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Microsoft Demands Removal Of Longhorn Images
bonch writes "After the previously reported release of the Longhorn beta at this year's WinHEC, Neowin and other Windows sites are reporting that Microsoft is going around sending legal letters demanding removal of Longhorn Build 5048 screenshots. Paul Thurrott discusses it on his site, stating that Microsoft never told anyone beforehand not to post screenshots of the publicly available beta, and links to the new galleries he has up now. 'Enjoy it while it lasts.'"
To me this pretty much looks like Microsoft ran the screenshots up the metaphoric flagpole and didn't like the salutes. Instead of spinning it as beta (which we in the IT community have come to understand, if not respect) and appropriately rough-edged, Microsoft apparently has decided to take the low road and is going to hold its breath until it turns blue (irony). Too bad, the images do suck, but I think Microsoft in its eagerness to prove "me too" for having a cool new OS stumbled mightily this time. Fortunately, having $50B petty cash makes recovery from these inconveniences convenient.
if the reviewers LIKED it, those screen shots could've stayed up...
So, if you do and they then sic the attack-lawyers on you, why are you surprised? Because they didn't do it previously? Guess what? They can pick and choose.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
If not, Microsoft is using it's multimillion dollar legal department to bully people into doing/thinking what they want.
Hold on a minute while I try to not act suprised.
"Powers. I have them."
This is going to be the problem in IT, too much legal messing about, both in forms of submarine patents and EULA with incredible conditions.
From the Blog
Honestly, how many of you read fully the EULA that comes with the SW you download ?
What if at some point a company tells you that you have violated their EULA and demands money ?
Sadly, the law, does not obey to "common sense" and "by law" you will be obliged to pay...
Solutions ?, maybe an EULA that is no longer than 25 lines (80 characters each long) ?
I bet it just seemed like a good free way to generate publicity for Longhorn.
"Longhorn, looks pretty much the same as current Windows."
Maybe in screenshot form, but not in video form. Watch Billy G's keynote address, they actually show Longhorn in action*. Nobody will be walking down the aisles of CompUSA and confusing Longhorn for XP. To put it another way: If that were Linux running the demo, you'd all be pitching underwear tents. That's not really a new story around here, though.
(* This is less exciting if you've ever seen OSX.)
"Derp de derp."
Don't let them see we haven't changed anything yet!
At least now Jobs has something valid to complain about MS copying them.
;-)
Why?
At least OS-X looks nice. But Longhorn? They took the Fisher-Price interface from XP and made the colors even uglier. Instead of jolly candy-like blue, now they have murky-organic-sludge greenish. I can hardly wait (...to disable the "themes" service).
And for those who might call me an Apple Fanboy, check my posting history to see how much karma I've lost over the years in just about everything I post that mentions Apple in any way.
If the condition is on *posting* screenshots, thn it's meaningless, even if the EULA was enforceable in its' entirety - just give the screenshots to someone else to post. (Say, someone who uses Linux and hasn't agreed to a MS EULA in their lives.)
"...did anyone else notice how the Recycle Bin icon's shadow slants left while the text's shadow slants right?"
Is it just me, or is the recycle bin icon also butt ugly? Actually, I think the whole GUI looks terrible. Windows XP/2000 looks nicer than this crap. All these screenshots look like Windows XP SP3 with an ugly skin.
I don't see how Microsoft could have progressed so little since the release of Windows XP in 2001.
I agree! So they hired an artist to make a better looking start button. Wow, do I really need to upgrade to get a better looking start button?!
I'd much rather have drag and drop easy installations.
No registry to screw up.
No shared DLL's.
Performance.
And to never have to install a print driver again.
In some ways this is like when a movie is about to be released, but the studio will not let the critics screen the film. If a studio knows their $70,000,000 film sucks that bad, they know better than to let critics screen it. It is time to get the PR people over to yahoo and amazon to leave 5 star reviews.
Plus, the screen shots MS gave out, there was nothing special there. Nothing secret. Nothing new. If someone did not tell me it was a new Windows, I would have guessed someone got a new wallpaper for their XP machine.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Meanwhile telling people to get them off their websites is a guaranteed method of making sure everyone will download them and save them and look them over much more critically, trying to figure out what Ms doesn't want them to see. Pretty effective marketing, really.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
1.) Comparing a leaked copy of the OS to screenshots is silly.
2.) Apple didn't sue over the leaked copy of Tiger. They watermarked it and caught the guy through technical means.
