Microsoft Pleads With Consumers to Adopt Vista Now 912
SlinkySausage writes "Microsoft has admitted, in an email to the press, that 'some customers may be waiting to adopt Windows Vista because they've heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues, or because they think they should wait for a service pack release.' The company is now pleading with customers not to wait until the release of SP1 at the end of the year, launching a 'fact rich' program to try to convince them to 'proceed with confidence'. The announcement coincides with an embarrassing double-backflip: Microsoft had pre-briefed journalists that it was going to allow home users to run Vista basic and premium under virtual machines like VMWare, but it changed its mind at the last minute and pulled the announcement."
Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thought not.
How about against IP violations? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do I need it? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they made an updated version of XP that didn't add restrictions and was refined to be more efficient I would be interested in buying it. I'm not interested in anything that is new in Vista. Slow animated transitions? (I took them out of XP too...) More complex visual displays? A completely redesigned layout that isn't more efficient or intuitive?
Now why would you expect me to want to buy this again?
Re:Do I need it? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Do I need it? ??? No. (Score:5, Interesting)
One of my friends calls me every other day begging me to put XP on his computer because nothing works in Vista, and I've told him he needs to atleast wait until his 30-day warranty period expires, and I don't think he's going to make it. He bought a brand new HP desktop with 1GB of RAM and the GeForce 6150. He only runs two progams, WoW and Picture Publisher Pro 10. Both of them failed right off!
I've wasted two evenings now trying to get PP10 to work correctly including setting the app to run in XP compatibility mode. No good, cursors get corrupted, screen refresh fails, no end of problems. Since this is what he uses for his secondary income, this has to be resolved. The program does everything he wants so "get him to buy a new paint program" is not on the table. He was also loosing his mind to get back into WoW so he's already bought an extra GB of RAM and upgraded the system to a GeForce 73xx series card just to get a barely tolerable frame rate.
Contrast this with my wife who bought the exact same systems spec but with XP preinstalled and the system screams. Games run great, 3-D apps run great. It's like night and day. MS can go screw themselves. They want people to run Vista, they better start sending out some major checks to us "family and friends technicians" to put up with this BS, I don't have time for it and 100% of the time I'm slicking Vista off every computer that comes to me. The real kicker is MS is still profiting off of this because of the people that have to go out and by a copy of XP to make their computer work.
Grumble grumble grumble
Re:Do I need it? ??? No. (Score:4, Funny)
I wonder if they offer special downgrade pricing?
Re:Do I need it? (Score:5, Insightful)
The pricing for me to upgrade to Vista is ridiculous. XP is pretty stable for me so why the hell would I move away from it? My office and home machines all run fully patched XP Professional installs.
More to the point the SO uses AutoDesktop and AutoCAD. They WILL NOT RUN on Vista.
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have two computers at my desk. A 7-year-old Pentium III desktop and this laptop, an IBM T-43p. The desktop is extremely slow, but serves perfectly fine for music, photo, and document storage. The laptop I'm using has a smaller HD, but works great for playing newer games and any application too powerful for the aging desktop.
In essence, I'm set. Why should I spend so much money to experiment on an OS that:
A) is so far unproven
B) Will not run properly on my desktop
C) does not support all my devices
D) See, cost.
As the old saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I use what I have, and it works just fine. So, where's my incentive to change?
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:5, Funny)
2- New MS games DX-10 exclusive games. If they make games so good only 10% of the windows PC users can use them, you definitely should be part of that elite.
3- Aero. No kidding, it if one of the 5 best looking UI of the moment.
4- No need for a good anti-virus. Well, at least no good anti-virus available anyway.
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd rather have older hardware then support DRM. You're forgetting about Mac or Linux as alternatives to DRM-ridden Platforms.
[2- New MS games DX-10 exclusive games.]
What PC game is going to make me want to upgrade to DX-10? Halo 2, Halo 3?
I can play both of those on the 360. If there's some game that absolutely will not
run on DX-9, then I'll just go without and stick to console games, as I am doing now.
[3- Aero. No kidding, it if one of the 5 best looking UI of the moment.]
I agree its very pretty looking, but as others have pointed out, I can achieve nearly
the same look on XP using software. Its not a selling point if its easily replicated.
[4- No need for a good anti-virus.]
Ok, so the OS finally achieves a level of security that it was expected to have
about 6-7 years ago, good for them.
----
I am not planning to use Vista at any point in the near future, and I will advise anyone
I know to, if not shun completely, wait for a while.
MS seems to not get the point that Customers will not move over to unproved and unstable
platforms when they have the exact opposite available: Stable, Proven platforms (Mac, Linux, XP/2000, etc.,).
That they would resort to these kinds of tactics is a VERY telling sign of how much they are desperate to
save face and try and make some money on MILLENNIUM EDITION 2.0.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Even without the performance and compatibility issues, DRM is the stopper for me. I've made the decision to not use any product that uses DRM. It goes beyond a simple technological issue for me. The decision to shun DRM is ethical, political.
And I can't see how any product with DRM could possibly run faster/better than a system without DRM, so I imagine it's also a technologically
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When Microsoft stops releasing security fixes for XP and starts making sure new software only works right on Vista, like they did to 98 and 2000 when XP came out.
....Or not. Some facts here, please (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, not that a lot of PC hardware is going to last that long. Remember, unlike with Win98 and Win2k, you can't just replace the motherboard on a WinXP machine, reinstall and have a fully functioning machine: it'll want a new license. Therefore, most of the holdouts will be "switching" to Vista once their old PCs break down and they can no longer manage to obtain XP licenses that install properly.
On the other hand, I noticed a while
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:5, Interesting)
Aside from being slow as molasses and able to burn through a laptop battery at twice the rate that XP did, it's recently
decided that I don't have permissions to see the network status.. so all I get is 'connection status: unknown access is denied'.. also making it impossible to see whether I'm actually connected to anything without going to the command line and using ipconfig.
