Vista Indicates A Shift in Microsoft's Priorities 499
jcatcw writes "After hundreds of hours of testing Vista, Scot Finnie is supremely tired of it. And of Microsoft. Although 80% of the changes in Windows Vista are positive, there is nothing about Vista that is truly innovative or compelling; there's no transformational, gotta-have-it feature in Vista. But the real problem isn't with Vista. It's with Microsoft itself. His opinion is that Microsoft has stopped focusing on end users. They 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.'"
Yep.... (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words (Score:3, Insightful)
Booohoo, Microsoft releases a secure system! They are doing it only so that they can avoid negative publicity, let's slam them!
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For example, look at this error message you get when installing Apache on Vista: http://cse.unl.edu/~mpeters/Site/lulz.html [unl.edu]
IE7, which forms one of the cornerstones of Windows Vista, also suffers from some pretty serious problems. Here's a screenshot showing IE7 consuming 99% of some fellow's CPU time, in addition to over 1 GB of RAM: http://www.allsorthost.com/is_ie7_ment_to_kill_my_ cpu/ [allsorthost.com]
Re:In other words (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In other words (Score:5, Informative)
It was a Dell box (surprisingly quick delivery, ordered Monday, delivered Thursday). The nvidia display driver sucked and the fonts were disgusting (looked just fine post XP).
Replaced it with stale piss (XP-legal) the next day.
It is still not ready, and M$ is just turning end users into free beta testers yet again (shame on Dell for bowing to M$ and eliminating customer choice on some models).
Anybody who think aero looks good must have also loved all those chromey bits on 1970s - 1980s japanese cars).
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I do agree with Bob.A above about the image. My sniff test involved looking at the programs shown in Task Manager -- this guy is running everything under the sun (Photoshop, Apache, BT client, WinAmp server, Dreamweaver...and on and on and this screenshot only shows about 25% of the programs running on his system). I think he was deli
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Re:In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
Spending six years and six billion dollars to achieve little more than a (debatable) improvement in security and a glossy but irritating GUI is wrong.
Imagine what a company that cared about its customers could do with those resources.
Re:In other words (Score:5, Funny)
Spending six years and six billion dollars to achieve little more than a (debatable) improvement in security and a glossy but irritating GUI is wrong.
Imagine what a company that cared about its customers could do with those resources.
Here's a comparison.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
What you see here is Microsoft slowly boiling frogs.
The main reason for Vista (or any MS Windows/Office release) is so that Microsoft won't end up "Yet Another Windows XP Compatible Vendor" just like the BIOS market - lower margins etc.
If Microsoft didn't keep introducing new APIs and try to force people to migrate to Vista for DirectX10, people would gradually come up with viable compatibles for DirectX9 and Windows XP. You can already see signs of that with Cedega and WINE.
If Microsoft waited too long to change stuff, a lot of people might go, hey I can still use this WinXP Compatible O/S for my stuff and I don't need all that bloat and DRM. And then it's bye-bye high profits etc.
If people would just think long term and kept telling Dell, HP etc, and software vendors (games) that they don't want Vista and stick to XP for a while longer, then there's hope for change and after that _real_ innovation.
But I don't see much hope for that - hardly anyone listens to me
People will switch to Vista just because Dell/HP/IBM/OEMs preload it, even though Vista has significant disadvantages (DRM bloat etc) and mostly insignificantly improvements.
Re:In other words (Score:4, Insightful)
> What you see here is Microsoft slowly boiling frogs.
You know that doesn't work, right? The frog eventually does jump out of the water. If you extend the analogy to consumers, raising the heat too much does in fact make them leave.
> If Microsoft didn't keep introducing new APIs
> [...] people would gradually come up with
> viable compatibles for DirectX9 and Windows XP.
Wasn't five years long enough? XP came out in 2001, DX9 in 2002, why couldn't the industry produce compatible alternatives over that five year period? Doesn't it seem reasonable to conclude that a market which couldn't produce alternatives in five years is not going to produce them at all?
