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Forbes Says Vista Not People Ready
Diomedes01 writes "Daniel Lyons has an opinion piece up on Forbes.com about a recent press conference held by Microsoft, and the results are anything but flattering."
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Let's take my three sisters. Each has a degree in biology. Each considers me their personal tech support when anything "breaks." It sucks.
I've gotten phone calls from them about the behavior of Windows XP on multiple occasions. Once they thought all their windows kept closing if they opened too many. As it turns out, they had the "grouping" feature enabled for windows of the same type on the toolbar.
*sigh*
Now Vista will have a new 3D effect to window grouping. Sweet Jesus, I am turning my cell phone off. I can imagine it now, "All my windows are turning sideways! Make it stop!"
Aside from "Ease of Use," I don't think any of the advertised features are going to meld well with any of my sisters. The new 'Aero' technology is no match for my sisters' Airhead logic.
I plan to make up some story for them about how Vista is the devil and if you install it, it will slowly begin to ruin your computer. Oh, and if you try to save your biology notes, it especially hates the medical sciences so it will delete them instantly. Not to mention that its new 'AI' abilities allow it to call you names if it perceives you to be an unqualified user. That should stop them from buying it.
The worst part is that Microsoft can smell this potential market in young people who don't know what they need: That's exactly the kind of publicity stunt that would cause all three of my sisters to run out and buy Vista. *shudders* He's an fucking fashion designer! What the fuck would he know about computer software?!?!
And what is with this part of the article: This article brought to you by Forbes Magazine's Daniel Lyons, owner of stock in AAPL.
Thanks, Dan, I was with you there until that last paragraph where your Apple sales pitch kicked in.
My work here is dung.
wow. what is going in the minds of MS execs heads? dont they realize they are quickly losing ground, prestige and time to open source and apple?
... no seriously im asking, i figure microsoft has some experience with this question. /honest frustation
just wow.
i mean how long does it take to quickly put together some new code for the same functions, a brand spanking new GUI and lots of "cool" new "features"?
Mike
I heart the RIAA & MPAA, im sure its mutual...
I think articles like this one may also help. It is scathing. Seldom have I seen such a brutal assault on Microsoft in a mainstream publication. If a similar rebuke was aired on CNN or 60 minutes ran a piece that tore apart the hype for Vista I think there would be an effect.
I think you are right that most folks use Microsoft because they simply have no idea that it is bad software. To them its just the way things are and they get on with whatever they are doing. The Linux FUD is going to be around for a long time still and more articles like this one are needed.
As I understand things, many Software Assurance Plans, which were essentially forced on customers with the claim that Longhorn would be available, expire as of 12/31/06.
I wonder if there may be issues with claims salesmen made and this date slippage.
Actually, I think the GP does indeed live in the real world, just not the same one as you.
Ballmer gave what I thought was an interesting answer when Forbes asked whether people will actually be able to use the complex new applications. He said that most people won't, but that some people (like yourself) will be able to do things with them that increase everyone's productivity.
I can see the theory he's using, but I'm afraid where Microsoft has always failed is in addressing the majority of users who need too much of their attention for other things to learn the intricacies of Microsoft applications. I worry that Microsoft has turned office computing into a difficult video game, where some people will get very high scores but some people just want to write memos.
The serious problem with this is that a difficult application creates a lot of frustration. Microsoft seems to ignore this emotional angle, and creates applications that are very capable but which most people are honestly afraid of. This ends up reducing their productivity and eliminating their willingness to explore the rich functionality.
If we want the masses to do interesting, complex things with their documents, we need to carefully consider this emotional aspect. Not that OpenOffice does, of course, but Microsoft's new versions won't be popular if they don't make software that people actually like to use.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I work for a large biotech company. Upper management uses Windows-based systems, as does manufacturing.
