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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."
Blatant Shill. Stop linking him. Stop completely. Please
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
* They just get a new computer
* They just (like me) are willing to upgrade (I'll get Vista the day it gets out)
* They will have the need to upgrade to run new specific stuff
* Or just because.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
When you have an entire industry where pretty much only one company supplies a critical part, the entire industry is dependent on that one company. It would be nice to get away from the single-supplier issue, much like there are two major suppliers for processors, a half-dozen dozen chipset makers and so on.
How does this fit with this without creating a universe-shattinger paradox?
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
The lack of "buzz" around Vista and apathy towards upgrading - despite its myriad improvements - are a tacit acknowledgement of just how good Windows 2000 and XP were(/are)...
Since Windows XP doesn't suck as much as the previous versions of Windows that users were dying to get rid of there will not be that much excitement about it.
Crysis. Have you seen the eyecandy in that game?
(Crysis is based on directx 10, and last I heard there wasn't going to be any upgrades to XP - granted if I can get directx 10 Ill stay with XP)
Each version of OS X has shipped with a number of things that were productivity boosters - Spotlight and Dashboard in Tiger, and with Leopard you are going to see things like Time Machine which brings version control to the masses!
Similarily with Linux updates have included ever more useful windowing systems and application software - you could of course have added parts piecemeal but it's pretty handy to load a whole distro.
The problem with Vista is that it doesn't even offer anything as compelling as a new Linux distro would have - basiclly the insides have been re-worked to some extent, and the window manager is improved. But it's not like you need Vista to run the new Office. The only thing you do need Vista for is DirectX 10, and most games are probably going to still support DX9 for some time as it's a huge market.
So what would be the reason to move to Vista over something offering real features like Leopard or even the latest Red Hat?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Dvorak's take on public interest in the Vista release seems about right, but I don't understand why he thinks this is a problem. Does he look forward to OS releases because he enjoys the buzz, talk, and excitement? He seems to be of the opinion that every major OS launch needs the marketing and fanfare of Windows 95.
There have been some major Windows revolutions - new versions that significantly added value since previous versions. Windows 95 was one. Windows 2000 was another, although the excitement of that was split between Windows 2000 and XP - XP wouldn't have been big at all if 2000 had been meant for home users. Windows 98 was not exciting. Windows ME was not exciting.
Perhaps the Vista launch would have been a big deal if the team had accomplished more of their original goals. But as it stands, even though a good deal of it was rewritten, Vista is not that much of a jump from XP. I guess Dvorak is sad that there's no revolution and fanfare. Boo hoo. Every release can't be a major step forward and a huge party.
Why are you guys still using Microsoft stuff? It is out-of-date. Linux is the best way to go! I know my wife still use XP though :(
I'd hope that this corporate pre-release makes for a much smoother public release of Vista.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
> Vista will not be a flop because it won't be long before ...
Vista can be the Edsel of computers.
The Edsel was the best Big American Car. It had all the features and acessories that were available, including some that were novel. It was overhyped and was delivered late.
The problem was not so much the car itself, or the marketing, but that the public decided it did not want a Big American Car, but wanted a compact or a foreign import, or more to the point, two small cars instead of one big one.
Vista is trying to be everything - a computer, a media centre, a games machine, internet access, telephone, all in one with every feature.
But only one person can use it at a time. Just like a Big American Car it lacks flexibility because it can only have one driver. For the same price as one 'all doing' Vista machine with Office and all the bells and whistles, you should be able to buy 2 or more 'foreign imports' (linux) or 'compacts' (like a miniMac) and/or recycle existing machines and link them together so that the family can all access everything they want without queuing for it.
Some years ago Bill Gates noted a survey that found that in most homes the TV and the computer were in the same room. He concluded that this meant that people wanted these to be integrated as one unit. No. Bill, it is because most families don't have 22 room mansions and because _some_ want to watch the one TV while others use the one computer, they don't all have a TV and a computer each.
Sorry to break it to you, but Windows's security model is now superior to Linux's. Like in Unix, you can now run as a regular user and only raise to admin permissions when required. The permission system has finer granularity and can more easily be controlled from a central server. Internet Explorer 7 runs inside a sandbox, unlike Linux web browsers. And not only do you have more power, it can be managed more easily by nonexperts using GUIs instead of text files. Realistically, Vista will still be much more worm-infested than Linux but this will be mainly attributable to market share.
As for stability, there's no reason to expect Vista will be less stable than XP upon release (i.e. at least weeks of uptime).
That Linux is better than Windows "under the hood" was only true in the 9x/ME days. To be sure, there are differences of approach -- Windows is monolithic, Linux distributions are made of loosely connected components; Windows is GUI-based with CLI tacked on, Linux is CLI-based with GUI tacked on; Windows maintains binary backwards compatibility, Linux forces recompilation. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages, and it's hard to see that one is clearly better than the other.
Car analogies do not work.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Of course people are still running Windows 2000. What features does XP have that make the work of your IT staff any easier? What programs do you really need to run for business purposes that run on Windows XP and not Windows 2000? In what way does Windows XP offer a significant improvement to productivity? How will the purchase of Windows XP licenses result in saving your company money? If you can't answer these questions definitively, then there's probably no reason to upgrade.
Good IT people are practical, and won't want to upgrade to the newest thing just because it's new. Along with everything else, new software usually brings new problems, which require new bug-fixes and work-arounds. Windows 2000 and Office 2000 make a great combo, and don't require inconvenient activation schemes. Sometimes it's better to stick with the devil you know.