Microsoft are constantly innovating. A day doesn't go by that we don't have thousands of people looking at our products and saying "how do we make this better?" - because that's our job. That's not going to stop. Even if we wait ten years to produce an upgrade, we're going to be innovating and improving for that entire ten years. So if the industry does happen to produce a clone of our current generation, we just have to look back and find the last RTM-quality build. Then we dump it on the market, and your alternative immediately becomes obsolete. You may as well have never had one at all.
Copying other people is a road to failure. It doesn't lead anywhere else. It's the major reason companies don't want to go open source, because their competition could copy them more easily, and the open source community has a huge body of very intelligent explanations as to why this reason is STUPID. Copying doesn't work. It's a bad business model. It doesn't serve consumers.
Besides, why would I buy a cheap copy of Windows instead of the real thing? After all, you get what you pay for - or, more precisely, you pay for what you get. What am I not getting when I buy this cheap Windows clone? Clearly I'm not getting SOMETHING, or it would cost the same.
> hardly anyone listens to me
I'm listening. I have roughly the influence of a hemorrhoid, but I'm still listening.
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My brother-in-law is a 6 year veteran tester at microsoft (FTE not contracter) on the Vista project and his Vista advice was, to quote "leave it alone, it sucks and is not worth upgrading to", he also questions "what exactly have we been trying to work on for the last 5 years?" and has explained to me that of the 3 original pillars for Longhorn, which would've made it innovative, only 1 one made it into the product and that was the GUI - in a red
Re:In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
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1. All of your software is installed
2. All of your devices are configured
3. All of your personal preferences are set
That's about as non-intrusive as it gets. I'm also rather worried that so many people who are, apparently, considered qualified to review software in this industry - can't seem to figure out that the first week or two on a new system IS NOT NORMAL USAGE.
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The "Vista" we see now is a step for Microsoft. Let's look at them for just a minute not as "corporate jerkoffs" but as the "special kid" in the class.
A sampling on what that hard spent development cash was good for:
-UAC: at least they took a clue from the rest of the community by utilizing the principal of a strong user / non-admin account.
-New IE7: Time will tell, but the new feature of running in a low-
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm. enterprise are their customers (Score:5, Insightful)
MS's biggest problem is to try justify all the effort that goes into making something "new" that is not perceived to be new by most people looking at it from the outside. There must be a lot of investors/share holders asking why MS spent $5bn or whatever developing Vista when XP seems healthy enough.
Re:Ummm. enterprise are their customers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ummm. enterprise are their customers (Score:5, Informative)
Sure the OS costs $189 or less per station if you buy a VLK for it, but the server it talks to needs the right licensing to be legal.
Terminal server, for example, is stupid expensive per remote access license. Oh you want Exchange server? Thats $N. Want to actually CONNECT to it? Thats ($Y * (number of connections)).
-paul
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I worked in retail once. We sold Office 2003 for $199 NZD. We made about $14 per copy, so we stopped selling software. The computer industry in general never gave retailers much in terms of margins. Laptops etc. would make sometimes less than half of what other products would at the same selling price.
Still . . . if you don't stock it, that's $14 in someone else's till. Well at least that's what my boss always used to say. I told him it's not worth the time and effort for $14. Software and IT weren't real
Join the bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
They attempted to improve their security and GUI. Any additional features were already available as third party add ons or with different OS's. Were we really expecting anything else? Time will tell if their attempts were successful. I for one have no interest in Vista other than possibly having to use it at work.
"His opinion is that Microsoft has stopped focusing on end users. They 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy."
Again, no surprise here... Marketing is all about positive publicity and MS recognizes that their bread and butter is evolving into the large, medium, and small corporate entities that are locked into their OS and apps...not the everyday home end user.
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I guess they're also trying to sell high-end graphics cards and CPUs, too.
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
Not selling the cards directly, just the revinue from the 'Trusted driver' scheme.
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:5, Interesting)
If they are not interested in the everyday home user then why on earth would they be currently in the middle of ploughing through half a billion dollars woth of mass market TV adverts trying to convince people to go "Wow" when they first see Vista?
