Microsoft Not Ditching Vista Until At Least 2011 297
CWmike writes "Microsoft will not dump Vista when Windows 7 launches, and plans to keep selling it to computer makers, system builders, volume licensees and consumers at retail until at least January 2011, a Microsoft spokesman said, citing long-running policy. Earlier today, a Microsoft general manager hinted that the company might ditch Vista as soon as Windows 7 ships. He also said that support for all versions of Vista will end in April 2012. Neither is true, according to the company. Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, said, 'to try to stop Vista or make it unavailable, that would just draw attention... The truth is, few people will be likely to order it once Windows 7 is available.'"
Millenium 2 (Score:5, Insightful)
Well remember MS continued to offer Millenium until 2003 even though XP launched in 2001. Offering and actually selling are two different things, I know I never heard of anyone buying Millenium after XP shipped.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Millenium 2 (Score:3, Insightful)
the difference was that WinME was DOS/Windows based and Win2K was NT based so there was little in common. Windows 7 is basically Vista SP3 so it's the same core. That makes this news even more of a dah moment and a WTF cares kind of news item. They won't continue _forcing_ OEMs to ship Vista but will let them sell to any sucker who bought their snakeoil sales pitches and asks for it.
LoB
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, I'm an Open Source advocate as well and I use Linux and OpenBSD... However lumping together Windows 2000 and Windows ME is just not fair. Windows 2000 was pretty much their best operating system ever, and Windows ME their worst. Just in case you didn't know: Windows 2000, meant for the business world and used in the business world was a big hit. It was and is still very popular in corporate environments.
Windows XP has exactly three things that make it "better" than 2000: Fast user switching, good wireless support and terminal services (only in Pro). The first and the second are good for home use, the terminal services only for business use.
Windows 2000 is used to this day in controlled secured environments.... I wouldn't call it unsuccessful in any sense of the term.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The first and the second are good for home use, the terminal services only for business use.
Oh, man, you have no idea. I use RDP and terminal services daily around the house. Until I found mpd and Pitchfork, it was how my music machine ran. I still use RDP to another old computer that runs my IRC and Pidgin stuff (VNC and NX ran like shit, but RDP was fine, so RDP it was).
Terminal services is a vastly underappreciated piece of awesome.
Re:FACT: Vista is fucking shit! MS doesnt care (Score:3, Insightful)
WHY DOES AN OS have to be written for fucking morons? Why cant the advanced features be displayed by DE-FUCKING-FAULT?!?!?!
Because those are the overwhelming majority of the people who use computers. This is not a hard concept.
Its fucking time they stop making crayola fucking operating systems because i cant stand it
Clearly, Slashdot users are Microsoft's target market. Really. No, really. It isn't the legions of people who buy the first Dell they see.
See, it's so clear. It's obvious that they should change what works so successfully just because Jackie_Chan_Fan on Slashdot doesn't like it.
Re:Makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
I know it might look like it's a service pack, because for the first time since 2003, it's a release that's an improvement on their previous OS, and the only other times they've released stuff that's improved a previous OS have been service packs, which makes it very easily confused... but it's still not a service pack.
Re:Millenium 2 (Score:3, Insightful)
I had a computer that wouldn't run 2k or XP (or 98!) but would run 95 and ME. That computer is gone now... (It wouldn't boot linux either.)
Re:Meanwhile, Open Source And Linux Fumbles (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, to be fair, the Open Source community has produced Ubuntu 9.04, which is probably one of the best operating systems ever made.
I don't know if I'd call that fumbling exactly.
Re:Meanwhile, Open Source And Linux Fumbles (Score:3, Insightful)
Erm... Microsoft's like, a business, an entity, that can have policy, direction, a road map, and can make decisions. "Linux" isn't... so... your post makes no sense. If your argument is really "people shouldn't disagree and should all just use the same system" then... that would be Windows. The whole point is that it isn't that.
Re:i just got off the toilet (Score:1, Insightful)
The US isn't supposed to be a democracy. The more it becomes one, the more it sucks.
Much like Vista. I think Microsoft is trying to pretend vista wasn't a failure, so they try to cut off XP, then rush Windows 7 but insist vista will still be available for all the people who love it.
-1 Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Insightful)
So the real question is: Why in the world would I install it then? To deliberately waste resources?
I can do that better with CompizFusion, and still have left over enough for a couple of needless gcc and java processes, or XP in a VM. ^^
(In fact I have that setup right now. And the only thing that feels a bit sluggish is the VM, which is kinda what I expected.)