3.) I think you seriously need to rethink your definition of "right to know" as it is nothing like what anyone I know uses. See I have a "right to know" MS is dumping toxic waste in my backyard. I don't have a "right to know" anything I want about their unreleased product.
As for harming MS, if you can't see how these screenshots do that you haven't been reading the critical reviews of it. It has been widely panned as actually managing to make XP's interface look positively sleek and elegant.
I already saw it, too late for you.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Because obviously Microsoft has put all their work into the way Longhorn looks, rather than under-the-hood things.
Screenshots tell all. Microsoft is asleep at the wheel.
People's suckage has nothing to do with MS. People manage to suck plenty all by themselves. You have obviously never worked in retail where you can see the masses up close and personal.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Hey, how's that tinfoil hat holding up?
It will go the way of Napster
You mean, become a company that does legitimate business, instead of a company that goes out of its way to facilitate copyright violation on a massive scale?
buy some members of congress, get them to pass new laws
Actually, massive copyright violation was already against the law. We have a long standing tradition in the US called, "just because it has become technically easier to do it, doesn't means it's OK to rip off artists"
form an industry organization
Those organizations were around a long time before Napster. Because there were music piracy and "I want to be entertained for free" problems before, too.
sue and make the targets highly visable
Well, that makes sense, since the people that were using Napster to rip off copyrighted material were being highly visible and crowing about how clever they were to find a way to get around paying for their entertainment.
distribute faulty crap to frustrate people
Hmmm. Who would that be frustrating? The only people I can think of would be the people trying to get it without paying for it. Have you seen "faulty" crap coming through iTunes or any of the other well regarded subscription systems? No... it's a lot like complaining to the police that some street corner drug dealer just sold you some faulty heroin.
All this almost makes me want to switch to a Mac, if only they were not so bloody expensive
Huh! I wonder why that would be? Maybe because the x86 architecture is much more open, more widely supported, and MS has such a huge audience that their stuff ends up being a better deal because of scale? I don't spend much on machines, either. But I'm quite happy with XP and Win2K/3 depending on what I'm up to.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The real problem of microsoft is that these days, most people don't care about which version of windows they run.
They just use whatever is on the pc they buy. They probably don't even know thay they can buy windows separately, so for them it's more like when amd or intel announce a new processor: it's something that they will care about whenever they decide to buy a new pc.
It's a bit like if a car manufacturer was making a big fuss about a new engine that they're designing. It's not something that will make people change their car.
Sorry to disappoint you but the gallery shots as they are used here are almost certainly fair use. They are certainly being used in both a news item and discussion. The person who posted them in reference to a news article is a well known journalist. Copyright laws in Germany are actually quite draconian - Thank you BMG!
Thalasar
Build 5048 is not a beta. It is a stripped down version of Longhorn that contains enough of the system framework for hardware developers to being writing their drivers. This is WinHEC, remember?
Beta is planned for August. The features I work on, and most of the features I've seen in other group's demos, were not merged into this build.
And as the years go by, my wife's Mac looks better and better, until I have finally decided to break down and get one myself. If aint about 'the pretty colors' as you put it, it is about PROGRESS.
The kind of progress that we wanted when we went from Win 3.11 to Win 95. The kind of progress we expected when we went from Visual Basic to C#. Or better put, the kind of PROGRESS that we USED to get from Microsoft. Disclaimer: Yeah, I used to work for Microsoft, so fucking what?
The point is; progress seems to be coming slower and slower, in the exact ways that Lucovski pointed out when he left the company. Personally, I am getting sick of hearing about shit, only to later hear that the one thing that would make me spend money beyond MSDN has just gotten ripped out.
Many of us who make our living on Windows and other Microsoft products would like something more to talk about than just .NET. Unless you have had your wife laugh at you as you search for device drivers while she just FUCKING WORKS, knows exactly what I am talking about.
In short, we are fucking fed up.
You are right, it aint about 'pretty colors', it is about showing us that the company can still produce something BETTER than what we had before. If they cant do it in the GUI, why the fuck should we believe that they can do it in the file system?
First impressions are a bitch, and these aint good ones. We've been looking at the same shit for two years now, and I dont see any progress anywhere, just ugly screens of boring shit.
Apple's shit may not be all that much better, but they at the very least manage to put a nice ribbon on it, and act like the shit is special enough to want it.
XP works; Win2K3 works damn well. But, if you are trying to show me something new, the very least you can do is take the time to make sure it aint similar to what we have already seen or at the very least not fucking ugly?