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Good point. I think however that their marketing campaign towards the end user is really nothing more than trying to justify why folks should buy new PCs with Vista. Folks buy new PC, get Vista, AND upgrade to the new Office. The OS is a freebie and the bonus
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Not to mention the anti-PC Apple advertising that is on the air right now. It's like a political contest - if you don't respond soon people will think the meme is true and stop buying PC's altogether. Particularly because A) Apple is attacking Vista head on and B) the commercials are really funny and easily likeable.
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Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:5, Interesting)
Or remember Enron saturating the airwaves with ads for their new bandwidth commodities market? How many of the viewers were really commodities traders? I think it's just a "show of force."
Is Microsoft really trying to accomplish anything or spread any message, or simply maintaining their larger-than-life image?
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:4, Interesting)
My thought when seeing those was it was more geared towards potential investors. If you've never heard of the company you're less likely to buy stock in it yada yada.
Of course, that is just what popped into my head when I tsaw the ads, so it could be completely wrong.
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Advertising on the scale of Vista, though, seems like a huge waste of money. I think everyone who's likely to buy Vista already knows what it is, and that it's available now.
Just the hardware requirements alone mean that 99% of customers will not and should not buy the upgrade. It's just not cost-effective to buy the $99-$
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:5, Funny)
I always wanted to say, "wow, I was going to by that wooden laptop, but because of that ad, I think I'll buy the plastic version! Thank!
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"...This reminds me of some ads I've seen "BASF... We don't make the things you buy, we make the things you buy better." Remember those? It was like they were purposely saying, "99% of you within the sound of our voice, we don't care about you... you can't even choose to buy our products or not, because they're everywhere in everything. To the other 1%... look how much we can waste on this - that's how big we are."
I disagree. The purpose, in my view, of adverts like this is purely to spend money on adve
Re:Join the bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it goes a little deeper than that - as another reply points out, they are spending buckets of cash on heart-and-minds right now (anyone else notice the slew of Vista ads on slashdot?). I believe they recognise people prefer to use a single system across all their computing, and if they can get Vista in homes, there will be more pressure for it to be running in the office.
Additionally, corperate users are generally slower adopters (or at least should be!) - validation of existing software on new plaftorms, cost/benefit analysis, beta testing etc. And most corp IT shops have learned to wait for SP1 before giving software a good shake anyway. So for now the majority of Vista uptake will be home users. In 3-6 months, the corps will start coming online with their purchases and the balance will swing.
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Dude, if you haven't completely atrophied you need to go for a walk or something!
When was Microsoft ever user focused? (Score:5, Funny)
Um, excuse me but (Score:3, Insightful)
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large enterprise customers are end-users if you define end-user as the one who writes the check for the software.
Users are the people who *use* the software. Enterprises are not users (although they do contain users). Enterprises are customers. Customers are the ones who write the checks.
This means that, for the most part, the end-users in the enterprise are generally *not* the customers, which leads directly to the issue raised in the article. Namely, that MS is focusing on their (corporate) customers, and all but completely ignoring their users.
MS-Basic ?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:MS-Basic ?? (Score:5, Insightful)
QBasic was one of the first languages I ever played with. For me it was just a toy, so I didn't need it to be tremendous -- but as a toy, I actually thought it was a lot of fun (that's why I taught myself C ;-)).
I think Microsoft's biggest mistake wasn't anything they screwed up with the language per-se, but hiding it on the Windows CD instead of giving it to everybody in the Start Menu! Imagine how much more computer literate everyone would be if their OS shipped with an easy-to-use programming language visibly installed! I'd argue that it'd do more than increase understanding of computers; playing with logic I will swear actively increases intelligence.
Programming is great fun. People need to get into it before they're too old or they won't see it. It'd be like expecting a 40-year-old to play with Legos... (We get the creative spark trained out of us as we age. I'm trying desperately to hang on to mine! [Got any pointers?*])
*(I can see those jokes with punchlines like '0xd3adb33f' coming from here already!)
Anyway, Windows needs a dead-simple BASIC or LISP or whatever, with a dead-simple graphics library, and some cool little example programs with source, and it needs to put them all in a folder on the Desktop with a good searchable helpfile. The world needs more Legos.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't even know what C-basic is.