However, I work in research. Until recently the systems were about 50-50 Windows / Mac with the exceptions of bioinformatics (mostly Linux), and cheminformatics (mostly Irix). However, more recently, vendors have been phasing out the use of Windows for instrumentation control in favor of Linux. Nearly all the structural chemistry applications have moved to Linux, and most genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics software is now Linux-based (and, frequently, runs just fine on Macs too). Macs are still pretty popular, but the use of Windows in research is pretty much considered "legacy" at this point.
If you come from an academic environment in contemporary biology, you were probably weened on Mac OS, or Solaris (when I was in grad school). If it's more recent, it's most definitely OS/X or Linux. It's also clear that Linux is rapidly becoming the platform-of-choice for apps in biotech and pharamceutical research, but with a heavy emphasis on WEB-based technologies.
That's not to say that there aren't users that use nothing but Excel and Word, but that's not so common anymore in research (at least were I work and in my previous job). This poses a big problem for our IT department -- they aren't prepared to support Linux desktops and Mac OS/X, yet those are the platforms where most of our applications run.
Biolgists either don't do computers at all (particularly "old school" biologists), or, if they do, Windows is not what they have the most experience with...
Microsoft keep aiming too high. In the end, it's as simple as that.
The executives who are driving the show like to promote corporation-wide initiatives (.Net springs to mind) but they lack the clarity of vision and coherence of presentation to get their message across. This is, of course, assuming that they're clear themselves about what their initiative seeks to achieve, which I doubt in many cases. Once you're detached from clear goals and clear plans to achieve them, and you descend into corporate initiative, business imperative, growth driver, buzzword buzzword zzzzz territory, you'll sink right to the bottom in no time.
The next level down - the guys who are basically running the show for Windows, or Office, or the more minor products like Visual Studio - are constantly in a state of flux because they don't know where the corporation-wide initiatives are driving them. Worse yet, they don't know where they're driving each other, but it's surely somewhere: if you want a radical new UI in Vista, you've got to have the tools to write programs that use it in Visual Studio, and your next version of Office has to fit in with the style, for example.
Now, the guys working on the products keep coming up with revolutionary new features that require dramatic changes in a single version. These are always a risk, and if things don't work out, it's rare that you can half-implement the good bits and scrap the rest, so you get cancellation of the entire feature if bad stuff happens. Combine that with the constant changes in high level business plans and such, particularly pressure to get a release out in time for this or that shareholder meeting (that means you, VS2005 team) and you can see why often these things do suffer catastrophic failure.
So, if your next release is based on three Big Features(TM), as was the case with Vista originally, and these then start falling to the wayside under business pressures, what do you do? You can't cancel them all, or you've got no product and your reputation is mud, but if you can't get them ready in time either, then your release dates keep slipping and your reputation is a different colour of mud. Such is the price you pay when you decide to go for the big features and not across-the-board, incremental improvements, and that's the mistake they keep making.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
... of bashing Microsoft and promoting Apple.
He also isn't a big fan of Linux.
This guy is widely considered a hack.
I've been using Vista build 5308 for almost a month now as my primary "home" machine. At first I was a little taken back by some of the UI changes, but overall I really do like it. In fact, when I move back to XP it really hurts because of things I miss from Vista.
This guy's critcisms of Vista are so vague it's hard to even know what parts of Vista he is talking about.
"The new programs are phenomenally complex, with scores of buttons and pull-down menus and myriad connections among various applications."
Huh? Which new applications? In most case, Microsoft has decreased, not increased, the number of UI elements.
XBox 360 and Games are all MSFT has going for it now. But why don't people switch? The answer is obvious XP works well enough for most people, of course that doesn't help Vista either. To me the place where open source will make up the most ground is on the application side. Linux may not gain ground for a long time, but Mozilla, Thunderbird, and Open Office will, as can many other closed apps.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
??? Saves time? LaTeX source is just a text file. You could invent your own tags like
... really hard.
@SQL QUERY@
Then write a perl script that parses the text and replaces the text between @@ with the result.
I do a related trick for my text book where I have @line_number,text@ markups that sync up line numbers in the text with lines in source code. E.g. I can say "The while loop on line @74,while@ performs..." and then it looks around line 74 for the word "while" and replaces the @@ with the actual number.