Oh and the wonderfully inconsistent permissions don't stop there. 'ipconfig
Oh and there's the utterly broken file copy. Try copying a directory from one place to another when it requires elevation. It'll do one of two things:
1. Ask for elevation, then when you confirm do absolutely nothing.
2. Ask for elevation, copy about 10% of the files then silently stop.
I could go on for hours... Advice for anyone thinking of installing it before SP1 comes out.. don't bother.
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:5, Interesting)
The most braindead part of Vista copying? You can't copy from a network share to a local subdirectory -- you first get an elevation, and then it's refused. But you CAN copy from a network share to the desktop, and then from the desktop to the local subdirectory without an elevation. As afar as Microsoft is concerned, it's not about where you're coming from, or where you're going to -- it's all about the journey
DEC: all your network are belong to us
SUN: the network is the computer
Microsoft: the network is evil! EVIL!
Re:Microsoft: the network is evil! EVIL! (Score:4, Interesting)
They couldn't replace it with MSN.
All unpatched MS systems directly connected to the Web get infected in minutes.
Web apps are making some desktop apps obsolete.
They are afraid... very afraid.
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:5, Informative)
I couldn't even make it through the 4-5 months that you did... Not because I hated it, but because I was trying to get work done.
My company rolled out Vista on several of our technician laptops to get us familiar with the OS. The problem is that those technician laptops are constantly going out on-site to diagnose/repair assorted network issues. And Vista, even the business version, just doesn't work well with Cisco equipment.
There's no telnet utility. Not a big deal, since I install PuTTY anyway... Except that PuTTY didn't seem to like Vista and crashed constantly. Hyperterm is also gone, which again wouldn't be a big deal with PuTTY - but PuTTY kept crashing. I was completely unable to get the P/S/ASDM to work reliably through IE7 (thankfully it worked fine through FireFox). And then there were the constant prompts for elevation - ipconfig, network properties, NetStumbler.
In the end we had to reformat all the technician laptops and re-install Windows XP just so we could get our work done.
Short summary of LUA and UAC (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_privil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control [wikipedia.org]
The short version: no, not new to Vista; the idea's been in the *nixes (and before?) for yonks. Windows NT/2k/XP did have different privilege levels but few used them for various reasons, everyone just ran as admin all the time (which was the default). The differences in Vista are, firstly, no-one runs as admin (the "administrator" account you create by default is actually a standard account in every way except that you don't need to enter the admin password every time you elevate); two, applications can request to elevate to admin privileges on a task-by-task basis if they need to (pre-Vista setup programs and the like are heuristically 'detected' and automatically told to request elevation for their entire runtime), and three, there's a ton of backward compatibility stuff to try and mitigate the effects of every program written before 2007 wanting admin rights because they're used to them -- even going so far as to virtualise
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:5, Funny)
Remember, this is a step above the Well, It Works On My Computer Award.
You're really on fire right now. Keep it up!
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I'd put it right up there with thedraw and pc-file III
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Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:5, Informative)
No, vista is differently -- but equally -- broke. MS did fix stuff like having stupid directory names (e.g. "Documents and Settings" -> "users"), etc., but compensated by adding UAC and DRM stupidity.
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about some other company, but my users are MY guinea pigs, not Microsoft's.
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:5, Funny)
What's the problem? That's exactly what he said.
Non-working apps killed Vista for me (Score:5, Interesting)
The big kicker for me was that I was completely unable to use Ulead's Media Studio Pro, which is my video editing software. The laptop has a Firewire port, so that made it a big plus for me to be able to do some editing on the laptop when I'm not at home. Thanks to the new way that Vista talks to the hardware, MSP was useless for all but basic editing. The Preview window didn't work and the audio didn't work, which made it impossible to be able to sync up audio and splice video segments together. Changing the compatibility mode in Vista made no difference.
On top of that, I needed to download a Vista-compatible DVD of Stuido 10 Titanium from Pinnacle's site. It was a free download and it worked fine as far as I could tell, but I'm glad that I have FTTH/FIOS because it was a 1.4 GB download!
There are also a number of other issues with Vista that cumulatively made me decide that enough was enough, like the initial issue that I had where my account would work fine but my wife's account, which I set up as an administrator-level account, couldn't log on stating that she didn't have the rights to log on. (!!!) I bought a 160 GB hard drive from NewEgg, threw it into the laptop, and installed XP. All of my hardware and software are working just fine. And now Microsoft is trying to push me to go back to Vista? They can kiss my ass. It's not happening.
Re:Non-working apps killed Vista for me (Score:4, Insightful)
Um... (Score:4, Insightful)
XP is the end of the line for me and Windows. We've had a long and bumpy relationship, but it's over now. Time to move on.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Um... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Um... (Score:4, Interesting)
In a brief moment of sobriety, Microsoft will rebuff Windows XP and possibly even release a new variant of XP such as "Security Enhanced XP." That's my prediction anyway... but hey, I was right about Vista being a flop.
Re:Um... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Um... (Score:5, Interesting)
When ME was released, Microsoft had two very-recent codebases to work with--the NT and 9x series. Both were recent, and both had strengths and weaknesses. There was nothing wrong with picking bits and pieces from each in order to meld XP. Not so with Vista. Now they have the Server 2003 codebase and the XP codebase, four and six years old respectively. And Microsoft are trying to get away from the XP codebase.
So now they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, they have this new, shiny, potentially-better platform in Vista, but it is plagued with average hardware support and multitudes of teething problems. On the other hand, they have the old and busted but very compatible XP. If they were to rush out a new OS, they'd have to base it on one or the other. To base it on Vista would be pointless, as Vista will be updated/patched anyway. To base it on XP would be a humongous step backwards, particularly because of all the money invested in Vista. In other words, I don't think they'll come out with a WinXP SE. I sure wouldn't mind the big laugh we'll all have at their expense if they do, though...
