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Business 2.0 Says 'Boycott Vista'
amyandjake writes "Business 2.0 has a story about Vista's delays, the amount of time wasted by Microsoft bringing Vista to market, and the fact that it doesn't seem to have any compelling features for upgrading. The last paragraph of the story says 'Boycott Vista. Keep your old Windows XP PC around. Don't buy a new one. That's the only way we have to let Microsoft know Vista is an overhyped, late, and pointless update to XP — a perfectly fine operating system.'" Relatedly, torrensmith writes "Paul Thurrott is at it again with his seemingly never-ending supply of information about Windows Vista. This time, he discusses the things he dislikes about the program, in the article The Dark Side of Windows Vista RC1."
Is the decree of consent over? In Paul Thurrott's article, aside from the refreshing observation Mr. Thurrott is willing to critique as well as fawn, I find it notable he picks one example where MS has been inconsistent and stupid (I agree) with their navigation ergonomics.
From his article, it's pretty clear MS is shipping a DVD maker, and from just one screen it appears to be a video/other type of application. Is this now considered de rigeur intrinsic Operating System? I know the definition of OS has blurred and been trickier to pin down, and I would expect an OS to have the appropriate drivers to allow burning of a DVD (it is after all, a component of the OS, or at least drivers for a DVD burner are).
If I were ROXIO or NERO, I'd be pissed, this looks like a de facto and direct competitor product, and if it's bundled as "part of the OS", it would seem close to the line of leveraging again.
And later in Thurrott's article he mentions the builtin virus checking -- something previously discussed on slashdot -- this also seems like another market niche MS is conveniently incorporating as part of their OS.... (how about making an OS much less susceptible to this in the first place?).
Is MS free to do this now?
As for boycotting Vista, I wish the world would consider, but it won't. And, I'll have to have some Vista machine and exposure to continue to pretend to support friends and family. Everything I've read about Vista bolsters the view there is not much new worth the upgrade, and there's enough annoying to induce a ferocious case of buyer's remorse.
why?
what features are you looking forward to in vista? i'm not trying to flamebait or troll, i just want to know what you are looking forward to.
-- lol pwned
A perfectly fine operating system.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's obvious to most of us out there that Paul Thurott is a paid plant for Microsoft. Why do we keep talking about his articles, especially at a site that's as heavily Linux-biased as Slashdot?
Everyone loves to consider the effect of Vista on XP... But what about 98? There are still thousands and thousands of business machines churning away on 98, which Microsoft has already tried to phase out. This is just another necessary step in that process to Gates and Co. Vista will drive continued XP sales as it forces these users to upgrade.
Vista's extreme support for DRM is my concern. I realize that XP also supports DRM in various ways, but Vista has quite a focus on it, and I'm not inclined to support that. That's what made XP my last Windows purchase. I bought an early Mac mini, and I've been nothing less than delighted with the thing. Feels like my linux machines, only prettier and a lot friendlier. Going to buy another Mac soon.
Apple's pushing DRM in a big way too; but Microsoft dominates the market and that's who I think the message needs to go to. In the meantime, buying MP3, staying away from iTunes AAC media, and supporting anyone who posts actual uncompressed, high-quality audio is the way to go. Vote with your wallet. That is the only thing these companies pay attention to. Every time you buy iTunes or any other proprietary DRM'd solution, you're screwing yourself and everyone else. And not in a fun way.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
1. If Vista is pointless, what does it matter if it's "overhyped and late"?
2. Would good does it do to send MS a message that XP is perfectly fine? Is any business going to stop developing new versions of sucessful products just because people liked the old version?
Buh...what?
Look, I'm no Microsoft fan, but that just seems crazy. Better for what?
XP was late and overhyped as well. Many argued that NT4SP6, W2K and W98SE would be enough for anyone. There were numerous predictions that companies and consumers wouldn't upgrade and stick with what they have.
