Ballmer Says Vista Selling Really Well 692
An anonymous reader writes "Steve Ballmer is in no way disappointed with Windows Vista. It is selling 'incredibly well,' he told a press conference in Herzeliya, Israel today. 'Vista sells on almost 100 per cent of all the new consumer PCs around the world,' the Microsoft CEO proclaimed. He added that the operating system was also selling on '45 percent of all of new business PCs.' Which is enlightening, since business users are about the only buyers of new PCs that get a choice." Anyone know anybody who bought Vista except as bundled with hardware?
upgrade rights, smoke and mirrors (Score:-1, Interesting)
I wonder how he defines a business and how many of those businesses are exercising their "downgrade rights". There are a lot more small businesses than big ones. Small business has far less choice and sometimes it's cheaper to buy retail. Even big business may get a better deal when offered computers with Vista that did not sell in retail channels - M$ can make any deal it wants. The bottom line for big business is that Vista has single didgit deployment and many companies are talking about skipping Vista [slashdot.org].
Bad Vista (Score:5, Interesting)
For Compatibility Testing (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought a copy for compatibility testing that I run in a virtual machine. A side benefit is that I get to compare versions of Windows side-by-side. It's enlightening. Vista is slower in every respect than its predecessors, and it's more difficult to use.
On the other hand, it is shinier.
XP? Really? (Score:3, Interesting)
Are business really just sticky with XP? Or are they moving over a Linux distro or OSX for that matter? I have a feeling that the Linux numbers are going to start increasing drastically. Just a hunch.
Counterfeit sales (Score:5, Interesting)
Or at least that's how I understood the deal. Correct me if I'm wrong.
db
Re:I don't really get all the Vista hatred (Score:2, Interesting)
Used it for 2 months, but was too buggy... (Score:1, Interesting)
I found forums that listed the Windows XP drivers for for the hardware the laptop uses, installed XP and everything was so quick, and I had no hiccups when watching video. I do miss the eye-candy, but to go through a day without rebooting windows for a crash is heaven...
I have also installed Linux on this laptop, and I got mostly everything, but there is a problem keeping the wi-fi working (after about an hour I would lose the connection and only a reboot would allow me to reconnect, so that got annoying and I put XP back on it.
It may be the case Vista not working well with this laptop is DELL's fault, but XP has had absolutely no issues so far.
Re:I don't really get all the Vista hatred (Score:4, Interesting)
Ten Percent (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who does he think he's fooling? (Score:5, Interesting)
Vista is Microsoft's new windfall.
I'm not helping the statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I don't really get all the Vista hatred (Score:5, Interesting)
Serious question.
Re:boughtVista (Score:2, Interesting)
And, yes, as it eventually turned out this is actually Steve Ballmer's own personal Mac behind the large Microsoft sign.
Re:I believe it (Score:1, Interesting)
(Posted anonymously due to left-wing Slashdot bias and off-topicness of post.)
Re:I don't really get all the Vista hatred (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Aero
2. The Apple Spotlight clone
3. The Google Sidebar clone
3. Windows Explorer now allows you to filter by file extension
Not worth the $220 and 10% to 15% performance reduction I paid. I recently reinstalled XP after using Vista everyday for over a year.
I use Vista, next to Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfriendly Access Control (Score:4, Interesting)
It is poorly implemented in that it doesn't have a grace period. As such every instance of requested elevation will hit a user instead of once in a reasonably short time window.
This is a real problem when people are initially bumping up against the new Windows 'feature'. When they buy a new machine and are installing countless pieces of software, it's like being hammered over the head with near constant 'cancel/allow' requests.
Once (if) the typical user gets past this initial Trial By UAC and aren't installing programs one after another, UAC is barely noticeable and is handy for the security it provides, but a user's introduction to the process is *extremely* negative and likely to sour them to the control mechanism, IMO.
Re:The Question (Score:1, Interesting)
My brother, who isn't very tech savvy, came to me and asked me to build him a new computer for his birthday. I spec'd it out from component parts and managed to keep it all inside his price range. Then I spent about 3 weeks debating between Windows XP and Windows Vista. I eventually sided with Vista Home Premium OEM, for a few primary reasons.
1) He's a gamer. Like it or not, DirectX 10 is only available on Vista. This gives him the ability to play newer games with more 'flashy' graphics - and yes, when it comes to game, looks matter quite a bit.
2) The price was not significantly different. We needed to stay inside the budget, and if we're going to spend the same amount of cash on an OS, then it might as well be the one that's going to be around longer, to prolong the life of the machine (by the time the hardware needs upgrading, the OS will too).