A nice strategy for presentations and demos is to make missing functionality look strange. That way when you give someone a screenshot and they see that the "Uplodes tests TOO DATABAse" button is bright orange and in an ugly font, they ask why, and you get to explain that that part isn't finished yet. It avoids the problem of people thinking that everything is finished just because there is a mock-up of the UI.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
"So in Longhorn, can I drag documents onto a button on the task bar to open it, rather than holding the mouse down waiting for the app to appear?"
There is a (sorta) good reason why this doesn't work currently.
Drag and drop facilities are per-control. Currently, when you drag drop on to the task bar, Windows shows reports an error and then simply eats the Win API message.
Windows could pass the message on to the application, but what does that mean exactly? Some applications could have multiple drop targets with different meanings. Even if Windows could determine which target to use, what co-ordinates are passed with that new drop Win API message?
Now this doesn't mean that a new Win API message couldn't be created something like WM_DROPONTASKBAR, but that wouldn't enable you to drop onto the task bar button of applications that do not specifically support that.
http://brandonbloom.name
Well, it's much easier considering the fact that Apple's market is only a tiny fraction of PC users (about 5% last I checked), while Windows is a multi-purpose tool designed for everybody from little kids, all of the way up to massive parallel servers (it happens... I've set up several massive Windows 'clusters'). So yes, Apple did do a good job with the shiny, pretty, minimalist, effeminate ultra-modern look, but in all honesty, that's pretty easy to do (again, look at VW, Ikea, et al.), especially considering that's virtually all their market consists of. And to go a step further, I'd say that Apple also has the luxury of being able to *create* much of this look. From what I've seen and read, people (ultra-consumers) actually accessorize around their various Apple products. Their consumers are incredibly loyal, and if Apple decided to make their next PC out of stone, I'd be willing to bet that we'd start seeing all kinds of stone furniture, etc. designed to match the Apple.
or get you $10k from intel!
One of the focus areas of IP protection
Yeah, because the UI was really the highlight of the features shown, what with the truncated titles, execrable icons from the 1990s, and dreary grey tinge. Lots of new ideas in there.
?
This is a damage limitation exercise because of all the bad press. When even your fan sites are calling it a 'train wreck' any publicity is bad publicity.
they are copying apple's lawyers' cease and desist campaign.
leave it to bill not to be outdone.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
While I didn't really give Windows a spin back on v2.0, I did use 3.0 when it first came out, and worked with it ever since.
... but the "magic" to Apple is that they're always making improvements that count. A modern OS X box always feels like a "fluid" work in progress. You never know when running the "Updates" tool will grab some new version of one of your Apple branded applications, a firmware update for a peripheral of theirs, or even a whole new update to OS X itself. When I run a "Windows Update" by contrast, I'm more annoyed than anything else when it has something new for me to download - because hell, other than "Media Player 10", what real new improvements to any of their apps did they send anyone lately? It's always boring "security fixes" for another broken detail in the OS allowing a hacker to compromise something. Basically, just another patch that'll tie up your computer for 10 minutes updating and requiring a reboot - and all so when it's done, things will still run and look exactly like they did before.
The only real meaningful improvements to Windows I saw were 3.1 to '95, and then the release of Windows 2000. XP is a bunch of "candy coating" on top of 2000, and IMHO - all the "NT" versions (3.5, 3.51 and 4.0) were medicore at best.
Now, granted, I'm not even beginning to try to speak for all users. I'm only talking about what I've seen from my perspective. But I've worked in I.T. and computer support for the last 15 years, and I've tried practically all the OS's out at one time or another.
I spent 6 years rolling out NT 3.5, 3.51, 4.0 and finally some Win2K boxes for a mid-sized company, and frankly, it shocked me how many basic administration-related functions were non-existant or cumbersome to use on the server side. We were always buying one 3rd. party product or another to perform a function which I thought should really be handled by a "business class" OS on its own.
A couple years ago, I started switching to Macs and OS X - and now I only have one Windows XP PC left at home. I'm sure I'll hang onto it and it will always have its purposes
I was told that Microsoft had left its Media Center user interface unprotected, and that UI has been stolen and replicated in numerous other places.
Someone stole the Media Center UI? Whoa! What are all the Media Center PCs using now Microsoft don't have their UI any more?
(Semantics aside, am I the only person who finds it ironic that Microsoft are accusing people of "stealing" their UI when only a decade or so ago they were being dragged into court by Apple to defend exactly the same charge?)
I use XP with the silver interface and don't mind it at all. These Longhorn shots, however, look pretty bad. It's almost like they're using Linux UI designers!
Seriously, surely they aren't paying whoever came up with this. I've seen better interfaces done by unpaid amateurs on skinz.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'