But this didn't happen. XP was adopted, just like Vista will be adopted over time. Trying to stop this inevitable progression is really a complete waste of one's political vigor.
More accurate to say :
Paul Thurrott is at it again with his seemingly never-ending supply of linkbait, generating page views for his advertisers by beathlessly stating Vista is great one week and it sucks the next.
Microsoft's biggest enemy is not Linux nor Apple but is rather Microsoft itself. Microsoft's entire business model is built on growth and expansion. They have now saturated the desktop and a major portion of the server market. Their quality has improved...and this is actually going to work against them since there is less and less incentive to upgrade. The windows 98 to XP migration was a no-brainer. XP is a lot more stable and capable than 98/95/me. Server 2003 is a lot easier to deal with than Windows 2000 ever was.
If Vista can't provide incentive to get current Microsoft customers to shell out money once again to sustain the financial monster of Microsoft, then Microsoft's place in the software market will shink in a way only remnicent of IBM.
I suspect when this happens, there will be a major but temporary dip it Microsoft's stock. Microsoft is well aware they're dead in the software market and have since poised themselves to emerge as the world's premiere media/content distributor. I'm going to ride this one for all its worth ;-)
So basically, based upon a superficial, second-hand interaction with the system, you're boosting it.
Maybe you're speaking a bit too soon?
If Microsoft subscribed to more of an Apple model (at least the recent history model), releasing steady improvements at regular intervals, people would be saying "ooh, look, shiny! Oh look, now the fugly is dockable!". Instead Microsoft still has the terrible habit of trying to reinvent, but they're often running to stand still (or more likely running towards the wrong goalpost). So many times they've rewritten something, in the process ruining what they had.
Vista, for instance, has been promised as a complete overhaul of everything. Geez, I remember 6 years ago reading FUD about how we had to start getting ready for WinFS (I can't even remember what they called it then) because it was going to change everything. Same for XAML (geez, is that even around anymore?) and so on. So for half a decade+ Microsoft has been running on fumes.
"... as long as you have a user smart enough to avoid the majority or viruses and spyware XP doesn't crash very often."
Couldn't have said it better myself.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Wow guys, from your reactions it seems as though you don't like windows vista, or xp. What a fucking suprise. I know everyone here says that xp is crappy and unstable, but iv been running it on one of my systems with no problems (except for a few hardware fuckups). Hell, i was running another system on 98 for a solid five years without any thing to worry about until i broke down and got another xp license. For many people xp just plain works, and im sure vista will be the same way. For a grand majority of consumers that all the matters, frankly i have more important shit to worry about instead of making sure i can find hardware and device drivers for linux and that i can actually play the game i just purchased. Everyone knows vista is going to be the new standard and will be used in most new systems, if you want to bother complaining about it, go on. btw, im not trying to flamebait or troll, im just tired of reading this crap, on my xp system that has been running for 6 months straight i might add.
So exactly what ARE the new features of Vista that are compelling? All I'm reading is that you don't like OSX. The question was not about OS X, it was about Vista.
So we're back to buying audio CDs? At least I get mine used, so take that RIAA.
Just what do you mean by "it's widely credited with being worse than Windows 98?" Show us three credible references where Win98 is shown to be better than XP for any common activity today. Win98 was a nightmare, XP more or less works. Believe me, I'm as much of a Microsoft basher as the next guy, but Dude, don't get all foaming-at-the-mouth on us.
I guess I'm just going to have to keep saying it until it stops:
When it is released and available for purchase, have someone review it like any other product, make one post, and be done with it. We don't need to hear about or debate every single time a developer in the Windows group sneezes or a random blogger decides to write their personal conclusions on a product that isn't even released
Owen Thomas's article is horrid, but if you had yet to read Thurrott's article go read it. He actually makes points, not just observations and tells you to boycott. He puts the blame squarely where it should go. On microsoft's head.
I fear the idea of Windows Mail, a system that makes Outlook Express seem advanced? Sadly the only thing I'm hearing that will cause users to upgrade to vista is DirectX 10 and of course graphics, and I don't see anyone saying they won't support XP in games just yet.