Yes, that's the crux of the problem when people (not to single you out) tend to promote nearly any Microsoft product : they have no outside reference to similar system / language / application, because they only used Microsoft idea of those applications. MS-Basic is a classic symptom of that. Burned in ROM in those 8 bits time, with other languages (sometimes just other basic dialects) coming at a premium, most people tended to stay with what they had at hand, had fun with it and mostly found it to be "th
Newsflash (Score:5, Insightful)
Like it or not, corporate desktops are Microsoft's bread and butter.
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Most people are under the impression that UAC is primarily intended to stop the user from doing something. To me that is a secondary goal. The real purpose of it is to prevent programs from harming the system. In other words, it's not really there to stop a u
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The aim should be improving security and software quality, not trying to make it look like you are improving security and software quality.
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AFAIK, it just gives an "allow/deny" prompt, by default anyway. users will simply treat it as a click-through and it will have basically no effect.
what they should have done is have it prompt for the password (similar to what ubuntu does). it makes them (some of them anyway) think for a moment before giving their password.
granted, there is an option for the latter, but it should do that be default.
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ahhh the crux of the issue... do we cater to the people who are required by fear of litigation to pay... or force more people who pirate to pony up? that appears to be the question.
i wonder how many people below class 3 geek can still pirate windows. isn't there a large portion of people who get windows with their new dells or hp's?
Re:Newsflash (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is in a major bind with piracy - they MUST make it easy for large-scale, unattended corporate installs. This means no serial number to punch in every time, and no major verification routine. As long is this is the case, pirates (aaaarrr) will just snag these installs and run with them. When you're trying to get something like 50 million corporate installs, your bread and butter, going all streamlined and easily, you're never going to be able to adequately protect against piracy.
At the same time, the harder they make it to pirate windows, and the more people have to upgrade to even do it, the easier it is to "pirate" Ubuntu. Which, with every passing version, adds another couple % of people onto the list of "does everything I usually need to do". That % is nowhere near 100% yet, but it covers a sizable chunk of the largely computer illiterate "email and interweb" crowd. And it's almost easy enough for them to pirate at the moment. Have you seen install.exe [ubuntu.com] yet?Re:Newsflash (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. Making large corporate users happy is the same thing as making CORPORATE IT DEPARTMENTS happy. It's a different kettle of fish.
What sorts of things do corporate IT managers want?
* Standardization
* Security, especially protecting data.
* The ability to set policys, and lock the users out of policy-violating actions (such as installing new software)
* Ability to push required patches/updates out to users quickyl and efficiently
* Ease of recovering from outages/problems
* Easy back up of files.
* Secure communication and collaboration tools.
* Make my employees more efficient--make it easier to find and use tools and shared data.
Basically, make it easy to maintain, secure, and don't let the users do anything I don't want them to do.
What do end users want?
* Ability to get news and information
* Entertainment, be it DVD playback or streaming audio.
* Communication with friends via a potentially diverse array of protocols
* Play the latest games and work with the latest peripherals.
* Share video, pictures, and other content with others on demand.
See the difference in the lists? One of the reasons Apple is doing so well in the consumer market is that they focus on the second list (well, except games per se, but that's a different topic). They focus on what individuals would like technology to let them do.
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Most end users also pay for Windows. It's called the Microsoft Tax for a reason.
I agree (Score:2)
The coolest thing about Vista (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The coolest thing about Vista (Score:5, Funny)
Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
Stop me if I'm wrong, but the "largest enterprise customers" are end users
I have copy of Vista Business, so I installed it on a spare disk. The hardware compatibility test app GPFed, which wasn't a great sign. I went ahead with the install to see what would happen. The installer archived all of the XP files on the disc, then installed Vista without any problems - or so I thought. Turns out there were no Vista drivers for my brand name NIC. Bought one of the few NICs with native drivers, so I was able to connect to the net. But what? No sound? No drivers for my sound card either.
That was as far as I wanted to go at this point. The stark reality about Vista is that driver support is minimal at best. Rather shocking considering XP had drivers for much more hardware. I'm really curious if anyone knows why driver support is so minimal at this time. Does the consumer version have more? If not, all of the people who bought Vista are in for an uncharacteristic surprise.
