John Dvorak On Vista's Launch

An anonymous reader writes "John is at it again, this time with his take on the launch of Microsoft's Vista operating system. John covers the reality from a market perspective, looking at whether the release will affect PC sales, peripherals ... or even Microsoft." From the article: "While there is no way that Vista will be a flop, since all new computers will come with Vista pre-installed, there seems to be no excitement level at all. And there does not seem to be any compelling reason for people to upgrade to Vista. In fact, the observers I chat with who follow corporate licensing do not see any large installations of Windows-based computers upgrading anytime soon. The word I keep hearing is 'stagnation.' Industry manufacturers are not too thrilled either. One CEO who supplies a critical component for all computers says he sees a normal fourth quarter then nothing special in the first quarter for the segment. Dullsville."

Comments

Though he's right

[abradsn]

I've seen and worked with vista already. Here were my impressions.

It is really hard to lose your work. It is really easy to find your files.

It is a lot prettier.

The GUI for the system has been re-engineered and it is easier to use. Other applications have been rewritten to have the same look and feel so that the system as a whole will be easier to use.

It was not stable when I used it.

Re:Though he's right

[Vancorps]

Although I agree, under the hood Linux is much more trustworthy as their is no mystery involved.

People in general do like the interface that Microsoft provides and after working with Office 2007 on my XP box I'm quite pleased with the shift, everything is up front and easy to find. The only problems I tend to have are not recognizing the plain English words that cover the functions I wish to perform. I'm so trained in having to hunt for the Microsoft query tool that I don't notice it's right in front of me for my Excel sheets.

Vista is the same way in that everything is incredibly easy to find and in many ways it's a consolidation of a lot of tools Microsoft has had available for some time. Keep in mind that although your Linux box has 6 months uptime my Windows box has been running for almost a year, all it does is run Webtrends crunching my web logs so mileage varies, all my Linux and Windows boxen have uptime until my regularly scheduled maintenance times. The Webtrends box is the only box I'm not concerned about since it's heavily filtered but the fact remains that Microsoft has been working very hard on stability so please move past this issue as Linux, OS X, and Windows are all perfectly stable platforms these days.

Security is a valid gripe but I think your prediction for their demise completely misses the mark. With OS X providing versioning in the OS, a feature Windows has had for 6 years now with Shadow Copies, things are moving back and forth and Windows today is a hell of a lot more secure than Windows of even 3 years ago. People are quite unhappy at the pace of the progress and the pace at which Microsoft adapts will determine if they live or die over the next 15 years. I tend to think they will survive as I've seen no reason to see otherwise.

The recent stories describing 22 programmers working on the shutdown screen is an example of where Microsoft is going wrong and I only see it as a matter of time before they figure out that 22 people are not a replacement for 2 talented people. When that happens I see the company becoming more agile and becoming much more responsive. As is, Microsoft does indeed listen to their customers. At some point they will also realize that large customers want different features from home customers so the two shouldn't be running the same OS.

Re:Though he's right

[Anonymous Coward]

SELINUX. Every single structure, or piece of memory, or file or device... EVERYTHING can be individually covered by a specific mandatory access control policy.

So thanks... you've just proved that you are bloody fool with no idea what you are talking about. This stuff has been mainline Linux for years. In fact, Linux supports pluggable security systems to allow whatever degree of control is required.

You could have found this out with 2 seconds googling had you actually had the slightest understanding of the subject. Instead you spent three paragraphs waffling away with no clue, and worse... you began the message with "Sorry to break it to you,".

Indeed... sorry to break it to you, dude. Next time, do some fucking reading first.

Re:Same with everything

[august sun]

But the good news is that upgrading the various Linuces is pretty much as easy as "yum upgrade" or the equivalent. So you don't have to fret and stress over whether it'll be worth it.

*cough*

Re:Ill give you a reason for upgrading...

[HAKdragon]

Crysis also has a DirectX 9 rendering path.

Re:Who is John Dvorak and why should anyone care?

[drinkypoo]

He's an asshat who used to make up wild predictions for Byte magazine in order to help sell copies. Now he makes up wild predictions for lots of people in order to help get ad impressions. I really like the title of this column, though: "JOHN DVORAK'S SECOND OPINION" I wonder what his first opinion was?

Re:Dvorak... Reality... ???

[chipxsd]

> At least he invented a kick ass keyboard. Give the guy some credit. I believe that was dr. August Dvorak, not John.

Re:Same with everything

[archen]

I went from 10.2 to 10.4. If you don't think the updates are worth it, then don't buy the updates. No one is forcing you. (that's a total of $120 BTW). My main reasons for upgrading were native caps->ctrl mapping, and expose - aside from that every apple update (aside from perhaps tiger which I'm unsure of) has made OSX faster on the same machines. I doubt I'm going to get that warm fuzzy feeling from Vista.

I think upgrading to Leopard will be a waste of money BTW.

Re:Same with everything

[cswiger2005]

For the most part, Apple has been adding APIs between point releases, not removing them or changing existing APIs. While Apple could do a better job of marking features for deprecation and handling that side-- by contrast, Sun & Solaris handle that very well-- backwards compatibility in MacOS X is handled reasonably well.

By this, I mean, you can run an app compiled for 10.1 or 10.2 on a later release, ie, 10.3, 10.4, etc. However, you seem to be expecting forwards compatibility-- ie, running an app compiled for 10.4 on 10.3, and pretty much no operating system vendor will support that. If an app is released which uses an API which is new in 10.4, and does not exist in 10.3, the 10.3 system is not going to be able to run that app.

However, if the source is available, you can try to backport the software yourself, and build it on 10.3 either by creating a compatibility shim or by removing calls to APIs not present in 10.3.