As a gamer I know they are going to force me to upgrade by not providing DirectX 10 for Windows XP. Hopefully it will be awhile before this really matters because I do not look forward to installing Vista prior to the eventual release of service pack 1.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I'm still learning shortcut keys on OS X
That's no fault of MacOS X - it is simply a lack of practice. I have been using the Mac for fifteen years and I'm super efficient at using it (keyboard shortcuts you wouldn't even know about probably). I can barely use Windows at all. Is this because Windows has bad keyboard shortcuts - no... it is because I don't have any experience using it.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
And what a perfect place to point out that the VAST majority of Windowsusers don't have the technical smarts to address or fix the issues related to viruses & spyware. And apparently the maker of the OS doesn't either. Hence the reason there are still cottage industries that support fixing these issues. Industries!
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
You know, I really don't think we are. We can buy MP3s, we can encourage uncompressed and non-lossy recordings — disk space isn't really an issue any longer, and when there's no compression, there's less work for your CPU to do, so there's a good reason... and no compression inherently rules out lossy compression which audiophiles and anyone with a really good ear will appreciate. Plain encodings also mean that they are easy to process, easy to write loaders and savers for in terms of audio programs, and they're also easier to maintain error correction for (row/column error correction can fix single sample errors with almost trivial ease when the surrounding data doesn't have to be decoded.)
I'm really tired of being told what I can do with something I purchased. I don't steal or share audio or video I buy (I'm a musician, and I appreciate the idea of intellectual property and support it fully) but by Darwin, if I bought a recording, I think I should have ZERO flipping problem putting it in my PSP, my MP3 player, any computer I own, any editor I want, and so on. Compression mechanisms are, for the most part, patented and otherwise encumbered — and it seems to me that these days, they mostly serve to make things more difficult. So I say the hell with them. It's not like we're using 64k byte machines any more. Plopping a 30 megabyte tune into RAM is no problem for my machine; most current machines are 512 megs or more, so playing an uncompressed tune (typical) is about a 10% RAM load... who cares? Not most people, I suspect. Likewise, most portable players carry LOTS of memory and I bet hardly anyone is using all that space, or if they are, they're not listening to everything they've got stored... and memory continues to get less expensive and denser as time goes on, so what are we doing, really, by insisting on compression? Let's use our memory and encourage the memory manufacturers to give us more of that instead of the damned DRM trolls giving us more grief.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
OS X was late and it still overhyped. BTW - I use it everyday
Boycott Vista. Keep your old Windows XP PC around. Don't buy a new one.
That's the key that I think a lot of the other comments are missing. As individuals, we're not nearly as important to the absorbtion rate of Vista as Dell, HP, Gateway and all the other PC manufactures are. People "in the know" about Vista don't seem to be terribly excited about it, at least not as much as previous versions of Windows. Those not in the know will be presented with the opportunity to pay a couple hundred dollars for an upgrade, at minimum, to get no more functionality then thay have, and likely find out that the experience will suck unless they also purchace new hardware. That doesn't seem exciting to me either.
But from the day Vista is released, every small to large scale PC manufacturer will be preinstalling it instead of XP. Just about every new machine purchased will be a Vista purchase. The number of copies of Windows bought off the shelf pales in comparison to pre-installed distribution. So what if we don't go out and buy a retail upgrade?
And that's where the magic of Microsoft kicks in. Even when delivering a half-baked, late-delivered operating system, they'll still be successful. There's little to no chance that someone like Dell will be convinced to not deal with Vista. Bigger operating systems need bigger hardware means more sales means more markups. An individual boycot is not only unlikely, it's completely ineffective.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
Let's assume Vista hits the streets in February 2007. After how many months will Dell, etc be required to drop XP and only ship Vista? (My guess 3 - 6 months.) At that point:
About 200 million pcs are sold annually. And 96% (?) of those will have Vista.
