsoft' didn't develop NT (Score:5, Insightful)
Today none of them work for M$ any more. I believe that factoid should complete the picture for you.
Re:It's all just a misunderstanding. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:leave it alone!! (Score:5, Insightful)
With Vista, that hasn't happened. To a large extent, it's been shunned even worse by the computer elite than by any other single group. There's peer pressure to NOT run Vista, widespread sentiment that it's rotten to the core thanks to Microsoft's deal with the DRM Devil, and general disinterest. That's a big problem for Microsoft, because the bugs people who bought a new laptop with Vista from Dell experience aren't part of the daily lives of the programming priesthood. Vista has become the "other" OS, shunned, scorned, and psychologically written off as irrelevant to their daily lives. The bugs don't annoy the very people in a position to fix them, so they remain and fester. Ditto, for drivers. If programmers aren't personally affected by whether or not some device works under Vista, they're not going to feel the same sense of urgency. Of course, there's always the business motivation... but when you get down to that special something that really drives programmers to spend their weekend fixing something, even though they aren't getting paid overtime... it's just not there.
If Microsoft REALLY wants to save Vista, they need to introduce one more editon: Vista LE ("Liberty Edition") -- $199, bootable from CD, freely installable on any 2 computers owned by the individual, installable and runnable on an unlimited number of virtual machines, as long as the host machine is running Vista as well, and an unlimited number of "floating" installations that can be activated for up to 30 hours at a time, with the catch that if you activate machine #3 for 30 hours and don't de-activate it, you can't activate machine 3b until the original 30 hours have elapsed. Oh, and every last bit of kernel-level DRM including protected audio and video paths COMPILED OUT. Of course, this means you won't be able to run WinDVD or view premium protected content... but nobody who buys VistaLE will really care, because we'd never buy DRM'ed content anyway.
Re:Huh? worst start? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's all just a misunderstanding. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Whatever (Score:2, Insightful)
On the other hand Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in Satan too, so it's possible all the nasty bits in the Old Testament, and Quran came from him. And given that the majority of what goes on in them is absolutely [evilbible.com] stomach churning [prophetofdoom.net], it sort of makes you wonder.
I mean if you do believe in God and Satan, how do you know that some of the more obviously evil bits in religious books didn't come from him impersonating God? It's something the guy who wrote Prophet of Doom came up with respect to the Quran, but it seems like it could apply to most of the Old Testament too.
Re:Whatever (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's all just a misunderstanding. (Score:2, Insightful)
Try to imagine you're running Ubuntu, perhaps you're a regular user who's just switched from Windows, and you add a new monitor.
Wait. Where's my second desktop? I have to do WHAT? Home users are not unix geeks. Apple knows this WHY DON'T YOU? How often do you need to open a conf file in OS X?
And we talk about Vista consuming speed and power- but 10.5 Leopard can't run on an 800 mhz G4, and Ubuntu 7.10 runs Compiz and Gnome OUT OF THE BOX- have you ever tried to run gnome on a PC with 256 mb of RAM? I will give you a hint- Vista runs faster and XP waaay faster.
Companies like google have made things even easier. Someone can buy a brand new PC with Vista Home Basic and go to pack.google.com and voila!-- you've got an easy to use open distro that does way more than Ubuntu out of the box. A stable, working window manager- handler for every which device- an a media player that makes even Amarok look like an always beta piece of crap.
You want people to compile commercial software for Linux? Talk to Sun about binary compatibility. It's a lot easier for developers when they don't have to support their commercial product for 5 different OS's and compile it anew every generation or two.
The point is- when linux is done, we can talk about Microsoft giving up and disappearing. Until then, their market is clear and strong. WORKING BUDGET OS THAT IS ALSO FINISHED. Stop talking about how great linux will be when it's done. It's been around for 15 years.
Re:It's all just a misunderstanding. (Score:3, Insightful)
Support for Digital Restrictions Management
They got in bed with the MPAA / RIAA, chose to support all the crazy DRM schemes, had to rework large portions of the OS to support "trusted paths". And the result is a slow, bloated OS that nobody is particularly interested in.
Re:It's all just a misunderstanding. (Score:3, Insightful)
I had all sorts of grief trying to make a vista monitor work at its native resolution (it had black bars up the sides). I succeeded in the end by doing something non-intuitive that I've now forgotten, but it took me an hour to find and had certainly foxed the neighbours to the point that they had to ask me round to fix it. You could not just set the resolution in Display->Properties because Vista thought it knew better and didn't provide that option.
Compare with adding a monitor to linux was simply choosing "System" -> "Adminstration" -> "Display" and ticking the box in the dual monitor tab. Beyond confirming the use of an admin tool with the root password there is no typing required.
gnome with 256mb of memory should be fine. A view of my desktop (up for 67 days so it should be in a steady state) shows it using about 40Mb resident. If you're having speed issues I suggest you've loaded your system down with lots of applications. I've seen firefox take up a fair amount of memory, but thats an application not operating system issue.
When I plug a disk onto my XP machine it allocates a drive letter behind one of my network drives and I therefore have to visit the administrative tools to remap it before it can be accessed (though I seriously hope this is fixed in Vista - can anyone confirm?). Compare this with my linux systems that just present it on the desktop labelled with the filesystem label from the media.
Your comment about computer requirements are unfair because you fail to mention the minimum recommended equivalent for Vista (home premium because you mentioned compiz, which give roughly equivalent eye candy) is 1GHz processor and 1Gb ram. These exceed those you mention for Panther and Ubuntu.
Full points for mentioning pack.google.com. Most of the same applications are availble for MacOS and Linux.
I grant you the observation that kernel-mode closed source commercial applications have a hard time with Linux, and that a fixed ABI would encourate some vendors. However, most commerical software are "ELF 32-bit i386" that use standard C library calls and are thus broadly compatible with most versions of linux released in the last 10 years.
A big problem that commercial outfits have with linux support is the hurdle of selling software for £100,000 on a platform that costs £3000. The issue is mainly of marketing rather than technical difficulty.
I acknowledge that playing Digitally Restricted Media (DRM) usually requires some tricky configuration, and my favourite media portal (mythtv) installs easiest when you are using an approved set of hardware.
However, your final comment is the trollish bait that caused me to respond.
Linux already exceeds most operating systems in its support of hardware, reliability and usability; requiring a magic "Done" label makes the conversation pointless. In a commercial society companies are always bolting things in to try and keep their revenue stream. Also, hardware and security risks evolve over time. Moores Law also observes that computers can do more whilst maintaining the same illusion of responsiveness. For linux in addition, software developers look for projects that interest them and a some choose to enhance the linux kernel or applications. For these reasons and many more I expect to see software continuing to evolve and improve over the years until I'm too grey and senile to notice. You have to make a personal choice when its "Good enough". I reckoned NT3.51 was "Good enough" for writing documents and network access at the time. I also got along ok with XP when SP2 came out, but my current experiences of malware and fighting with Vista has moved it out of my "Good enough" category at a time when I can support all the nice eye candy, multimedia streaming, large disk volumes, hardware support and office tools on Linux. Being able to do it at a fraction of the cost and actually not having control of my computer taken away from me by the operating system is just a bonus.