Re:Um... (Score:5, Informative)
With that said....
___
I don't get it.
Considering what a vast improvement security-wise, GUI-wise and feature-wise Vista is over it's predecessors, I don't understand why it's so unpopular with people who've not even used it.
Maybe that's the problem - they go by hearsay. I ran Vista betas for about a year before taking the plunge and upgrading in February.
I have no regrets, it beats the heck out of XP. The features they borrowed from OS X added to the desktop are awesome. Search is everywhere and the Vista equivalent of KDE/GNOME's Alt+F2 rocks. Flip 3D is nice, but frankly I rarely use it. And yes, security is indeed better than in previous versions.
What don't I like? UAC is annoying, but you get used to it.
And Hardware/Driver/Software issues? There are some, but my problem was really 64-bit related (So, just like in Linux, I gave up and went back to 32-bit).
Drivers for all my hardware and peripherals (with the exception of the crappy cheap TV turner card I had - which I never liked anyway and ditched for a better one) were available and worked fine. Heck, drivers for both my 2-year-old printers (Brother MFC 7820N, HP DeskJet 6820) came with Vista.
Maybe I'm just lucky...
No, Vista isn't a godsend and there are some minor things that irk me. But the same goes for Linux and it's desktops (GNOME/KDE/XFCE...).
But yes, Vista is a vast improvement over it's predecessors. And it took 5 years to get to consumers because the development team started over from scratch halfway through the development process (a fact that doesn't seem that well known).
OK, it does have stricter hardware requirements but not that much stricter. Go in to any computer retailer and look at the "cheap" computers they have running Vista. Most of them have hardware approximating what most consumers (who bought a box in the past 2-3 years) have already.
I got my computer at the end of 2004 and deliberately went "overboard" and a higher-end box. My roomies computer (bought a year later) is half as good and runs Vista just fine.
So once again, I don't get it.
So why aren't I in Vista as I write this? Because I use whatever OS suits my mood or needs at the time and Linux was and still is the 1st choice for this OS junkie...
Re:Um... (Score:5, Interesting)
I ran a couple of Vista betas and RC1. Vista's UI (sans Aero) is definitely an improvement over XP but that isn't saying a lot. Out of the box XP's desktop looked like a bag of M&Ms.
What Microsoft has yet to fix is all of the clutter. Yes Vista, I know a new USB device has been plugged in, I'm the one who plugged it in. Great, you have determined that its name is OEM CARD RDR 4-in-1. Now you've installed a drive. Now another. And then two more. Now you are notifying me that my hardware is ready to use. And if there are files on the card in the reader it keeps going. And if the files happen to be photos it is best to just unplug the machine as fast as possible.
Even with a 21" widescreen, desktop real estate (not to mention my attention) is too precious to waste by continuously blitting little messages at me from the system tray. And I'm trying to work up here, I don't want to read about participating in the User Experience Improvement Program.
Don't even get me started about managing focus stealing in any kind of intelligent way.
For my desktop purposes, OSX is well ahead of everything else. Ubuntu's latest release is quite nice, and it finally seems to be improving at a faster pace than the competition. But Windows seems to have stalled out. I haven't enjoyed using a Windows machine since the early Win2K days.
Re:Um... (Score:5, Informative)
Based on stuff like your comment, I decided to leave Vista on it. It's easy to use! It's pretty! Sure it uses a lot of resources, but it's pretty and it's easy to use! "OK", says I, "we try this pretty, easy to use OS." I was concerned when it seemed to be using like 30% of the RAM resources at idle, but at least the computer had lots of RAM. Then I loaded WOW.
World of Warcraft is 2 years old. It wasn't exactly Quake4 when it was released. I played it quite happily on a P4 with 512MB of RAM and a crappy Intel video chipset. It was unplayable on my wife's new laptop. When I tried max resolution with all the video pretties turned on that I usually use on my Macbook Pro (almost a year old) you could literally watch the frames draw. When I turned the resolution down and turned off most of the video tricks, it was choppy and gave one a headache. I tried everything I could think of. Upgraded the video drivers and sound drivers (Oh, did I mention that sound was stuttering and broken too?) tweaked setting in the game, etc. Nothing yielded more than marginal improvement.
I put XP on that sucker. Now everything runs fine. Should I have chucked the whole OS for one app? Well, she LIKES that app. It's her FAVORITE app. Besides, if a brand new, decently speced computer couldn't handle a two year old mass market game, what could I expect from Photoshop? This was a computer built from the ground up and factory installed with Vista, I feel sorry for some poor sucker trying to upgrade.
Vista not from scratch (Score:4, Interesting)
In the control panel clasic view open Fonts. Hit the alt key to show the menus. Select File => Install New Font...
Notice the style of the dialog box. This is the old 3.11 dialog box style. Notice the drive selection method. Hey, it still works.
Compare this to the dialog box used to select a file in notepad.
Re:Um... (Score:5, Insightful)
I got the chance to experiment with Vista at work. I played around with it for 5 minutes... and made a decision...
I switched. I switched my home computer from Windows 2000 (which I've happily used faithfully for... 7 years) and Windows XP (which I've hated since its inception) to Ubuntu Linux 7.04.
We have another happy customer. I've been running Ubuntu for neigh on... a month now. No serious problem to speak of... I've rebooted it twice for updates... and a couple times to get extra things working. Aside from that, I've been thrilled, and wont ever switch back.
The problem with Vista as I've seen it (in my grand 5 minutes of experience with it) is that its not designed for usability. Its designed to market itself. "Oh look, its so pretty! I want that one!" And then people buy it... and hate it because it lacks some fundamental usability bits that I felt it could have used.