<tinfoilhat>Is the lack of drivers a conspiracy to get people to upgrade hardware?</tinfoilhat>
Why are the hardware vendors so far behind supplying drivers?
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
Also, in order for all the DRM to work, only software drivers that are secure enough are allowed to run on vista if you want to use "protected content". This means that all those old XP drivers (many of which don't meet the requirements vis a vis protected content) wont work if you want DRM.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
all those old XP drivers wont work if you want DRM.
No one wants DRM.
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DRM-laden drivers? XP drivers would give you full quality even if you couldn't verify, to Microsoft's satisfaction, that you had paid for your content. Only communist homosexual evolution-believing terrorists would have any need to play content without Microsoft's explicit authorisation.
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
For enthusiasts and box builders, sites like Tech Report have useful articles like their Vista System Guide [techreport.com] that includes notes on Vista support for various pieces of hardware in both 32 and 64 bit flavors. Interestingly the current video card king, the GeForce 8800, only has preliminary support for Vista [nvidia.com]. Updates are no doubt in the pipeline, but it's good info to know before going shopping.
Couldn't have put it better myself (Score:5, Interesting)
Think Different... (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess this is why Apple is deliberately ignoring the Enterprise market.
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i think that the focus on the enterprise is because THAT is where people learn about the computers they use at home.
unless you work with images, video, or music for a living, there is a pretty good chance that you are going to use a PC at work. there is a reason that apple runs those "i'm a pc and i'm a mac" commercials... apple wants people to equate PC's with boring work stuff.
the only hole in this whole thing is, of course, games. directX 10 is a vista exclusive... a clear indicator that while the
Just sayin' (Score:3, Insightful)
Now I'm not saying this [slashdot.org] all came exactly true but if'n you ask me, some serious trolling of blogs for peeved-at-Vista articles is going on
Which makes Slashdot about the only place in the world where anyone cares about it.
Re:Just sayin' (Score:4, Informative)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=217328&cid=17
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=212480&cid
Problem is, i didn't really care about microsoft. Bought a bundled office back in 1997, seen the first bomb on my new mac after 5 minutes, uninstalled it, manually removed files that the installer forgot about, started realizing people weren't bashing microsoft for nothing.
Then at work I had to use XP and the hate slowly mounted.
Odd logic (Score:5, Insightful)
How can Microsoft simultaneously focus on their large enterprise customers (who have hundreds of thousands of end users) and simultaneously stop focusing on end users?
Second: why would it be a negative to fucus on security and SW quality? Were these not the things MS was criticised the most for --for not focusing on security and quality enough --now this is their bane? What??? Make a straight argument. Or is he trying to say that MS is only pretending to address the issues and their main strategy is really a public relations strategy on security and SW quality?
I get his gist, but he's just not explaining himself clearly. In critizing MS he's using odd logic.
throw that boy some coffee
The thing that really irks me is.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yessiree bob, Apple is looking better every day!
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And, other than viewing photos, the occasional mpeg, and multimedia things, I DON'T need video editing or sound editing capabilities, but am I going to have to buy the "Home Deluxe" or whatever the fuck it's called to view these multimedia files?!?
Sounds like you need Vista Pr0n Deluxe Edition
Re:The thing that really irks me is.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you rather try to pick out the right Linux distro? A comparison would be 300 pages long and have a 10,000 point venn diagram, filled with obtuse technical jargon not fit for consumption by the masses.
What a load of... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.
Funny, that. I can see how it's bad they don't attract negative publicity and piss off their largest enterprise customers.
But tell me, how do these features fall into any of those two categories:
* New aero candy interface (I bet enterprise customers demanded this!).
* DVD maker.
* Photo processing.
* Live thumbnails.
* Updated Windows Games.
* DirectX 10
* etc etc.
There's a real reason why nobody is impressed with Vista as much: we've been watching it for 5 years. Previews, alphas, betas.
Maybe Jobs is right to sue blog sites that leak product info, and release everything with a ton of hype, of the "Best. Chewing. Gum. Evah!!!".
Because you see what happens now: people who followed Longhorn's development since it's inception are now whining that they're kinda familiar with what's new. Well duh, smartass.