Microsoft is not worried about the 1-2 year upgrade holdouts.
What kind of consistency are you waiting for? I haven't found Windows to be very consistent in functionality, except to consistently barf white-on-blue onto the screen at least once a week. The Mac platform has used the same intuitive keyboard shortcuts for years, if that's what you really care about. Not once has a Mac OS X machine completely crashed on me (excepting a hard disk failure). The worst I've got is a failure to save wireless network settings, which I have encoutered on every platform I've used, and which happened to be a simple security update bug, fixed within a month. There's also the spinning beach ball of death, easily remedied with Opt-Cmd-Esc, the one-handed Mac equivalent of Ctl-Alt-Del, without the system-crashing side effects. You will of course need to relearn shortcuts on a new platform, seeing as you unsuprisingly fall into the 90% pie slice of lifetime Windozers, but if that is all of which you complain, you have no reason to do so here.
This is not the signature you're looking for.
...even if you, as an individual, boycott Vista, it won't matter. Next time you go to buy a new PC, XP won't be a choice, HP/Dell/etc. will only give you the option for Vista, preinstalled.
Maybe this will push a few people to OS X. But my money is on Vista becoming the defacto standard, much as XP is now.
The only thing that may work, is if corporate America doens't standardize on Vista. If large companies only want PC's with XP, im sure the boxmakers will oblige them.
Although it was probably not your intention, you basically just supported the claim of the parent poster that it is inconsistent.
Since Microsoft's OS is the dominant home OS and one of the largest OS for business, the preparation and potential capabilities of its new OS seem like they would be worthy of more than average consideration, particularly since many of the people here might end up working on them and/or programming for them. The emphasis on DRM in Vista also seems worthy of consideration before it comes out, as once a nucleus of users have Vista, others will be forced to change to it (and its DRM) in order to preserve compatibility with others - thus dealing with the DRM before Vista comes out might prevent complaints about DRM from being so much tilting at windmills (and the users might know what they are getting).
Complaining about the lack of substantitive information in articles about Vista is legitimate, but the discussion of Vista does not seem to be misplaced, even before its release, because the consequences of its release for Microsoft users, for other programmers, and for related issues are significant and widespread.
FLAC. It's lossless, it's unencumbered by patents, it's open source, and it compresses well, and it's supported natively by many, many media players. It's what I use for all of my audio.
CPU load is probably the least of my worries. RAM however, is a big concern. RAM affects the speed of your computer more than CPU. 30 Megs may seem like a drop in the bucket, but what happens if you have all 512 Megs in use? Or even worse, you're using Windows (which for some reason just *adores* its swapfile.) You start using your swapfile or partition, and now your computer goes from hopping to dragging along like a molasses zombie in a vat of liquid oxygen.
So next time you rip a cd kids, just flac --best -o %o --tag=Artist=%{artist} --tag=Album=%{albumtitle} --tag=Date=%{year} --tag=Title=%{title} --tag=Tracknumber=%{number} --tag=Genre=%{genre} %f
"Build a man a fire warm him for a day, set a man on fire and warm him for the rest of his life."
And Hondas have way, way better uptime than Windows.
I meant that to be funny, but now that I think about it, it's kind of an interesting point. Cars have wear items like belts and seals. And yet they're often WAY more reliable than Microsoft's software, in terms of how long they can run without a problem.
How is this an insightful comment? This author shows his complete LACK of knowledge about Vista, not some insight about it.
Just because you haven't done more than 30 seconds of research on what's new in Vista doesn't mean there aren't any useful new features.
It means you're being willfully ignorant.
I want the latest AND the greatest. And whether people like it or not, when Vista comes out, it will be both.
Vista has nothing to do with 'latest and greatest'. It's the last gasp of the two massive but crumbling monopolies, Microsoft and the entertainment industry, to try and lock down everything you see and hear so they can charge you for it. The future doesn't have these monopolies, content creation is becoming more and more decentralized and their business model is dying and they are well aware of this.