This way if I add a comment or whitespace my line numbers still make sense. To make a PDF I type
make docs
My point is you don't need to spend two grand on a suite of tools where teTeX and a small perl script accomplishes the same thing. You could edit the LaTeX source with any text editor and view the pdf, ps or dvi output with your fav reader.
If you're not a programmer hire some intern for a week to script it up for you.
You look at that and probably say "oh great now I have to invent my own tools!" I say why not? Why is being clever such a bad thing? It means I can use professional tools [hint: LaTeX does typesetting not just whatever Word feels like] and accomplish my goals in an efficient manner. Instead of being totally dependent on MSFT to come in and solve my problems [with the added bonus of vendor lockin, security holes your parents would be ashamed of and a price tag that is absurd].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The fact that Microsoft operates under conditions like that is indeed a herculean effort, but such a huge amount of resources is wasted in the process and such amount of overhead generated, that there is no wonder for Vista to be delayed 3 years and its feature list slashed in half and its stability and security (whatever amount there ever been) is going down the drain. I can only imagine that Office is in the same boat.
This is not merely flawed development environment, this is a sign of total disaster in making.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
To be perfectly honest, next time my parents need to upgrade, which won't be for awhile, if things don't change it's going to be Apple products... tired of providing tech support for stupid things, while Apple's seem to just work, and just work right. Even simple stuff like sharing a printer seems to be nothing but a headache in Windows. Who knows, my dad need's Office for compatability with his clients, but maybe I should look at CrossOver or whatever the Wine port for Office is and have them run a locked down version of Linux.
So Vista won't be ready for another year. Or two. Or three. Novell Netware lost the race to a vaporware NT5, but it was Linux and then Active Directory that killed it. Microsoft has a habit of delivering late, and poorly. But they are bringing onnovation to the (mainstream) desktop. Yes, Unix is a better architecture. But Windows is so much more featureful than Gnome, KDE, or *especally* Mac OS X. Office is 10 years ahead of any of it's clones. Granted, the main reason Star Office is so far behind is because most of their energy is spent on compatibility. But they shouldn't worry too much about it. Like Word Perfect shouldn't have. Microsoft saw a collaboration suite where everyone else saw desktop publishing. Office 2003 is a credible competitor to the browser for application development. With a growing .NET library and the push to port decent scripting languages (like python & php5) to the CLR, it's a compelling platform. Infopath is the new Visual Basic form, only backed by SQL Server and XML instead of Access.
I'm not praising MS unconditionally. They still have weird, arcane ways of doing things. And lots and lots of bugs -- and security issues. But they're offering more in functionality than anyone else. Ajax isn't a competitor to OLE.
I'm simply noting that unless an *alternative* to MS Office integration is offered, alot of open source zealots (like myself) will be switching over. I'd love to see an open source web framework tied to Windows and Office automation, but I don't see it happening.
I wrote a list of Microsoft technologies I'd need to learn to be as productive as I am using open source. It was a long list and it was ugly, too, with words like "Exchange", "IIS", and "VBA" on it. I don't want to learn to use Active Directory (but at least it's not NT Domain Controllers), and it is a pretty good LDAP server, too. I don't want to learn VB, VB.net, and C#. (and maybe I won't have to, at least no more than necessary to translate api's to Python or Ruby.)
But Office and Exchange are unmatched in the open source world, and there's really not a reason they should be.
It all comes down to the fact that most people would rather stick with the inconvenience they know than risk starting over on something that might not be worth the effort.
In other words, whatever they're switching from has to get really bad, and whatever they're switching to has to offer a major improvement.
You could look at it in terms of neophobes and neophiles, or the devil you know vs. the devil you don't know, or just plain inertia.
Probably fairly high. I recall him and a number of other early microscopists being convinced that they could see a little tiny human embryo in the head, much like the early telescopists were convinced they could see canals on Mars.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.