Mom Blasts Ballmer Over Kid's Vista Experience

Lucas123 writes "While on stage at a Gartner's ITxpo conference today, Ballmer got an ear-full from the mother of a 13-year-old girl who said after installing Vista on her daughter's computer she decided only two days later to switch back to XP because Vista was so difficult. Ballmer defended Vista saying: 'Your daughter saw a lot of value'; to which the mother replied: 'She's 13.' Ballmer said that Vista is bigger than XP, and 'for some people that's an issue, and it's not going to get smaller in any significant way in SP1. But machines are constantly getting bigger, and [it's] probably important to remember that as well.' Says the mother: 'Good, I'll let you come in and install it for me.'"

Oh really...

[Tarlus]

'Good, I'll let you come in and install it for me.'

Uh, Vista is easier to install than XP.

Re:A lot of value...

[RonnyJ]

Ballmer's comment seems really prick-like to me. It probably wasn't meant as such, but still.

From the article: Ballmer was good-natured about the critique as he defended the operating system.

Re:I hate to be the one defending Microsoft, but..

[varmittang]

Actually, OS 9 to OS X had something called Classic in OS X, so that you could run all your OS 9 programs without a rewrite.

Re:I hate to be the one defending Microsoft, but..

[njfuzzy]

Take a machine that runs Mac OS X "Leopard" and upgrade it to OS X "Panther". Painless. Take a machine that runs "Panther" and upgrade it to Mac OS X "Tiger"-- also painless. It doesn't have to be this way. I am assuming that most major linux distros can say the same thing, probably even more so.

Re:Am I reading that right?

[Workaphobia]

Oh absolutely. When machines get more powerful and can perform the same function for a tenth of the cost, they won't sell you the same machine at the reduced price running the same software. They'll sell you a more powerful machine at the same price, and upgrade your software's bloat to make you require the horsepower.

Funny how I can pretty much do everything I do with my new lenovo T61 windows (formally vista, now XP) laptop, on my six (?) year old 1.2 GHz Sempron running gentoo.

Re:I hate to be the one defending Microsoft, but..

[laffer1]

I'm assuming you mean a machine that shipped with 10.3. Newer apple hardware requires newer OS X versions for drivers. My ibook can run 10.3.5 but my wife's can't.

I built my pc last september. I had to install 6-7 drivers including video, sound, chipset, etc for XP. I formatted and put vista on it in january (along with a new bsd install). I only needed to install a sound and video driver. It was less work for me to go to vista in that sense. I'm running x64 vista at that. On newer hardware, it's easier to deal with vista. It actually has support for some sata controllers built in. Imagine that.

Linux distros are probably the same as my windows experience in some cases. Many people still end up using binary video drivers and perhaps a wireless driver and/or firmware load. It depends on the distro and what deals they have with ATI and nvidia.

Re:A lot of value...

[mikael]

The "mother" was Yvonne Genovese [gartner.com], Research VP of Gartner Research. She was on stage with a discussion panel.

The $350 Vista Desktop

[westlake]

because she won't have to spend $400 on just the operating system.

The Geek always quotes the list price for the retail box when he wants to slag Microsoft.
This isn't "insightful," it is ignorant and foolish:

The Vista Basic laptop at Walmart starts at $400 Everex StepNote w/VIA CPU [walmart.com]

The Dual-Core Vista Basic desktop with 1 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD and a DVD burner at $350. Compaq Presario w/ Dual-Core Athlon CPU [walmart.com]

The Vista Premium HP Pavilion [walmart.com] desktop with 3 GB RAM, 2.6 GHz Athlon Dual-Core CPU, 500 GB HDD, and nForce motherboard graphics is $670.

The Vista Ultimate HP Elite Media Center PC [walmart.com] with an Intel Quad Core CPU, 3 GB RAM. 1 TB of storage and ATSC tuner is $1900.

The whole point of buying the OEM system bundle is to get a fully configured system, all the new tech and the latest Microsoft OS at a very attractive ptice.

I look at these specs and prices. I look at the price I paid for a mid-line refurbished PC four years ago and I wonder why the geek wastes his breath screaming about the "Microsoft Tax."

No one is listening. No one gives a damn.

Re:Still

[Simon80]

If you want wmv playing under kaffeine, I'm guessing that installing libxine1-ffmpeg would fix it.

For Ubuntu users, if you want to get stuff working in gstreamer (i.e. for totem), you might want to install w32codecs or w64codecs (found in medibuntu), gstreamer-0.10-ffmpeg, and gstreamer-0.10-pitfdll (this last one provides support for the w32codecs DLLs), along with ubuntu-restricted-extras.

Re:mysterious

[Joe Tie.]

I'm going to guess it was a starndard format with the file extension changed.

Re:Depends.

[wmlamia]

I don't know about his list, but here's mine, and I *like* OOo.

1. Outlining mode that works the way M$Word *should* work (but usually doesn't) I want a real outlining program.

2. Change tracking that is at least as good as M$Work XP and later. The balloons are nice, but not the only way to do it.

3. A robust multi-format multi-lingual bibliography system that supports all the major publication formats.

4. Templates for all the major publication formats.

And p.s., I know everyone complains about the startup time, but it has never bothered me. I even have a subjective preception that OOo loads are more competitive with larger documents.

Re:mysterious

[garett_spencley]

Shouldn't matter. Totem will still play it. It checks the mime-type not the file extension. I even tested it just now to make absolutely certain that I'm correct. Renamed foo.wmv to foo.bar, double clicked and Totem loaded it and played it just fine.

Re:A lot of value...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I know for a fact that Bill Gates reads /. He's a geek, what do you expect :) I met him when I was working at MS (he received a bunch of employees at his home) and asked him. He acknowledged he read it and found the cyborg icon funny. That was 4 years ago. I'm posting as A.C. because I'm still involved indirectly with MS, sorry folks!