Microsoft Battles Vista Perception With Prizes 342
LambAndMint writes "In what can only be described as an act of utter desperation to overcome Vista's mostly negative public perception issues, Microsoft has put together an online "Fact or Fiction" quiz about Windows Vista. Every person who submits themselves to Microsoft indoctrination gets a free shirt and the chance to win a $15,000 prize. Some of the supposed 'facts' will make you feel like you're reading a document from an alternate reality. Get ready to get a job as a computer salesman for a mass-market retailer as you go through the quiz."
Re:Propaganda (Score:4, Insightful)
What site? (Score:2, Insightful)
Little slanted (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Propaganda (Score:2, Insightful)
if you're trying to win people over,
why restrict the "facts" site to people you've already got (requiring silverlight....)
Re:Cheat Sheet! No Silverlight Required! (Score:5, Insightful)
Pick the answer that makes Microsoft look good.
That sound about right?
but wait! its all true! (Score:3, Insightful)
All of the "facts" are true, and yet Vista is still a slow giant that doesn't play well with others and needs an uber-machine to accomplish basic feats.
Comon' guys, the market isn't saying these criticisms based on fictional accounts - they bought/used Vista and it sucked as an experience.
And PLEASE, give up on the Aero-is-cool stuff. You are playing catchup on the desktop - by far. You've simply been in GDI for so long you can't see the irony of cheering about abandoning it now.
Give your user support offices that "quiz" and listen for laughter.
Re:All I read was... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, 100% safe. (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you ever talked with Microsoft marketing people? Every day they have to go to work and pretend that they are doing something positive for a company that pretends to sell quality products. They pile fantasies on fantasies. They live in a world of unreality.
Microsoft marketing people are far scarier than zombies [wikipedia.org]. Zombies have more respect from the universe; they were at one time at least allowed to die.
Like zombies, MS marketing people also have no will of their own; they are automotons of corporate speak, which is a language that no one understands, including themselves. But they wander the earth undead, believing that they are human, believing that they have jobs.
Okay, some of this may not be completely true. However, I'm not sure what or how much.
Re:Sheesh. (Score:1, Insightful)
Microsoft must be having a pretty good day if this is the worst thing the Lunix mob can slime them with. Wasn't there a new vulnerability found in IE or something?
Help (Score:5, Insightful)
If I could just finish the quiz I might ditch Slackware and move to Vista!
Re:No, 100% safe. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll give it a shot:
- That you've ever met a Microsoft employee, or anyone in the computer industry besides a Best Buy cashier: Fiction
- That you sincerely think you're impressing us by providing a Wikipedia link to "zombie": Fact
Do I win a t-shirt?Re:Vista isn't so bad (Score:2, Insightful)
That sounds about right.
Re:Propaganda (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't want it, I don't need it, and please, for the love of god, stop mooning me with it.
Re:Cheat Sheet! No Silverlight Required! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cheat Sheet! No Silverlight Required! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm familiar with this story, but followed your link anyway. Where do you get the idea that McDonald's is "suing" anyone?
Re:Cheat Sheet! No Silverlight Required! (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though I am usually a pitiless and fanatical member of the Apple Hyper Commando Flame Unit in their Eternal War Against Evil (TM), this has gotten so bad that it is hard for me not to feel a bit sorry for the programmers who wrote Vista. It has to suck when you spend five years on something and pour your heart into it (as many no doubt did), yet poor management turns all your work into that.
Re:All I read was... (Score:2, Insightful)
--------- Woohoo! Free shirt!
Yeah, you could always wear it inside-out.
Re:All I read was... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Cheat Sheet! No Silverlight Required! (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Don't know, don't care, the PC market now is vastly different than it was even when XP was released, comparing 1st month sales figures matters to accountands, but up or down don't say much about whether an OS is good or bad. You might possibly be able to compare 1st month non OEM sales, but even that wouldn't make a lot of difference.
2) I haven't used every piece of hardware on the market, but personally speaking I've experienced more hardware incompatibility on Linux than on Vista. A couple of things didn't work right away, and a couple of things required work arounds, but the same has always been true of my Linux system, and at least Microsoft didn't shaft driver developers simply because they disapprove of the way they license their own product(see the whole GPL export debacle a few years back). Hardware compatibility is really a hardware vendor thing anyway.