Re:Why? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The geek's obsession with activation can be really puzzling to others. ;-)
We geeks have a strong aversion against giving up control of our toys
That includes wanting to reinstall the OS when we feel like it, without asking someone for permission. And the typical geek does this more frequently than every 8 years.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting.
If Microsoft does something incremental (eg. 2000 -> XP, or Vista -> 7), people complain that too little has changed, that it's basically just a "service pack" which Microsoft is charging money for.
If Microsoft does something too radical (eg. XP -> Vista), people complain that too much has changed, that they should have just touched up XP a bit, given it a visual makeover and a few core updates and that would have been enough.
Conclusion - Microsoft can't win. At least with the fussy pricks on Slashdot.
Re:-1 Troll (Score:1, Insightful)
hmm, let's see... it's 64-bit with actual driver support for most hardware you are likely to use. this allows you to install several gigs of ram, which is quite cheap these days and you can NEVER have too much ram. any new hardware is more likely to have a vista driver than an xp driver. vista also installs drivers in parallel rather than sequentially, so you dont have to wait 5 fucking hours for your keyboard to be detected when you boot up with a bunch of new hardware. it looks better and it actually uses your gpu to draw windows. it has the start-menu search box, which is fucking AWESOME once you get used to it. you press LWin and type in what you want to run and press enter really fast, and it fucking runs.
i mean really, i don't love vista and I tried to hold off and just use xp like the rest of you. i thought i would hate vista. But when I finally built a decent PC and actually tried vista on it, i realized that a lot of the *dumb shit* that xp does (or doesn't) do is fixed in vista. the little things go a long way. when i go back and try to use xp these days, i miss a lot of this stuff.
and you may ask why i don't run linux as my primary OS. I do run linux sometimes. But most of the time I just want all of my shit to work properly without having to consult any documentation, wikis, or forums. i want that flash video to play the way it's supposed to. i want that game to run properly at full frame rate in crossfire mode. i want that random usb device to do everything it was designed to do instead of working maybe 50% with some wonky half-finished driver that needs to be hand-compiled into the kernel. i run linux on my eeepc because it happens to support all of its hardware, and it fits the usage pattern of that computer (email, web browsing, etc.). i run vista on my workstation desktop pc because it's the best for the task. it can do anything, including games and heavy graphics stuff, and i dont care much about the wasted resources because i have more than enough to go around.
Re:Ah, Vista (Score:1, Insightful)
yes, you could go straight to 7. I myself am going straight to 7.
*but* you're complaining that the computer doesn't run perfectly, with all the graphical bells and whistles, on the minimum hardware.
vista capable (ie it'll run, but not anything higher than classic) min requirements:
* 800MHz processor
* 512MB ram
* 32MB dx9 video card
and it will run. maybe not as well as xp on the same hardware, but that's to be expected. New OS = HW upgrade. windows 7 is the only OS I can think of which this doesn't hold true for.
to run aero (in vista *OR* 7) and have anywhere near a decent experience you need at least a 128MB video card and 1GB of ram.
I'm not a fanboi, I just hate people bashing on vista, when they clearly haven't used it on a system that can actually run it.
Re:Millenium 2 (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Conclusion: You're a giant idiot.
Re:Millenium 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing like disk caching and virtual memory that'll fight each other while eating up the RAM and disk space.
ME could be thought of as the Retarded Cannibal Edition... the cannibal that eats itself.
Re:Millenium 2 (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:-1 Troll (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the big problem is that it was not able to be run on the hardware they claimed would run it at the time of release. I bought my wife a brand new laptop a few months after Vista became the "standard" on new computers. It came with a dual core 2.3Mhz CPU, a gig of RAM and an Nvidia Go video card. Pretty decent mid-grade specs at the time for a desktop replacement type laptop. It was crap. She couldn't play WoW (not a high-end graphics game, even then), Photoshop ran like molasses, anything remotely high performance or (especially) graphics intensive was a joke. I even upgraded to 2 Gigs of RAM without any noticeable change.
I installed XP and everything worked like I would expect from a reasonably powerful current generation machine. She's still got XP now, around 16 months later, but it's starting to slow down quite a bit from "Windows drag". I need to reinstall, and I'm considering either going back to Vista or grabbing the Win 7 RC tomorrow. From what I understand, a lot of the problems we were having probably related to incomplete or non-optimized drivers, and I've been REALLY happy with the Win 7 Beta I played with on my Macbook. Fact remains though that we had an awful experience with a machine that was not just advertised as "Vista Ready", but actually had Vista installed on purchase. My wife still isn't too happy about me putting Vista back on it.
