Slashdot Mirror
Vista Indicates A Shift in Microsoft's Priorities
jcatcw writes "After hundreds of hours of testing Vista, Scot Finnie is supremely tired of it. And of Microsoft. Although 80% of the changes in Windows Vista are positive, there is nothing about Vista that is truly innovative or compelling; there's no transformational, gotta-have-it feature in Vista. But the real problem isn't with Vista. It's with Microsoft itself. His opinion is that Microsoft has stopped focusing on end users. They 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.'"
That's about my thoughts exactly, except let's not forget turning the screws on the paying customers.....
"Although 80% of the changes in Windows Vista are positive, there is nothing about Vista that is truly innovative or compelling; there's no transformational, gotta-have-it feature in Vista. "
They attempted to improve their security and GUI. Any additional features were already available as third party add ons or with different OS's. Were we really expecting anything else? Time will tell if their attempts were successful. I for one have no interest in Vista other than possibly having to use it at work.
"His opinion is that Microsoft has stopped focusing on end users. They 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy."
Again, no surprise here... Marketing is all about positive publicity and MS recognizes that their bread and butter is evolving into the large, medium, and small corporate entities that are locked into their OS and apps...not the everyday home end user.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Making the largest corporate users happy is the same thing as making the end users happy. The corporate desktop represents a large portion of their end user install base, and it's definitely a larger portion of the end user paying install base.
Like it or not, corporate desktops are Microsoft's bread and butter.
Video for Online Dating Profiles
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.
I guess this is why Apple is deliberately ignoring the Enterprise market.
Now I'm not saying this all came exactly true but if'n you ask me, some serious trolling of blogs for peeved-at-Vista articles is going on
Which makes Slashdot about the only place in the world where anyone cares about it.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
How can Microsoft simultaneously focus on their large enterprise customers (who have hundreds of thousands of end users) and simultaneously stop focusing on end users?
Second: why would it be a negative to fucus on security and SW quality? Were these not the things MS was criticised the most for --for not focusing on security and quality enough --now this is their bane? What??? Make a straight argument. Or is he trying to say that MS is only pretending to address the issues and their main strategy is really a public relations strategy on security and SW quality?
I get his gist, but he's just not explaining himself clearly. In critizing MS he's using odd logic.
throw that boy some coffee
Yessiree bob, Apple is looking better every day!
Scott: it's a friggin OS, not a video game, it's not supposed to have a nice plot twists, hot action and lots of suspence.
1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.
Funny, that. I can see how it's bad they don't attract negative publicity and piss off their largest enterprise customers.
But tell me, how do these features fall into any of those two categories:
* New aero candy interface (I bet enterprise customers demanded this!).
* DVD maker.
* Photo processing.
* Live thumbnails.
* Updated Windows Games.
* DirectX 10
* etc etc.
There's a real reason why nobody is impressed with Vista as much: we've been watching it for 5 years. Previews, alphas, betas.
Maybe Jobs is right to sue blog sites that leak product info, and release everything with a ton of hype, of the "Best. Chewing. Gum. Evah!!!".
Because you see what happens now: people who followed Longhorn's development since it's inception are now whining that they're kinda familiar with what's new. Well duh, smartass.
That's been the case since 2K/XP, and arguably since Win9x and the introduction of IE/ActiveX.
Word and Excel macros on by default? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and all content created by people in the office is trusted!
NetBIOS filesharing on by default in 9x? Of course! Everybody's on a LAN, everyone should be able to share their documents with each other!
ActiveX things that autoinstall and execute when some string on a webpage tells them to? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and the only thing they should be browsing is the company Intranet, and the only web applications are going to be about entering your vacation time into a database of timesheets!
Javashit on by default! Of course! See above -- how else can we be sure to tell those UNIX greybeards that they're fired (because they can't run ActiveX TimeSheet Thingy that the consultant was paid $100K to write) unless they're running IE!
Install IIS by default and make it listen to requests from everywhere? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and wouldn't it be cool if everyone had their own little web server thingy running on their desktop so they could share their Word documents with other people in the office?
UPnP on by default? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and wouldn't it be cool if you just plugged the computer into the LAN, and it automatically knew about the printer down the hall.
DCOM and RCP services turned on by default, listening on ports 135, 139, 445 or 593 for requests from everywhere? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and DCOM makes it easy for people to stick Excel spreadsheets in their Word documents!
Goddamn near every out-of-the-box remote exploit (and most of the designed-in insecurities in IE and the Office suite) arises from the assumption that everyone's on a LAN, and that all content is trusted.
Windows is not secure......Bad Microsoft
Security (a.k.a, User Account Control (UAC) for Trigger-Click-Happy People who click "Yes" no matter what).....Bad Microsoft
Give me a break....Bashing Microsoft just-because-I-hate-Microsoft (a.k.a, Linux fan bois)
is getting too old and childish. Grow up people!
It is a "No-Matter-What-Blame-Microsoft" attitude.
Overall, I think Vista is a gradual evolution of the Windows platform.
That is why, they delayed one of the most anticipated featuresJust like every other company, Microsoft had to make hard Business decisions.
like WinFS because it is NOT ready and solid yet.
In my opinion, Microsoft is focusing on releasing a STABLE OS rather than an error prone insecure OS.
Scott Finnie tests Vista for hundreds of hours, finds nothing wrong with it, so he complains that Microsoft now focuses on " Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality)". And it's somehow wrong.