Ubuntu is:
A: Pretty! Right out of the box (so to speak) the default styling leaves me thinking that its been designed with a user in mind. Sleek, with pleasing colors, and an interface most people could pick up in a few minutes.
B: Cost effective! It's a free download, and the default installer will install the OS on most common PC's in the market with no upgrade required. Not to mention that the text based installer will install it on many low-end or aging PC's as well.
C: Functional! I had very little trouble getting all of my hardware to work. Most of it required NO work at all. Even in windows I have to install driver updates to get things to work 100%. Ubuntu worked pretty much out of the box and required only 1 additional tweak to get my video card working 100%, and 1 tweak to get my mouse working (All 5 buttons, the way I *WANT* them to work).
And so yeah, when you say Microsoft has done Linux a favor... Your right! I think if people give Linux a try at this point, they'll be surprised. Pleasantly surprised, like I was. Linux could pick up some of that lost desktop market share.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The people bitching about vista here are the same ones who bitched about XP, and before that, windows 2000.
Re:Um... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Office may be Microsoft's saving grace yet again. A few of my users are on the new 2007 Office and I must say it's a massive improvement in productivity and ease of use over any office suite out there. I had been pushing to replace our Microsoft systems with a free operating system and OpenOffice, but Office 2007 will make that a much harder decision. $800 per workstation (Vista+Office) is nothing if I can get more out of my workers and not have to retrain them on OpenOffice.
I'll still move our servers to Linux, or preferably, BSD. Office 2007 doesn't help me there.
Re:Um... (Score:5, Funny)
But what if I don't want to have to take legal action against my operating system?
What if I just want to use it instead?
Re:Um... (Score:4, Informative)
Don't wait for SP1... (Score:5, Funny)
I hate begging... (Score:5, Funny)
Now, bribery, I'm ok with... Maybe if they slipped me a couple hundred dollars, I would reconsider their operating system offering.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, then Vista Ultimate would only cost $200. Practically free!
No (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows XP was a major improvement over Windows 95/98 (which is what most people were using when XP was first released) but Vista is a major step backward. Not to mention horrendously bloated and absurdly over-priced.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Ofcourse if they got rid of all that crap they *MIGHT* actually have an operating system that will run as fast as XP and people will consider buying it. Until then its doomed to rot on the shelves with all the intelligent IT people badmouthing it (which is where most customers get their info from)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, most customers get their info from the highstreet PC retailers who are pushing Vista as the New Big Thing the everyone should have.
Whatever MS do, their operating systems are guaranteed success because they come bundled on machines - most people will buy whatever they are told is the latest thing. The majority of people don't buy preinstalled machines based on
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
The DRM in Vista is NOT there because the RIAA lobbied for it. It is there because Microsoft wants to do an end-run around the content distribution and software industries and establish themselves as gatekeepers to all PC-based media&software and, with the eventual rise of the M$ home media/entertainment hub (complete with wmv-squirting, color-coordinated Zunes and souped-up, remanufactured Xboxes), of all media full-stop. They plan to do this (at some point in the next five-six years, when Vista and Vienna are sufficiently prevalent) by simply turning off the tap and not allowing ANY non-DRM-ed media or software play/run on their boxes - 'cause by that point they will be THEIR boxes, not yours anymore. Does the last computer you bought come with a TPM chip? How about the next one you'll buy?
This, incidentally, is Microsoft ripping off yet another page from Apple's playbook. Oh the delicious irony - Steve Jobs, hoist by his own platform-lockdown petard.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't like it don't use it, just don't be a karma whore. Sure Vista can be slow but then running vista on 512mb of ram is like running XP on 128mb's, something you shouldn't do. Can we actually see a compelling reason rather than the usual rants?
Some things I like about Vista (Score:5, Interesting)
Vista has a few things I could live without (like UAC and mandatory driver signing, both of which I have disabled), but it also has some features that I really miss if I have to use someone's XP box.
And for the programmer in me:
Re:Some things I like about Vista (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
Except for the multi-media part there was next to nothing in Vista that I wanted since I rarely play games on a PC preferring console games instead. Ok maybe I am being a bit harsh but I really did not buy the laptop for Vista anyway since my work requires me to have knowledge on Unix and Linux machines and as far as I was concerned I was going to put Fedora 7 on it and virtualise other versions of Linux and possibly Solaris. In addition I normally sell my laptop after about a year so I made up a recovery DVD (2 off) which will enable me to put Vista back on if the buyer wants.
Even though Microsoft is pushing Vista I cannot see any reason for upgrading from XP and if you have seen Beryl on Linux you can have a much more interesting (not necessarily practical but the Wow factor is priceless) desktop than MS Vista. I have put Fedora 7 on my laptop (no dual boot) and I was pleasantly surprised how just about everything on my laptop works including parts of my multi-media controller and the things that don't work I have not put any effort to getting them to work since I don't really need them. I have found Xen virtulisation does work but it is not as easy as Vmware, still it is interesting.
Of course I would not recommend Fedora for a beginner so a distro like Ubuntu would probably be the best one to start with although I have not tried it myself. For those who want to make the move try a live CD then if you like it install a dual boot but (and many would disagree with me) after a few weeks providing you are comfortable then get rid of MS Windows partition otherwise you will back-slide. Gaming IMHO is the only reason for dual booting. If you have a work PC you are dependent on work policy. I do know that HP has a policy of allowing Linux desktops and friends of mine have taken this up.
a "fact rich" statement (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot pleads with users to adopt Linux now... (Score:5, Funny)
(Feel free to replace "Ubuntu" with the name of your favourite FreeNIX: Slackware, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, you name it)
Sure (Score:5, Informative)
We have several people who've bought new laptops in the past few months, and every one of them is infuriated at how annoying the interface is. I certainly couldn't train a computer novice to use it yet, because it makes no real sense where anything is or under what conditions entire sections of the interface are hidden and revealed.