I for one will absolutely be boycotting Vista.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
It must be me, but having 3 flavours of linux running, a Mac G4 and 3 PC's with windows XP, XP-x64 and 2003 I don't understand all the flaming back and forth. I love the Linux for getting me on the internet worry free and letting me experiment with all kinds of stuff, I dig the Mac for feeding my Ipod and driving my KORG WS and I just cherisch my Windows flavours for getting my Canos EOS connected and playing my games, doing my SQL 2005 and putting my ASP based forum up nice and secure. I have dedictated a disc for Vista (RC1 at the moment) and I don't realy see the reason for all the big fuss. Everybody is shouting about monopolies and in the same sentence is pushing there own fav OS. Realy, it CAN work, I have all those PC's working in harmony and I wouldn't want to part with any of them. Whenever I get comments to ditch this or that it reminds me of all those fundamentalists trying to force their religion onto the world. Believe me, they all work, they all are manageble, they all have their down and up sides. You just need to know what you are doing... And that is what REAL system administration is all about. Everything else is just an inabbility to deal with it.
Supporting MS products doesn't mean you have to like them.
and as long as you have a user smart enough to avoid the majority or viruses and spyware XP doesn't crash very often.
You also need to avoid dodgy hardware. USB network adapters are an excellent example of hardware which tends to be flaky.
Tell me, why does the driver for a USB network adapter need to sit at a point in the OS where it can bing the whole thing crashing to the ground? (Not that Linux is any better in that regard, but if Windows is so much "better"...)
You know, I've seen this list dozens of times, and the majority is still complete marketing BS.
First of all, the UI changes, IE7, simple network changes, start menu, explorer changes, new dialogs, USB caching, search, WPF, backup utils, audio changes, and speech recognition are next to useless, and are certainly not worth paying for. Some of thing are even a further step backwards over the old W2k way.
The kernel scheduling, file operations, superfetch, DX10, driver changes, and driver API improvements should just have been there already. They are not worth paying for. They are definitely not worth a new OS. These things fix things that Microsoft should have been fixing in service packs.
This leaves the new TCP/IP stack, desktop compositing, and DPI independence (part of the composition engine anyway), and some new security model improvements. Considering how broken people have been saying UAC is, this *really* is leaving the network stack and the composition engine.
As far as the speed recognition FUD, yeah, it might work. It's much more likely that it just doesn't work well enough to be useful. You can't use it while on the phone, or having a conversation. You won't use it in a busy office. It's just a gimmick.
If you want to hype improvements, they *REALLY* need to be both useful and novel. Many of the things on that list we've had for years on other platforms. Many are only niche useful, or not useful at all. Most of the rest of fixes for poorly implemented MS functionality.
XP is a perfectly fine operating system. I haven't had any of my boxes crash...
Statements like this really do suggest the negative effect that Microsoft has had on computing. Users now are "perfectly" satisfied if their OS doesn't routinely crash. What should be a basic assumption has become a lauded feat.
My linux and mac installs don't crash either. Nor do they have a spyware virus problem (or even need for software to prevent such). But that's just what they do to not suck. From usable CLI to functional least-rights users to better software (no Quicksilver, Textmate or iLife for PC) and on ad infinitum, they also do a tons of things that MS just can't offer.
If you're happy with the "accomplishment" of not crashing, good for you. I've experienced more and I've come to expect more.
~p
I, for one, don't care if Hollywood movies stop being made. It's not as if they're capable of making anything good with those billion-doller budgets anyway!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
...is not crash, then you should get yourself an old copy of DOS and be happy.
Some of us, on the other hand, have somewhat higher requirements for an OS: decent POSIX support and standard utility programs (e.g. bash), a UI that doesn't mostly freeze when all we're doing is copying a file, the ability to use the machine without having to worry about malware, etc.
Windows wouldn't meet this criteria even if it were perfectly stable!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz