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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.
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.
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...
??? 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.
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.