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On that note, might I point out that the features you mentioned are akin to the comic included with each piece of Bazooka bubble gum: mild amusement wrapped around a pink, flavorless brick.
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Every one of the features you mention falls into the "avoiding negative publicity" category.
Microsoft needs to keep Windows up to date on eye candy / included basic functionality so that they don't get smoked in reviews compared to Mac OS X (and even Linux desktops). The minor effort that it required for them to add a 3D UI and "live thumbnails" was more than worth it so they could bullet point those things on a feature list.
As for the DX10/Games thing, that's more of an Anti-feature. Updates to Direct X
Re:What a load of... (Score:5, Informative)
"The minor effort that it required for them to add a 3D UI"
Go read just the userland API details on that "minor effort". If this is all a minor effort to you, you should be writing the Windows killer right now and release it by the end of the year, why deprive the world of your incredible kung-fu programming skills?
As for the DX10/Games thing, that's more of an Anti-feature. Updates to Direct X are normal as graphics cards improve. The news here isn't that Microsoft is releasing a new version of Direct X - that's normal, the news is that they're *not* releasing it for XP.
Did the fact that DX10 is a complete rewrite escaped your attention? The whole thing is redone so the API has much less overhead, can multithread and allow videocard virtual memory (swap)? And this is the reason why it's not ported back to XP, it's a completely different architecture.
But let me calm you down: Microsoft ported back all the new *shaders* capabilities to a DirectX9 release called "L". The same one that will also run in Vista alongside DX10.
Aero itself runs on 9L as DX10 cards aren't even done or out yet. So what exactly are you spreading FUD about?
Has stopped? It never started. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's been the case since 2K/XP, and arguably since Win9x and the introduction of IE/ActiveX.
Word and Excel macros on by default? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and all content created by people in the office is trusted!
NetBIOS filesharing on by default in 9x? Of course! Everybody's on a LAN, everyone should be able to share their documents with each other!
ActiveX things that autoinstall and execute when some string on a webpage tells them to? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and the only thing they should be browsing is the company Intranet, and the only web applications are going to be about entering your vacation time into a database of timesheets!
Javashit on by default! Of course! See above -- how else can we be sure to tell those UNIX greybeards that they're fired (because they can't run ActiveX TimeSheet Thingy that the consultant was paid $100K to write) unless they're running IE!
Install IIS by default and make it listen to requests from everywhere? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and wouldn't it be cool if everyone had their own little web server thingy running on their desktop so they could share their Word documents with other people in the office?
UPnP on by default? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and wouldn't it be cool if you just plugged the computer into the LAN, and it automatically knew about the printer down the hall.
DCOM and RCP services turned on by default, listening on ports 135, 139, 445 or 593 for requests from everywhere? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and DCOM makes it easy for people to stick Excel spreadsheets in their Word documents!
Goddamn near every out-of-the-box remote exploit (and most of the designed-in insecurities in IE and the Office suite) arises from the assumption that everyone's on a LAN, and that all content is trusted.
Re:Has stopped? It never started. (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I think they've always had a "not invented here" mentality and for that reason, didn't bother to study the lessons of those who'd been dealing with the internet for ages before it exploded in popularity.
There's a reason java applets (lame as they were) weren't associated with the type of security problems we've seen over and over from MicroSoft. Sun understood the "all incoming content should be treated as hostile" principle and sandboxed applets by design from the very beginning.
I've often wondered why some enterprising bottom feeder
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let me be the first to say.... (Score:2, Funny)
DUH!
Testing (Score:5, Funny)
Although there's no must-have features, they'll bludgeon everyone with the DX10 stick and the "we won't patch XP any more stick after 2011" until everyone has bought it.
It's like Kevin Costner's Movie "Nowhere to Run" (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows is not secure......Bad Microsoft
Security (a.k.a, User Account Control (UAC) for Trigger-Click-Happy People who click "Yes" no matter what).....Bad Microsoft
Give me a break....Bashing Microsoft just-because-I-hate-Microsoft (a.k.a, Linux fan bois)
is getting too old and childish. Grow up people!
It is a "No-Matter-What-Blame-Microsoft" attitude.