What's in it for me? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Those who already have a PC, are reasonably knowledgeable about it and are quite happy with how it's all running. What's in it for them? Re-learn how to do a bunch of tasks only to wind up with exactly the same as what they've already got but with a few extra bells and whistles.
2. Businesses. What's the benefit? Microsoft likes to peddle things like "increased productivity", mainly because it's impossible to measure and hence impossible to argue with. I would, however, point out that "the IT department having to make sure that everything runs on Vista, scripts don't break and users don't get confused with an interface change" doesn't increase anyone's productivity.
3. Those who either don't have a PC, or do but are unhappy with it (probably because it's dog slow under the weight of all the spyware, but they don't know that). This is the only group which may go with Vista - but they'll go with whatever the PFY in the store tells them to go with. If Apple started offering sufficiently generous kickbacks to retail partners, you can bet that their market share would go up quite a bit.
People hate change (Score:5, Interesting)
Once again, Microsoft proves that its previous versions are its biggest competitor.
Drink the Kool-Aid© (Score:3, Insightful)
It would also demonstrate, yet again, that in the world of technology marketing trumps quality every time.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Why Microsoft Fears Virtualisation (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheap, efficient virtualisation totally throws most of the downsides of multiple OS booting out the window (no pun intended). Suddenly you could run Linux or OS X as your desktop and totally ignore Windows until you need to run a Windows program. Windows thus goes from the Master Control Program of your computer to just some shared library that a program loads in order to run. This represents a loss of control over the user, and the one thing Microsoft fears the most is the loss of power, regardless of how small the loss is.
Microsoft loves your money, but it loves your obedience even more. Being able to discard Windows from your sight when you don't require it means you're not being a good little Windows user. Therefore, you deserve to be punished, hence the licensing restrictions.
Even better than that... (Score:5, Interesting)
And, because I'm not looking at windows while I'm using the programs, XP works perfectly well; why install Vista when it has such outrageous requirements and I'm just going to hide it anyway.
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Nonono, we don't fear incompatibility (Score:4, Interesting)
What it comes down to is that Vista has no redeeming feature, aside of the forcefully opened incompatibilities with the previous versions. And so far, those incompatibilities don't really strike. For example, DX10 isn't really out the door yet, so there are no DX10 only games on the market.
It's not that we don't want the shiny, we just don't want the ugly. And so far, I see nothing in Vista that really offers any value for me. I don't care about the flashy interface, it's probably the first thing turned off to reclaim at least part of the performance hit. I don't care about the pointless "allow or deny pseudo security", actually I see more harm than good in it. I sure as hell care about DRM and I don't want it. Yes, yes, DRM doesn't keep me from using my old content and "enables" me to use all that DRM crippled junk, but the way I see it, if there is nobody able to see DRM crippled content, DRM crippled content is an Edsel. If people can't use it, people won't buy it, and studios will be forced to pull the plug or suffer even worse than they already do due to DRM. Either's fine with me.
So far, MS failed to show me any compelling reason to use Vista over XP or 2k. So, why shell out my dough for a new system if it doesn't give me anything I want that I don't already have with the old one?
Ok, let's be fair, let's be constructive (Score:3, Interesting)
Many people have MP3 players. A library with an API MP3 player manufacturers can hook into for easy transfer would have offered a lot of value. Interoperability is the current big thing in the home computer market, people enjoy plugging everyth
Microsoft is losing it (Score:4, Interesting)
Evidence 1: Their fact-rich sheet for "partners and customers" is in fact locked to only computer making companies who sign an NDA O_o. Yes, their "confident list" of reasons to use Vista is actually a secret. That makes me wanna switch to Vista for sure!
Evidence 2: How Microsoft explained that they changed their mind back on virtualization of Basic/Home? "The company said virtualization presents inherent security risks". Oh... My... God... They aren't even TRYING. What kind of damn security risk are we talking about? That people will buy cheap Windows Basic and run it on Parallels on Mac, isn't that the one. Pathetic.
Thanks, but no thanks... (Score:4, Insightful)
But, but... how can this be?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like ESR says of Plan 9 (Score:5, Informative)
Bad reports of Vista (Score:3, Interesting)
-Lars
Vista wanted me to "Validate" (Score:3, Interesting)
First, I called the vendor and started crawling up their butt about how they must have sold me a bogus copy. They tried the "it's outside of our return period policy" line, but I just came back with "Do you really want me telling Microsoft where I got my bogus Vista?"
So they gave me the number to Microsoft's WGA team. Called that number, gave them my story, and they told me I had to "Validate" now. I already activated, now they want me to Validate. So fine, I jumped through their hoop, got the goddamned thing "Validated."
And as if I wasn't already pissed enough, the helpful MS drone told me that if my hard drive died, I'd have to buy a new copy of Vista in order to reinstall on the new disk. My old activation code would not work now. (She acted like this was normal and acceptable to lose a software license due to a hardware failure.) I felt like I must have popped a blood vessel as I "forcefully" told her how I would never buy Vista again, regretted buying this one, and would make it my mission to convert people over to Linux, probably Ubuntu.
Easier path to take... (Score:3, Interesting)
A) Send developers out to work on site with hardware manufacturers who are having known device and/or software compatibility issues. (nVidia, I'm looking at you...)
B) Redirect internal resources to get SP1 ready by, say, August.
C) Find a way to build an XP style shell on top of the Vista style base. So you get the technology advantages of Vista (like improved app security), but you still look and feel like you're in XP.
Now, to get to why some people are really not upgrading it's cost. So let's address that.
A) Scrap the idea of "same program, with licensing enabling more features if you pay more" nonsense. At the MOST have a home and business edition.