Vista may be a lot better now than it was on release, but it made some really bad first impressions. I've read enough horror stories to know I'm not alone in thinking so. It was bad enough that normal, everyday users (my wife, my parents, etc) had an opinion on an operating system. Something that users normally take for granted, that they just buy a computer with, made an impression, and not a good one.
Meanwhile Apple released Leopard. Certainly it wasn't a perfect release (I nearly killed people till they gave me back my "View Content as 'List'" option, and the folder option to get rid of the "stack"), but in final analysis when I upgraded my Macbook Pro from work it ran FASTER with Leopard than it had with Tiger. When Apple upgrades their OS, they look to optimize things at the same time that they add features. This doesn't always result in a net performance increase, but at the least it offsets the performance decrease. Combined with their (admittedly sometimes draconian) control of hardware, and you get a really gentle upgrade scale that can leave the same hardware running 3 and even 4 generations of the OS.
Is it fair to expect the same thing from Microsoft? They're dealing with a nearly infinite variety of hardware and software, and that makes things a Hell of a lot harder. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but to an extend "fair" doesn't matter (just as it often doesn't matter with Linux's hardware problems. These are also generally not the developer fault, but create similarly large PR problems). People expect a computer to perform a certain way when they buy it. They expect it act a certain way when they upgrade it (especially when it was advertised as "ready" for the new OS). The old adage about first impressions applies to operating systems as much as any other product or person.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Correct. This fussy prick won't buy ANY Microsoft OS. After all, there are alternatives.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now answer this question: why do I give a fuck how much bandwidth it uses? The cost of bandwidth up to my cap is zero, and I don't use Bittorrent so I never even come close to the cap.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
So if Microsoft fucks up and creates a piece of shit, you call that producing something radical?
If Microsoft releases the exact same OS with a few minor changes and a different theme, you consider that a completely new OS deserving of more money?
Conclusion - we look at it as above, differently to you. You seem to accept whatever Microsoft tells you, we look at the actual product and make our own decision. So someone who actually looks at the product is fussy in your book.
And before someone says that we jump on the bandwagon, and Vista ain't that bad, I will probably kill the next person that want me to do some testing on Vista to make it more compliant.
Re:Makes sense (Score:2, Insightful)
No, it's not. A service pack fixes regressions in a current operating system.
Vista/WS08 SP2 was released to TechNet/MSDN on April 30th, and it fixes a few issues that are there.
Usually, a Microsoft service packs seldomly introduce big new features. The big exception here was Windows XP SP2, which included a lot of features. That is not the usual case, but instead was done to improve security, because the release of then-called Longhorn was delayed.
Windows Vista is perfectly usable. I've been using it since the end of 2006 and the main problems were applications that have not been tested with the Beta by their vendors or devices that vendors no longer support under Windows Vista.
Yep, there were some real issues that made working not-that-fun Pre-SP1, but there were many advantages that still concluded to a full Vista deployment (for example, BitLocker, which was a very cheap way to get full disk encryption on all our laptops).
Windows 7 improves a lot of the technology added in Vista, and adds several new features, like BitLocker to Go.
Nothing wrong with that.
Besides, if you are current on Software Assurance you get 7 for free anyway.
Re:Millenium 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
His problem right there is 512mb of RAM. That's simply not enough for Vista. It's marginally enough for XP. Increasing RAM requirements is nothing new. When I had Windows 3.1 my computer had 2MB of RAM. I remember running Windows 95 on 16MB. Windows 98 I started at 64MB. When I finally moved to Windows 2000 I moved up to 256MB and my friends thought I was just showing off with such an insane amount. The simple fact is that Vista needs 1GB minimum to run even acceptably. 2GB would be better (my home machine has 4GB - I'm running 64-bit). Try to toss Windows XP on a machine with 128MB of RAM and see how well it'll run.
Honestly, Vista isn't THAT bad of an OS. I use it daily on my desktop, as well as on a laptop pretty frequently. It's fast - I game and edit video on it. UAC I disabled long ago, and I'm running the classic theme just as I always did with Windows XP. If you want to complain just because it's Microsoft or Windows, go ahead, but Vista, despite having some slightly heavier hardware requirements, really isn't any worse than XP.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Brand new? 512MB RAM? 3Ghz Pentium?
Your brother got ripped of, sorry. A current "brand new" machine has between 2 and 4 GB RAM, and a dualcore CPU (e.G. Core 2 Duo) with 2.5 - 3 Ghz.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)