Overall, I think Vista is a gradual evolution of the Windows platform.
Just like every other company, Microsoft had to make hard Business decisions.
:shrug: (Score:2)
What would have been wrong with that? And keep the fixes for how async IO is done, and keep the new schedulers, and keep the new installer process, and so on.
I don't care if it was a $149 box and $79 upgrade like XP vs. 2000... I just want some continuity between my OSs. Give me some nice benefits without the drawbacks.
I mean, you want to talk about bein
Re:It's like Kevin Costner's Movie "Nowhere to Run (Score:5, Insightful)
Security (a.k.a, User Account Control (UAC) for Trigger-Click-Happy People who click "Yes" no matter what).....Bad Microsoft
You aren't paying attention. The criticism is directed at the poor implementation, not the fact that it was implemented.
Re:It's like Kevin Costner's Movie "Nowhere to Run (Score:5, Interesting)
This took Microsoft over SIX years to send out. People aren't saying it's not a gradual improvement, people are asking why the hell it took Microsoft SIX years to make such gradual improvement, how long its going to be before they make their next incompatable "gradual improvement", and whether or not Microsoft even has an R&D department. Most of the things they did were very clearly innovated by someone else.
-Security's a problem? Let's create something that will let us blame the user. (UAC)
-Games going to other OSs are a problem? Let's rewrite an incompatable DX10.
-Third party drivers for video crads are crashing our driver model? Let's just gimp the third parties so that they can't and do it ourselves. (Bonus for gimping OpenGL.)
-GUI/useability is a problem? Let's just slice and dice some Linux and OS X elements.
The problem is not that Vista is incremental in change, it's that its incremental, it took six years, and Microsoft is forcing the incompatability anyways.
And this is a surprize how? (Score:3, Insightful)
The entire publicity was done to get mainstream media's attention and tell the corporate buyers, who buy not 1 machine at a time but 10,000 to 20,000 machines at a time that the change is coming.
The end-user who's sing a PC at home isn't going to upgade his OS until he buys a new machine, and he's taking what they're giving because he has no real choice.
Unless he buys a Mac or is geeky enough to get a Linux box. (That means YOU reading this, and you didn't give a shit what Microsoft was doing anyway, did you?)
Its all being done for the volume buyers.
A very good thing for MS (Score:4, Insightful)
Fast forward 20 years. Everything is in MS Word format, which may or may not work with a particular version of Word, and is much more likely to work with another Office application. We are nearly 100% connected, but if you do not have the MS Windows only version of IE, there are significant web pages that will not work. It now matters that you have the same computer as work, if for no other reason than you can use the office copy of MS Office.
If there was the fluidity of motion of the 80's, then perhaps the MS strategy would be as disastrous as the IBM strategy. However, I do not see millions of users moving from the WinTel machine to something cheaper, nor do I see millions of users who never bought a computer before buying something other than a Wintel. Perhaps a few hundred thousand will buy a Mac, and few hundred thousand will buy a *nix machine, but that is not going to be a short term problem for MS.
Ultimately Vista does what it is supposed to do, which is to satisfy the contract of those that paid MS for very expensive long term licensing, as well as justify the higher cost machines from MS real customers, the OEM computer people. A positive ancillary purpose of MS Vista is to further isolate MS OS from other commodity products, thus making it harder to switch. This is a risky proposal, but perhaps the only way that MS can continue to amass the huge profits on what is essentially old stock. Good for them.
Pay Very Close Attention (Score:3, Insightful)
I keep having this strange dream where most of the governments of the industrialized nations got tired of the myriad of problems they have when one connects a relatively anonymous PC to the Internet and decided to do something like mount a smart card module on a motherboard to generate a unique, verifiable signature (among other things) for each pc.
Just a dream though...