3) Media Center features and other eye candy. Vista looks nice. This is universally agreed upon. And so long as you don't use the built-in applications (Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, etc), everything works and functions very well. Yes, you can use the alternatives on other platforms as well, but the full effect won't be there.
4) Security. XP has been hacked all to the nine hells by now. He generally knows not to click stuff and just install it, but he does partake of some of the seedier things the internet has to offer, so it's always best to be on something more secure that can play all his games, even if it's only a little more secure.
5) He really doesn't care. He is Average Joe. He hasn't had a single complaint since I set it up, other than his rear speakers not working, and after 30 minutes of research, I got that fixed. All his peripherals work. All his games work. All the videos and music and whatever else he wants to do, he hasn't had an issue with.
In the end, you have to decide on the right tool for the right job. At home, I use a MacBook for my laptop, a refurb $250 Dell with Debian as my server, a custom-built XP Pro rig for my desktop that also dual-boots Ubuntu. Sometimes, Vista is the right answer.
A Positive Review for Vista. (Score:2, Interesting)
Have any of you ever tried running Windows 95, lately. I did, and noticed there were alot of little things that I could do in 98/2k that were not possible to do in 95 (like right-click interactivity in the start menu), so much so that I cannot effeciently and effectively use Windows 95 today. The same thing also applied to windows 98 and XP for me.
The very same thing applies also to XP and Vista. There are alot of small refinements in Vista that make it difficult to work the way I want in XP. Things that you wouldn't even notice until a few months of using Vista. In brief, here are a few of the things I find invaluable time savers:
Take for example, file renaming in Explorer. When you hit F2 to rename a file, it no longer highlights the extension (when you have the extension visible) and you can press the TAB button to move to rename the next file, etc.
The start button Search Field. I no longer have to go hunting around my start menu if I don't know where something is. And let's be honest, I have tonnes of crap on my start menu that I only need occasionally and never know where it is. Now, instead of wasting a few seconds (and losing my train of thought) searching for the program I need, can just type (a part of) the program name, and windows will load it.
Default Folder names: Gone is the excessively verbose "Documents and Settings" replaced with "Users" and so too is My Documents no longer the root for all your personal files... now your username is the root folder (I just wish more programs realised that and stopped cluttering up my Documents folder with their useless settings.)
Change Explorer Views: This one's a simple one... The view selection (i.e. detail, list, thumbnail) is now a button/dropdown, instead of just a dropdown. I'd much rather click the button 3 times instead of clicking it once, moving the mouse down to the name of the view I want and selecting it. Anything that can shave seconds off an already fairly easy process is awesome.
I like the new insanely large thumbnail sizes when dealing with a pictures folder.
UAC: I bought Vista for both my parents specifically because of UAC. If you're an administrator, UAC behaves stupidly. Granted. It becomes some weird twisted sort of double "Are you *really* sure?" confirmation. Useless. But, when you're not an administrator, it becomes the most obviously useful thing in the world. In XP, if you are a regular user, and you need to run some process as admin, you need to know beforehand. You need to find (sometimes by holding Shift when you right-click) the RunAs command, and use it to run this program as an Admin. In Vista, you can run it normally, and if it then finds out it needs admin rights, it will prompt you then and there to enter an admin user/password. That's the key difference. Needing to have foreknowledge and not.
When I first installed a beta or RC of Vista, I immediately declared it a complete and utter failure and bomb. I proclaimed I would never use it fully, and most certainly not ever let my parents use it, for fear of all the questions I would be bombarded with.
After I used it for a few months though, once things became familiar to me again, I greatly prefered it to XP. And it's a pain having to continue to use old clunky (interface-wise) XP.
I realise that many of the improvements I mentioned can be applied to XP through some means or other, but the point is that by including that improved functionality in the OS, they have raised the baseline. And I do recognise that to use Vista, you'll need a bigger screen resolution (long gone are the days of 1024×768 being enough), and a faster machine. I just take it for granted that as machines become more powerful and have more resources, so too do the software programs use those resources. Anyway, that's just my personal take on Vista, for me and my family.