B) Get price competitive. No, I do not mean give it away for free like Linux, but be comparable to what people are paying for OS X. Right now they're still on the Sony mind train of "early adopters will pay anything" and they need to get off it.
C) Take a page from how our government wants to handle illegal aliens. Offer a one-time cheap "Amnesty program" for people with illicit/older versions. "Have a pirated copy of XP, upgrade to Vista and get a permanent license for only $30. Have a legitimate copy? Upgrade for $20. But this ONLY lasts until XX/XX/XXXX..."
Some of step B I have seen already. At the local Fry's you can pick up the "System Builders" edition of vista for under $200, and it's the "ultimate" which I thought was costing upwards of $400. This, I think, was in response to the hobbyists who screamed bloody murder and were one of the most prone to switch to Linux groups.
The problem here is that MS has something along the lines of a DECADE of R&D costs to recoup with Vista. These ideas would cost them money. But at some point they need to ask themselves if they're in this to win it, or in this to milk it as long as they can.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Bad "word-of-mouth" among ordinary folk (Score:5, Insightful)
I had not discussed Vista with either of them. Short story: Both of them bought new PCs this year, both of them after Vista's release. My wife wanted a Dell but ended up picking up an HP at Staples because Dell told her she couldn't get a Dell PC with anything but Vista. My son wanted a Dell and, as it happened, it turned out he _was_ able to get a Dell preloaded with XP, and that's what he got.
Both my wife and my son are what you might call computer-literate, but neither of them has any love for computers. They browse the Web, they do a little word processing, a little spreadsheet, they download and print pictures from their digital cameras, and don't buy new computers until they're forced to.
In my wife's case, she'd been using Win98 SE on a 2000-vintage Gateway. (She picked Gateway because she liked their cow-themed boxes and because in 2000 they had retail "stores" that catered to non-techies). What forced her to buy a new PC was the lack of updates for her Win98SE version of Norton Antivirus, and for IE--and the increasing number of websites she visits that cause her version of IE to hang or crash.
Her approach to me came about a day or two after Vista release and what she said was, "You know, I think I'd better buy a new computer now before I'm stuck with one that has Vista." What put her off of Vista was the impression she'd gotten from the mainstream news that it was a) brand new, and b) rough around the edges. Incidentally, she wanted a Dell, but ended up buying an HP because at the time she called Dell they claimed, truthfully or untruthfully, that they would not sell her the low-end machine she wanted preloaded with Vista. (The reason I even suggest untruthfulness was that the person she talked to said that Dell would not sell any PCs preloaded with XP to anyone nohow no way, that they had switched 100% to Vista, and claimed that every other computer maker had, too). So we drove to the nearest Staples and she bought a sweet little compact HP, new in its box, that had XP SP2 preloaded.
A couple of weeks ago, my son called asking whether I had any idea why performing a virus scan on his machine would make the screen go to black and make the machine reboot. Long story short: Bad fan on the power supply. After reviewing options, he decided that the option he liked was to buy a new machine.
Again, I had not discussed Vista with him. Again, _he_ called _me_ and asked whether I thought he should get Vista. He said he was leaning against it, "because Moose" (a friend of his) "says I'd be crazy to get Vista at this stage," but he was on the Dell website and couldn't find a home machine without one. He asked if I thought it would be all that crazy to get Vista. I gave him the most honest answer I could, which was that if you just want a plain-Jane reliable box, well, XP is mellow and mature and not too bad, while Vista is new and does have significant teething pains. I added that if he was going to go with Vista he should get Home Premium, not Home, because it would be silly to have the headaches and not at least get all the fancy new usability and UI good stuff, and that he should have at least double the minimum "recommended" RAM and disk space and should ask hard questions about the video card.
He called me back an hour later to say that he'd found that if he ordered the machine as a "home" system, he could only get Vista, but he'd found that the exact same CPU... which incidentally happened to be one Consumer Reports liked... was also sold under "small business," and ordered that way XP was an option. And the machine ordered as a "small business" system with XP actually cost a little less than the same machine ordered as a "home" system with Vista Home Basic.
He went with XP.
So, yeah, I'd say Microsoft has a problem. But I think it's a problem with Vista, not a problem with perception, and they'd be better off improving Vista than conducting ad campaigns. No ad campaign is as powerful as word-of-mouth and the word-of-mouth on Vista is bad.
And, just maybe, when Microsoft thinks about "customers," they should be thinking of my wife and my son and attending to their needs... not the needs of PC manufacturers and the RIAA.
Rumors? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, and some of us have tried Vista and have first-hand experience with those "rumored" device and application compatibility issues.
I doubt any marketing campaign, no matter how "fact rich," can change users personal experiences.
Don't Do It. (Score:5, Interesting)
- Yes, it's slow. I hear the figure 20% tossed around, but it seems much slower than that compared to XP. My new laptop has exactly four times the RAM of my old one that ran XP, and a processor that is over twice as fast. The hard drive is 5 times larger. Yet my Vista machine seems to run at about the same speed as the old one... and that one had four years of installs and re-installs on it, and an 80% full hard drive. What did I just pay for, again? Needless to say, to maximize performance I have turned off the transparent windows and all the other fancy gimmickry, which make my upgrade even more pointless now.
- When Vista becomes "stressed", such as when I open too many apps, rather than simply becoming slower as was the case on XP, weird behaviours begin to occur. Everything still opens and seems to operate normally. But then the weirdness kicks in, the most frustrating example being the disappearance of buttons and other widgets in dialogues. For example, effects windows will open in Photoshop with all the buttons and sliders that let me tweak the effect. But then when I go to apply it... lo and behold, there is no "Apply" or "OK" button. Just vacant grey space. Fantastic. This happens in many applications, though it does seem to be getting less frequent (maybe those daily patches are helping, hmm).