$400, and all I got was Texas Hold em'? (Score:2)
Buy it bitches! (still a shareholder)
New Vista Audio Tweaks (Score:2, Interesting)
"Vista redefines the audio landscape, but is it a landscape of forced obsolescence?"
http://pc.ign.com/articles/759/759538p1.html [ign.com]
In this blog there is video about how the audio stack in Windows Vista has been rewritten so people can have per-app audio control.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=1 [msdn.com]
"largest enterprise customers" (Score:3, Interesting)
Fast forward to 2007. In order to install the current version of Exchange you pretty much have to become a directory services expert. You need to know Active Directory pretty well, and basically be at the MCP level of Microsoft-brainwash. Sure, this is great if you're running something like Ford Motor Company and you have 100,000 users at dozens of locations, but what if you're a small to medium business and you just want to set up a basic mail and calendar server?
Disclaimer: the reason I know about this is because I'm involved in the development of Citadel [citadel.org], an open source groupware server. One of the things we focused on was making the installation as easy as Exchange 5.5 used to be. That's my "full disclosure".
Focusing on end users (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is exactly what an operating system maker is supposed to do. End users don't use an operating system, developers do.
If Microsoft finally starts giving developers priority over end users, Windows might actually become something useful someday.
So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Vista contains quite a few very nice new features, volume shadow copy(sure novell's had it for 15 years, but not on the desktop), bitlocker(sure you could do that with third party apps, or if you configured it reasonably well, linux, but whole drive encryption is still pretty new, especially having it work in an efficient manner. Even the DRM is about as "innovative" as operating systems get(that's not to say it's a good thing, but not all innovation is good).
Most of the truly innovative technologies in Operating Systems are really low level, new file systems, new kernel designs, new process schedulers, emulation, etc. We haven't really seen much innovation in any of these things in a number of years, certainly not anything that just changes the whole way we do things.
ReiserFS is just another way of looking at journalling file systems, not a major new step. GNU Hurd has been working on a microkernal design for nearly 20 years and it's still not ready for prime-time, Microsoft has been working on WinFS for a long time too, and maybe eventually they'll have it, but not this time.
In essence Vista is what 2000 was supposed to be and XP almost was. It's a reasonably functional and reasonably secure multi-user operating system from Microsoft. One which is relatively secure, but which can still run most of the programs you want to run on it. Yeah, it took them 10 years to get there, but if you think of what things were like in the NT/9x days, where you had to choose between an OS which wouldn't work at home(and didn't even always work in the corporate environment) or an OS which was about as secure as a sieve, we've come a long way.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, no, we have not come a long way. Perhaps it is correct to say that Microsoft have come a long way, but nothing more. MS are just now implementing features that were commercially available in the bad old "NT/9x days" from other OS vendors. The truth is, we've basically tread water for a decade waiting for MS to catch up, while watching MS (unethically, if not illegally) strangle better technologies the whole time.
No change, really. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not exactly a revolutionary observation. Ever since the PC entered the corporate market Microsoft has been this way. The "end user" has been nothing more than a cash cow to be milked.
M$ started focusing on 'the enterprise' with WinNT (Score:4, Interesting)
CIOs and Micro$oft have been an evil combination. CIOs gain authority by fielding systems that have some sense of 'business case' but that require expensive tech support staff. Windows moves capabilities away from end users and to CIOs and corporate overhead. End users get stuck with problems that only CIOs can fix, but the CIO -never- has to pay for employee downtime when the computer goes south. In the meantime, the Microsoft monopoly grows, and no CIO gets fired for buying Microsoft, no matter how bad the crap from Redmond is (and there has been some -real crap- from Redmond.)
This clearly started with WinNT's focus on 'the managed user experience' and was obvious to me by 2000. So I'm only surprised it's taken others so long. Geez, and they talk about -Steve Jobs'- reality distortion field!!
dave (they get my Mac when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers, -or- they indemnify me against all of the delay, downtime and inconvenience of the alternatives...)
largest enterprise customers happy, wtf?! (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Vista includes NO tools of any kind for detecting nasties (viruses, trojans, spyware, worms, rootkits or anything else).
Yes it does: Windows Defender, an antispyware tool. IIRC, they attempted to bundle a virus detector with Vista as well; Mcafee, Symatec, and a load of other antivirus companies complained to the EU, which upheld it and told MS to sell it as a seperate product (which became Windows Onecare). Or actually, now I come to think of it, it could be that they just threatened to comlain to the EU. Something like that, anyway; you could probably Google it.