UAC: Can't work with it, Can't work without it. (Score:2, Interesting)
Good for you. You turned UAC off. You know what you can't do anymore? If you're not logged in as the admin (and you never log in as an admin unless you NEED admin rights, right?) then you have no access to other user folders anymore at all. Example: you're logged in under MyAccount working on some progect, and you need to grab a photo your wife has in the Pictures folder of HerAccount. No problem right? It's your computer and you know the admin PW, so you explore to the HerAccount user folder and when it pops up the prompt saying you don't have permission, you click OK expecting to put in the admin PW and keep going. Doesn't happen. You're not allowed at all. No PW prompt. Nothing. You're just not allowed in. So you log in to the admin account, turn UAC on again, switch back to MyAccount, and try it again. This time it says you don't have permission to access HerAccount, but it does give you an opportunity to use the admin PW to get in, so you finally grab the photo from her Pictures photo, stick it in your project, and you're good to go. A couple of months later (you naturally have UAC turned off again), you're in MyAccount, and again you need to grab a picture from HerAccount. By now you've forgotten the hassle you went through before, and you just explore straight into HerAccount, and then her Pictures folder and you get what you're looking for in a snap. And then you realize that Vista didn't deny you permission this time, didn't ask for a password or anything, it just let you straight in. UAC gave you PERMANENT access to HerAccount while you were logged into MyAccount. That access wasn't permitted on a session only basis as would be expected in any real multi-user system. And then you remember that you used the same UAC enabled trick to help her get a document from MyAccount. Now you know that she still has access to MyAccount while she's logged into HerAccount. And now you understand why she's been acting so weird lately - She found your AnimalFootFetishPr0n folder. You sick bastard.
Yeah. Just continue having your no problems with Vista. You can continue being happy with Vista as long as you ignore all the little braindead brokenness. I couldn't ignore Vista's performance-crippling, copyrights-restricting, user-rights-bungling, hardware-settings-losing, user unfriendliness anymore, and as soon as I can get Wine to run photoshop right, I can scrape that ungodly pile of crap off my laptop and stop having to dual-boot just to do a few tweaks in PS that I can't do in GIMP.
Re:Nothing is moving, Apple is handing him his ass (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyhow, I bought Vista Ultimate without it being bundled with the PC..I will admit it wasn't selling well though. The place I bought it from said I was the first customer to buy Vista Ultimate from them...-this was the first week of it's release though-...and that they actually only held one copy of Vista Ultimate in stock; I was pretty shocked. I do however like Vista, and find that most people who make fun of it, or hate on it, have actually never used it.
Re:Nothing is moving, Apple is handing him his ass (Score:5, Interesting)
My old XP laptop with half the specs does things faster than vista. I had some hopes for SP1, but so far I've seen no real improvement... As far as I'm concerned, vista made things shiny, added a few handy but hardly necessary features, and slowed down my machine.
Re:The Slashdot Stepfords (Score:3, Interesting)
We worry more than other people (Score:5, Interesting)
On my Linux box if a website manages to get a popup window open without asking, that's a major security breach requiring immediate examination and correction.
On the average user's Window's box an unexpected new browser toolbar, websites that redirect to unfamiliar places and a short game of Kill the popups [heavygames.com] is such a common part of the landscape that people just don't notice them until they render the computer completely unusable [splasho.com].
Re:I'm not helping the statistics (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Bad Vista (Score:2, Interesting)
At work, there is no way we can support Vista in its current form, the hardware requirements are simply too high and there isn't enough benefit to warrant the expense we would to do the upgrade. The only realistic way to deploy Vista across an enterprise would be by attrition - replacing XP PC's with Vista in the normal upgrade cycle, but then you are dual-platformed for about three years while that all plays out.
I attended a Norex.net conference back in February and of the 50 or so organizations represented, fewer than five expected to have a significant Vista deployment in place by the end of next year (2009).
Here's what I think MS needs to do to fix Windows:
* Rename Windows 7 to "Windows Clean" and use that principle to guide its design.
* Follow the Apple pricing model: One version $89 for everyone with no upgrades, ultimates or basics.
* Adopt a philosophy that the CPU cycles belong to the user, not third party marketers and eliminate preloaders, updaters, ride-alongs and alerters. Strangely, many of the problems with Windows now are caused by third-party companies that won't keep their grubby hands off my CPU cycles. Software should only be running while the user is using it! Corporate rudeness must not be tolerated! Etc. ETc. Etc.
* Along the same line, Adobe, Apple, Real and HP should be banninated from writing non-application software.
* "Modularity" should mean that the base install is clean, but offers the additional (free) component modules (enterprise networking, Media Center, UI Enhancements, etc...) from the install DVD.
* Abandon DRM support - it is anti-user and invasive. SCREW THE xxAA's! It's my PC, not theirs!
* Provide an EXPERT MODE that turns off UI handholding (...stupid Windows XP search dog!). Apps should obey this, too.
* Help (especially from third-party vendors) must be more FAQ-like and informative, especially with fundamental descriptive informationlike "What does this app do?", "Who put it there?", "What depends on it?", "What impact is it having on my system?", "How do I remove/disable parts I'm not using?" Too may help files were written by marketroids.
* Microsoft standardized printer support with Windows in the 90's, they should do the same for licensing (EULA) agreements now. I should be able to view the license agreements for every piece of software on my system and look at the conditions in a table for term-by-term comparison. It would provide an amazing amount of warm fuzzies and goodwill if Microsoft was willing to lead the way away from lawyer-ese and toward a simplicity that INCLUDES the customer, rather than alienating them.
Ok, sorry I turned this into a bitch session. Besides, there's NO WAY IN HELL they're every gonna listen to me!
[/soapbox=off.]
Re:Nothing is moving, Apple is handing him his ass (Score:3, Interesting)
Vista ? a nightmare for editors (Score:4, Interesting)
It was the worst nightmare we ever had. After finguring out for several months what was going on, we came to the conclusion that it simply wasn't possible. To summarize (sorry for simplifying):
- UAC is the worst design/implementation ever. Windows has several execution environments (unlike UNIX, which has... 2: user(s) and root), and UAC asks you for permission each time you cross a fence ! (in UNIX, sudo at leasts reminds the password for several minutes or so)
- ActiveX are simply impossible to use under Vista+IE7. Problem is that Microsoft didn't care to offer a replacement technology.
The consequence of all this is that our application was no longer available under Vista/IE. It worked well under Vista/Firefox, though.
Finally, we hired an ex-microsoftie, who re-implemented the ActiveX part entirely, using MS _private_ APIs, and now it works - more ore less.
Going through all this, i wonder if the NT platform can be secured at all. Since we also have a support department, i can tell you that users have fare more problems with Vista than XP.
This is going to kill MS. Almost all techies i know, plus lots of "power users" are switching to Linux or OSX (even the ex-microsoftie we hired was using OSX as his primary OS). Only big companies are sticking to MS, because of the total lack of competence that reigns there.
Resources (Score:3, Interesting)
The resources I worry about in a laptop aren't dollars... they're electrons. If your laptop is running Vista, you need a faster processor (less battery life) and more RAM (less battery life) and you run the CPU at a higher power level (less battery life) to get the same experience as you would with XP. Paying $200 more for a laptop isn't a big deal. Not having to play musical power cables in a meeting room is.
Best laptop I ever had was a Toshiba Libretto. The battery pack was the size of a joke pen, and I got five hours of actual use out of it, so with two charged batteries I could go all day without ever needing to find a power point.
I don't think you could even boot Vista on it.
Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
In order for your comment to be true the exact opposite of what I illustrated happening in my post must be happening. Since I provided links, it would be fair to ask you for some.
PC sales are up in a big way in units, dollars of sales and dollars of profit. Windows sales are off by 24%. Make of that what you will. I choose to believe that Microsoft is getting a lot less for Windows than they used to especially in emerging markets, they're bleeding share on high end retail units and they've fully booked the sales under Software Assurance. I also choose to believe this is because nobody wants Vista, especially on the cost effective platforms that don't run it well.
We have run the circle:
We're back at nothing but XP for you. All your base are belong to XP. Now you just also have to take the Vista License so they can book another Vista sale for their marketeering. That way Ballmer can say stuff like "almost 100% of retail PCs are Vista." If you'll remember, Saddam Hussein also got 100% of the "popular vote" in the last election before his execution. At least they aren't making you take a SuSE coupon as well -- yet.
Re:Nothing is moving, Apple is handing him his ass (Score:4, Interesting)
The real thing is that Microsoft has become so disconnected and arrogant that it has put itself in a position that its customers are willing (and wanting) to find any viable alternative to their products.
I really believe that Microsoft believes their own stories. If you go to a computer/electronics store you won't find a choice between computers with Vista and XP. You will find Vista rammed down the consumer's throat. I think they really believe that the customers are really choosing Vista over XP even though they have no choice.
As far as businesses: The company I work for purchases lots of computers from Dell (100+ a month) and last week I changed our purchasing from ordering only machines with XP licenses to only ordering systems with Vista licenses...
I'm certain that Microsoft will lie to themselves and tally this up as a successful sale of Vista instead of a customer who wants no part of it but is going to pick up the license for the same price and hedge his bets.
When a company lies to itself and loses focus on trying to meet customer needs it is walking the road to failure. The only question is if there is a David out there that can capitalize on Goliath's faltering. (Can Linux pull a major rabit out of their hat? I just don't see it...)