- When application A crashes or starts running slowly, strange behaviours (such as the missing dialogue buttons mentioned above) will start happening in some other random application B. When I close application A, application B starts working normally again. Annoying.
- When apps start to crawl or crash, and I have to kill them, a helpful "Would you like to save your changes?" dialogue pops up. Of course I would. But sometimes the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons are missing. So I can't save my content. Fine, I think, I'll just select the text in the file, copy it to the clipboard, and in a few minutes I'll open a new file and past it back in. No such luck. When apps begin to crawl or crash, copy-and-paste to the clipboard will not work. Bottom line: you're screwed. Notepad is the most frequent app to display this behaviour.
- I can't print to my printer. It's a common, cheapo Canon. Worked fine from the get-go when I plugged it in to my Mac or my old XP machine, but Vista fails to recognize that any printer is installed at all. Spent a bit of time digging around looking for drivers or settings, got annoyed. Now I just email my files to my Mac and print from there. Welcome to 2007.
- When Vista starts to crawl or crash, and I can't close apps normally, I want to open the Task Manager to kill the offending process. About 50% of the time, however, it won't open, either through the CTRL-ALT-DEL menu or by right clicking on the taskbar. Great. What's the point of having a Task Manager if, when you need it most, it is often not available? Reminds me of Windows 95.
- Every few days, the menus in my IE 7 suddenly disappear. If I right-click on the menu area, the menu pops up and there is a checkmark beside "Menu Bar". Strange. But regardless of whether I check or uncheck this, the menus are still missing. So I randomly check and uncheck some other widgets, like "Links" or the "Google Toolbar". Then I recheck the menus bar. The menus reappear! For now. Whether this is a specific IE 7 issue or a Vista one... I can't say.
- Some mysterious key combination - I believe it involves SHIFT or ALT something - causes the keyboard layout to switch instantly from US to whatever else is installed, in my case Canadian French or Canadian Multilingual Standard. For the first month I h
Consumers Plead sell Vista at a reasonable Price (Score:5, Insightful)
The other reason I am not buying is the utterly insane price. My OS shouldn't be the second most expensive componenet of the entire system.
The only thing in the system I paid more thana the price of a copy of Vista for is the SLI Video Card setup.
Ferris was wrong: You can go too far (Score:5, Funny)
Who said anything about waiting until SP1?
Slow: "Please wait. And I emphasize the 'Wait'"
Intrusive: "Vista has found a number of movies and MP3 recordings that you may not be licensed for. Please wait while Vista authorizes licenses for these."
Obnoxious: "You've positioned your coffee on the left side of your keyboard this morning instead of the right side. Please wait while Vista reauthorizes your license. Sorry we've screwed up a script on our website so we'll assume the worst and now run your PC in degraded mode."
Dilbertesque: "To help developers test their software under Vista, we won't let you test your software on a virtual machine. Go out and buy a new PC and test your software on there. This will make you more productive, or so the crack-smoking marketing executive who came up with the idea thought."
Tedious: "UAC: An Application is about to do something. Are you sure?"
A Bridge too far: "Congratulations for installing DirectX 10: Only available on Vista! As the 10th person to use DirectX 10 you qualify for a special prize. This will be a DirectX 10 game of your choice, when someone finally decides to write one. (We're hoping a Mac programmer will do it. They like to target obscure niche markets.)"
Vista User Here.... (Score:3, Interesting)
At home, I have a 3.5 year old machine. It was beefy at the time: 3.2 Gig Pentium, 2 gigs ram, 160 gig hd, etc. I have replaced the video card, since those tend to go out of style from time to time. XP on that machine was fast. As fast as I'd ever need for daily use. I was starting to need to crank down resolution in games to get acceptable framerate, but that's standard fare in the gaming world for computers getting long in the tooth. I installed Vista. Wow, is this machine a pig. It takes LONGER to boot (clean wipe install), takes forever to do file copies/moves, really creeps and crawls with anti-virus enabled, and popups galore with UAC enabled. It looks clunky, it feels clunky, and it runs clunkily. One would think that a 3.5 year installed XP would be slower than a fresh Vista install: not so.
At work, I have a dual core 2.4 ghz with 120 gig hd and two gigs of RAM. Under XP, it booted in like 10 seconds, but using it for work didn't feel much faster than my home machine. It has, of course, a crap-ass graphics card, but I don't play games at work. I install Vista (clean wipe) and have the same issues as above. It takes almost 3x longer to boot, file copies around the network are painful, even moving files around on the local machine takes forever. Symantec does have a version of their corporate av product, but it will spin the cpu at 100% for 24 hours during a simple av update (not Vistas fault, per se). I've had to run un-manged in order for that not to happen. Scheduled scans make the computer unusable where under XP I could hardly notice anything happening.
I recently recieved a questionaire from Microsoft asking when I plan on deploying Vista to the rest of our environment; my response, "I'm not planning on deploying this software this year or next year." This announcement certainly sounds like Microsoft must have gotten a lot more professionals stating the same thing.
We are buying Vista, though. We don't have another option with our computer supplier. Fortunately, we have Software Assurance on our copies of Vista. This allows one to run OLDER versions of software for which you have a license of a newer product. A license on Vista, we're told, allows you to run XP if you choose. So Microsoft thinks we're running 20+ Vista computers, but really we only have one.
I like vista (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:MS's greed is there worse enemy (Score:5, Interesting)
I like Channel 9 a lot. It's video interviews with Microsoft employees about the work they're doing in the company. Some of the guys are truly smart, even genius, and have great insight into the way technology works, and will develop in the future.
But some of the videos, on Vista, were very odd.
In one interview, a team of few guys spent working almost 3 years on just the sound volume dialog in Vista. They also said they're just "experimenting with some things" and very far from done.