3)I do Integration work for a living and I don't even know what they mean by this one. I don't really want to integrate my OS with applications, I just want them to run. Do they mean that older applications don't take advantage of Aero or something? If you can explain this one to me, I'd be happy to hear it.
4) The Vista security model is substantially better than the XP security mode, and if we stopped blaming the UAC nags on Microsoft and instead pointed the finger at the lazy software developers who won't right their Windows App code to run in user space instead of as an admin we'd be a lot closer to the truth.
5) In a business environment deploying an new OS or OS version is expensive, and licensing is rarely the largest portion of that. I suppose if you were running your XP machines with Automatic update on pointing directly at windows update instead of at a SUS server, the activation requirement could be expensive or tedious, but that's a relatively small subsection of businesses really.
6) Any new version of anything is unpopular with some parts of business, making a major change to the environment is expensive and risky. My company is just upgrading to XP now, so it's relative popularity in business is really only important to accountants.
7) Haven't really noticed this much, there was a period back last year when they patched it a bit and it got less stable, but aside from the fact that your regular IT people are less familiar with the interface and so it's a bit harder for them to find stuff, it's not been much more difficult for me. In my experience the OS is rarely the cause of support calls anyway. Most issues are with third party apps, spyware, data corruption etc, and 2000 and XP had plenty of wierd it's easier to wipe the system than fix it bugs too.
8) Matter of opinion really I've never found anyone who believed that a developers response time was quick enough, and as I've not been sitting waiting with baited breath for a patch on Vista yet I can't realy talk about the response time. SP1 is taking a while, but that's a big patch set.
9) Total garbage, but no more garbage than any other claim by any government, third party vendor, OS manufacturer, or anything else. No content filtering system is effective, and unless you plan on running your home network like a corporate LAN you're not going to stop your kids from looking at what they want to look at, and even then you're not likely to stop them.
10) If you're not running a bleeding edge environment(which applies to 99% of the corporate world) waiting for a new version of anything to get patched a few times isn't a bad idea. Vista's not worthless pre SP1, but it'll presumably be better post SP1.
A lot of this quiz is marketing spiel, and I hate market droid speak as much as everyone else, but Vista has been the victim of the greatest FUD campaign I've ever seen for software, so maybe they needed market spiel.
Re:Cheat Sheet! No Silverlight Required! (Score:5, Insightful)
pick the answer that is blatantly wrong.
Re:Sheesh. (Score:3, Insightful)
then woe betide anyone living on the sides of mountains. the gates foundation will be relocating thousands of tibetan monks.
Yup, real experience. (Score:4, Insightful)
Suppose you had a job, but what you did in your job didn't actually benefit your company. And your company was adversarial toward its customers, as much as possible, so that, even if you did benefit your company, you would being doing harm in the world. How would you describe that?
Re:All I read was... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well they did say they were okay with ActiveX, and the Flash plugin for IE is an ActiveX control, so it's possible they at least have that installed. The real WTF though is considering ActiveX controls to be somehow different from "some shady .exe".
Translations: (Score:3, Insightful)
Fact. Translation: We've gotten better at force-feeding upgrades to people. In the past, it was actually possible to buy a computer with the previous version of Windows in that first month.
Fiction. Translation: We consider any hardware that doesn't have a "Works with Vista" sticker on it to be insignificant.
Fiction. Translation: Windows Vista is not an application, it's an operating system. Therefore, we squeak by on a technicality.
Fact. Translation: We're more secure from bad press, because we can always say "They clicked allow at some point! Don't you know you were supposed to click 'deny' on that one?"
Fiction. Translation: There's no such word as "expnesive". Alternate translation, in case the typo was only the parent post: It's only expensive once you actually want to use it for something. But if "deploy" counts as part of a new computer, and "run" counts on booting up, it's dirt-cheap!
Fiction. Translation: It's been popular with some businesses, like MSN and NBC! No one said anything about Vista being popular with all businesses, or even a majority of businesses!