Windows' permissions system has always been superior to that of Unix. Sure, there's POSIX ACLs, but no one uses them and user tools to manage them are just not there as they are on Windows. The masking system used on Unix is just stupid. The fact that a file can only be associated with one group or user is pathetic. The fact that a file must be owned by a user and cannot simply be owned by a group is ridiculous. And finally, while NT has both permit and deny permissions, Unix has only permit. I cannot for example grant full control to all developers except those who are also QA engineers, who are denied write access.
However, it is entirely possible to run any application you like inside of a sandbox on Unix systems, so that's nothing special. And while it is easier to perform superficial management tasks on windows, when you run into something the GUI doesn't cover it becomes much harder than Unix, while on Unix I can use ssh to push and execute scripts to handle border cases securely and conveniently. This functionality is present on NT but not as easy to use or as reliable.
Unless you've done a line by line source code comparison of the two operating systems, you are not qualified to make this statement. Certainly Linux still behaves as if it were more robust underneath than NT; try putting both systems under heavy load, using up all their memory, etc etc and see what happens, see which one is more usable, see which one you can recover and which one you end up applying the BRS to.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hey, he's right about the system idle process. It doesn't make sense but every once in a while my computer just freezes and nothing happens for quite a long period of time. The symptom is that the system idle process shows as consuming all the cycles. I know it isn't doing anything, but neither are any of the other processes, and they should be.
That's a popular theory, but it smells dubious. So I tested it at one site - all the desktops had OpenOffice, Thunderbird, and Firefox on them when they were first installed, and not Outlook or MS Office, and IE was carefully disabled (if it had been a problem, we could have had Office installed later without any trouble).
That site has now been running for over a year.
Several of the users never even noticed that they weren't using MS-ware. None of them cared. There has been no need to install any other applications on any of the desktops.
(We're now planning to deploy Linux desktops at the next new site, and not waste any more money on Windows licenses)
On reflection, the flaw in the theory becomes obvious. Every version of Windows and Office behaves differently. Every Windows box behaves differently after it's been running for 12 months and is starting to get clogged up with worms and spyware. Users are used to computers that don't behave consistently. Why should they care about a version that's slightly different again? They really don't. Most users don't pay any attention to details.
I speculate that the people who moan about how free software "isn't ready" are just trying to justify a political position. My message to them: shut up and get on with your job. Windows and Office aren't ready either, but that's never stopped you before.
For home users, who cares? I don't.
Well, under that criteria exactly 0 people are qualified to make a comparison. Nobody one person masters the details of either operating system individually, let alone both at the same time. As you say, we can only surmise based on experience, and my experience is telling me that there's no strong winner either way.
I haven't administered large servers so I don't know much about heavy load situations; I'll assume you're right that Linux is better on this. But robustness under load isn't the only measure of "better under the hood". There's other questions like: how well does the framework accept dynamic changes and upgrades to various components? How well does it perform under light load? How gracefully does it recover from various types of failures? How well does it perform without careful case-by-case performance tweaking by a skilled sysadmin? These issues are very complex and case-dependent and I won't claim to know which operating system is better for any of them, but I think I can at least say that Linux isn't invariably the winner.
I feel like we've reached a design plateau with both Windows XP and MacOSX these days. They both do what they do extremely well, and most of the other needs can be satisfied by the applications themselves without changing the OS.
I strongly disagree. The progress in the OS field has been slow, but there is plenty of room for growth. OS X has numerous features that are part of and should be part of the OS that have not yet made their way to Windows. For example, system level services. Can you believe there are still OS's without spellchecking, grammar checking, etc. in all programs that use text? Also, there is the area of application management and security. By default some random program off the internet has access to read my e-mail address book and start sending mail? And someone thinks this is acceptable? There is no universal update service to keep all my software current and that is normal?
There is a whole lot room for improvement in operating systems. I'm sure not satisfied.
I've seen some other people mention the same thing. Is it possible that an AC did the copy/paste of your journal entry rather than zonk?
Assign blame where blame is due... and until you know for sure that no one else could have possibly ripped off your entry, don't blame Zonk. I suggest looking at your fans list as the prime list of suspects, since they are the people most likely to read your journal.
Or do you think that Zonk spends his day combing through journal entries looking for entries he can rip off without attribution as stories?
Grow up.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I'm a long-time Windows fan (cue flames) but it's the honest truth. I get older and busier and have long-since dropped computers as a hobby, and use them exclusively to "get the job done" which means watching TV on my media center, burning CDs for use in my car, Word documents, and Internet browsing. I've never needed anything more than that.
I don't plan to upgrade to Windows Vista for a year or so, most likely...if ever. I'm gradually letting my "hobbiest" knowledge lapse since I am getting out of tech as a job in the near future, but remain computer literate. And my plan is: when I get a new PC, I'm going to (gasp) load a Linux distribution onto it.
People have convinced me that Linux is, at this point, reasonable enough to configure to work on common hardware without a lot of fuss. I'll dual-boot Windows XP, or use Wine, or something -- but Vista's DRM scares me just a little bit, and I am a historic *supporter* of DRM (cue flames again) for a variety of reasons.
I imagine that Vista may prompt Linux desktop adoption to a bit of a degree, as corporations and "power-users" (somewhere between Joe User and Joe Admin) decide "hey, I've heard this Linux thing works and is free" and go for it.
That's my plan, anyway.