The WPF/DCE (i.e. the new GUI) team has produced an incredible amount of demos of 3D spinning and "raining" windows, none of which had any practical purpose and none of it ended up in the final Vista builds.
There were a ton of skins produced, just fiddling with the design part, not the technology part, including a "Pro skin", a simpler skin for professionals, before they settled on Aero as the idea and improving that one (for another 1-2 years). They dropped the "Pro skin".
Funny thing is, during XP betas, another "Pro skin" was developed (dubbed Watercolor), and subsequently dropped again. Maybe in Vienna they'll finally ship the mythical "Pro skin", who knows.
The start menu was apparently being in "heavy development" for the entire 5 years of Vista's development, and they had some very hard time deciding how to make the shutdown buttons work. In the end they opted just putting all options in a menu next to the sleep function.
--
Basically, this all started to look like a bunch of (otherwise very smart) developers having no direction whatsoever. The blame for this can only be in the management. I mean: these guys CAN deliver, if given a specific set of tasks to produce, and monitored on their progress in case they stumble in the process. But looks like none of them really had any idea what Vista will end up like and they spent their days playing with the technologies and fiddling and redoing the same things for years.
Truly weird.
And now Microsoft comes and says "proceed with confidence". Microsoft: if we have the confidence to proceed of your developers, we'd be stuck on XP for life.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yo
Re:MS's greed is there worse enemy (Score:5, Interesting)
I found it [blogspot.com], and the related [joelonsoftware.com] posts to the menu [joelonsoftware.com] by Joel.
That' far worse than Channel 9 hinted at and apparently a big problem that grew with XP and exploded during Vista. Some comments I selected.
Moishe, the dev who worked on the menu:
The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week.
Also each team was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature [: the shutdown menu].
By the time I left the team the total code that I'd written for this "feature" [in a year] was a couple hundred lines, tops.
approximately every 4 weeks, at our weekly meeting, our PM would say, "the shell team disagrees with how this looks/feels/works" [...] Then at our next weekly meeting we'd spend another 90 minutes arguing about the design, [...] and at the next weekly meeting we'd agree on something... just in time to get some other missing piece of information from the shell or kernel team, and start the whole process again.
Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. [...] the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. [...] it [took] between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes.
Stanely Krute, ex-Microsoft developer:
In 1989 I worked on Windows UI for a brief period. [..] Even then one could see that what MS did to IBM would eventually happen to MS [..] Vista is a bloated baroque thing that adds some kernel security and eye candy at the cost of doubling a machine's RAM and adding a high-end graphics chip.
Anonymous ex-Microsoft manager:
I was a manager at Microsoft during some of this period [..] [There is] promiscuous dependency [, including circular dependencies, ] taking between parts of Windows without much analysis of the consequences. [...] There was much work done analyzing the internal structure of Windows [suv4x4: note they're not familiar with the structure of their *own* OS]
As others have mentioned, the real surprise here is that they managed to ship anything.
Anonymous developer working at Microsoft:
Slavish adherence to the "rules" as a means of CYA, a desire to build kingdoms (people/hardware/process), an inability to adjust as circumstances changed, and an irrational fear of breaking "something" were the real problems with many branches in Vista.
teams constantly harped on BS "rules" as the reason why they couldn't move or make progress. "My PM tells me what bugs I can/can't work on". "I can only check into branch vvv_www_xxx_yyy_zzz - I have no idea if/when my changes will migrate up". "We need a N-week test pass before we're allowed to make a change - there's no way we could do that in any other branch".
Anonymous developer who worked in Vista UI in a small company hired by MS 2002-2004:
Microsoft wanted to avoid some of the problems that cropped up with XP and told us they were going to do Longhorn "right" this time. After years of slaving away to supposed exacting standards of UI elements, the project was pulled from us and (I assume) taken in-house. [..] Now we see the result and I can tell you it is not
Re:MS's greed is there worse enemy (Score:5, Insightful)
People used to tease us at Apple about this, back when I worked there in the nineties.
See what happened when they got organized?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Too late. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:No problem (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Shame on Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
If they were really minded towards science and altruistic academic improvements, their OS would consume less resources [and power] yet still get the same amount done as before. It would be more standards compliant to make development cheaper and more reliable, it would embrace all vendors of software, even the OSS side, etc.
Vista, in my mind, is basically a GUI change [not upgrade, just change] and explorer.exe re-write.
Put this in your noodle and ponder. Windows is the least standards compliant OS in the world [that is in current production], and YET they can't even keep their own software working with it. That is, they hold all of the cards and still can't make a play. That speaks volumes as to the quality of the shite software they put out.
When something like OpenOffice breaks in Fedora, you could say, well it's not Fedora's fault, they're aiming at UNIX/Linux standards by using industry standard libraries [X11, motif, glibc, etc, etc, etc], and the software just didn't work. But when people write for the proprietary Windows libraries and then Vista goes and breaks it all, that's just amazingly shotty engineering.
Tom
Re:Shame on Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
I find it amazing how comments like yours get modded insightful. Where's the insight here? Do you know something no-one else does?
As you are clearly out of touch somewhat with Vista, please review the following 'under the hood' changes to the OS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_n
That's just a list of stuff you'd probably never even notice that's been enhanced. If you're going to bash Microsoft senselessly, please back it up at least.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Nah, I'm gonna wait 'ntill the first pirated ve (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Compatability? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a computer that is almost 4 years old; what are the specs?
Desktop computers haven't gotten all that much faster (excluding some insane gaming rigs out there). Why should people go out and buy a new machine when their 3-4 year old computer is comparable to most new computers? The same is true of printers/scanners/etc.
If it isn't broken, and works well, why replace it? If your "upgraded" OS won't work with it, then it's not much of an upgrade is it.
Re:embarrassing double-backflip? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Woe is them (Score:5, Funny)
Vista! Applied directly to the
Well, of course...! (Score:3, Insightful)