Fiction. Translation: The only tech support you need with Vista is "Here's a copy of XP!" That's a lot less time on the phone! Ok, yes, Vista is unreliable, but didn't you notice that's an AND statement? If either half of the statement is Fiction, the whole statement is Fiction!
Fact. Translation: "Swift" is relative, but yeah, we have been working our asses over here -- mostly because there were so goddamned MANY initial issues with Windows Vista!
Fact. Translation: Parents are so easy to fool. Heh heh.... Wait, did I say that out loud?
Fiction. It will take much more than one service pack to fix it.
*vomits*
Seriously, how can anyone write this bullshit and not actually throw up? I'm having a hard time holding my dinner down, and at least I'm writing satire, not outright lies!
Not all wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Almost none of the statements on that quiz were 'fact' or 'fiction'; they were mostly opinions that differ based on your needs for a computer.
Security, for example: Sure, Vista has the 'protect the user from himself by continually asking if he really wants to X' features, but I'd be happier with licensing agreements for bundling in AVG and Spybot, both as low priority scheduled tasks (better integration, of course, but basically the same system I use to keep my friends and clients from calling me every twenty minutes saying they've contracted a virus).
Compatibility: sure, Vista supports '2.2 million products', but that's still less than what XP supports. Why don't they have a compatibility layer for legacy devices? Is it that damned hard?
I could go on.
The point is, if you value intellectual honesty, you can't even pass the first question.
Re:Cheat Sheet! No Silverlight Required! (Score:3, Insightful)
How about also at those lazy Microsoft developers who enabled this behavior?
But more relevantly, if they were going to break so much compatibility anyway, why not go whole-hog? Wrap the old Win32 API up in a compatibility layer like Wine, require new apps to include the I_AM_VISTA_COMPATIBLE flag (or whatever). Then, nag once for the old apps before you sandbox them (to encourage developers to adopt the new standard), and pop up as many nag screens for the new apps as you like (as they won't generally popup nag screens in the first place).
Also, if I understand it, Vista's security model is, at a low level, identical to XP. At a high level, it's a ripoff of the Unix sudo model (as used by OS X and Ubuntu), only much more annoying.
I've never found anyone who believed that a developers response time was quick enough, and as I've not been sitting waiting with baited breath for a patch on Vista yet I can't realy talk about the response time.Fair enough, but you can't really call it "swift", considering the things which still haven't been patched. It's been a year, right? Do they still have that audio-slows-down-the-network bug? What about the bug where disabling the indexing service will cause the start menu's instant-search to bring the machine to a grinding halt? Or maybe everyone's favorite, the click-drag-move-or-copy-can-run-out-of-RAM-while-estimating-how-long-it-will-take bug.
I haven't paid attention, so I wouldn't be surprised if some of those were gone, but last I checked, they were still happening, for months. How the hell is this thing not caught in testing? Maybe a lot of them were caught in the public beta, and ignored?
When any ONE thing of this magnitude happens with an open source app, the latest version is temporarily taken down, preventing people from upgrading (unless they want to compile it themselves) until the problem is fixed.
"Everyone else does it" does not make it less garbage, however.
"FUD campaign" implies a deliberate attempt to spread misinformation to cause fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I don't think Vista needed any help doing that, and there's really almost no organized FUD behind it, anyhow -- unless you count the "You are coming to a sad realization" Mac ad.
Re:The whole site will be like this? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Good luck with your free shirt... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vista isn't so bad (Score:3, Insightful)
Didn't someone post a list a while ago, where it shows that the number of features removed from Longhorn before it became Vista is actually longer than the number that remained?
Re:All I read was... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, ya gotta watch out for those Australians shipping things. Why, they might try to slip a kangaroo into the package or something.
>apparently the SilverLight installer is just some shady
As opposed to the rest of the software on your computer that just magically appeared and runs in some otherworldly fashion, I suppose.
But, my goodness, you're quite the Slashbot - I especially admire the fact that you got modded up for bashing Microsoft when you use Windows on your computer. The hypocrisy here knows no bounds, apparently.
I know, I know: "You must be new here".
Re:Cheat Sheet! No Silverlight Required! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good luck with your free shirt... (Score:2, Insightful)