Booohoo, Microsoft releases a secure system! They are doing it only so that they can avoid negative publicity, let's slam them!
Microsoft doesn't really care about the little single machine buyer.
The entire publicity was done to get mainstream media's attention and tell the corporate buyers, who buy not 1 machine at a time but 10,000 to 20,000 machines at a time that the change is coming.
The end-user who's sing a PC at home isn't going to upgade his OS until he buys a new machine, and he's taking what they're giving because he has no real choice.
Unless he buys a Mac or is geeky enough to get a Linux box. (That means YOU reading this, and you didn't give a shit what Microsoft was doing anyway, did you?)
Its all being done for the volume buyers.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Fast forward 20 years. Everything is in MS Word format, which may or may not work with a particular version of Word, and is much more likely to work with another Office application. We are nearly 100% connected, but if you do not have the MS Windows only version of IE, there are significant web pages that will not work. It now matters that you have the same computer as work, if for no other reason than you can use the office copy of MS Office.
If there was the fluidity of motion of the 80's, then perhaps the MS strategy would be as disastrous as the IBM strategy. However, I do not see millions of users moving from the WinTel machine to something cheaper, nor do I see millions of users who never bought a computer before buying something other than a Wintel. Perhaps a few hundred thousand will buy a Mac, and few hundred thousand will buy a *nix machine, but that is not going to be a short term problem for MS.
Ultimately Vista does what it is supposed to do, which is to satisfy the contract of those that paid MS for very expensive long term licensing, as well as justify the higher cost machines from MS real customers, the OEM computer people. A positive ancillary purpose of MS Vista is to further isolate MS OS from other commodity products, thus making it harder to switch. This is a risky proposal, but perhaps the only way that MS can continue to amass the huge profits on what is essentially old stock. Good for them.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
to the phrase "largest enterprise clients."
I keep having this strange dream where most of the governments of the industrialized nations got tired of the myriad of problems they have when one connects a relatively anonymous PC to the Internet and decided to do something like mount a smart card module on a motherboard to generate a unique, verifiable signature (among other things) for each pc.
Just a dream though...
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Excellent, excellent comment. If MicroSoft had simply realized from the beginning that they needed to treat *all* incoming content as hostile until proven otherwise they'd have avoided so many of these mistakes.
... erm ... lawyer didn't take these assholes to court in a class action suit for the billions of dollars in damages their idiotic design choices directly caused.
Personally, I think they've always had a "not invented here" mentality and for that reason, didn't bother to study the lessons of those who'd been dealing with the internet for ages before it exploded in popularity.
There's a reason java applets (lame as they were) weren't associated with the type of security problems we've seen over and over from MicroSoft. Sun understood the "all incoming content should be treated as hostile" principle and sandboxed applets by design from the very beginning.
I've often wondered why some enterprising bottom feeder
there are two kinds of people in this world - those who divide people into two groups and those who don't
MS's biggest problem is to try justify all the effort that goes into making something "new" that is not perceived to be new by most people looking at it from the outside. There must be a lot of investors/share holders asking why MS spent $5bn or whatever developing Vista when XP seems healthy enough.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
large enterprise customers are end-users if you define end-user as the one who writes the check for the software.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Which is exactly what an operating system maker is supposed to do. End users don't use an operating system, developers do.
If Microsoft finally starts giving developers priority over end users, Windows might actually become something useful someday.
http://outcampaign.org/
Pardon me, but back in those times, you never tried CBasic dialects, did you ? If you had, you surely wouldn't mention MS-Basic as a good product from Microsoft, focused on users. Even then, most other basics had already dropped line numbering in favor of non-sequential numeric labels at worst, alpha labels at best. And to nail it, no other basics of reputation I know of had computational bugs in floating point arithmetics.
I think what the author meant by no huge breakthroughs, was that all of the big breakthroughs that were promised (WinFS, database filesystem, etc.) were scrapped. Microsoft touted and planned on a huge makeover for the Windows operating system, hoping to do a big change to the core of the OS ala Mac OS Classic to OS X. It proved to be more difficult than they had planned, so they scrapped all of their big plans and went with WinXP with a rework of the gui and tweak to the way it handles file permissions.
The reason people aren't going apeshit over the Vista, is that it's nothing really new. It's just XP with a facelift. It looks pretty, has some nifty new widgets...err, gadgets, and uses twice the resources at idle time. In short, all of the original big promises were dropped, so all of the big expectations were dropped as well. It's all ho-hum now.
Microsoft is very focused on end users. Yes, corporate desktops are a large segment, but there are millions more citizens than office lackeys, such as people who have a computer at home but would never use one at work--construction workers, janitors, blue-collar workers, etc. Vista Home Premium has many personal user options--an improved Media Center, Windows DVD Maker, a new version of Movie Maker, and more. Do you think that Aero was made for business users? Business users generally don't care about the GUI, save for maybe personalizing the desktop. I keep my office PC on the default themes, not loaded with extra themes and whizbang graphics effects. My home PC, now running Vista, is much better looking than XP and is visually appealing.
I think Microsoft is trying to make money ultimately. To make money, you have to a) have an appealing product, b) avoid negative publicity, c) have a product that works, and d) have happy consumers. Any market segment that gets marginalized will hurt profits. With the amount of money Microsoft has, I doubt they decided marginalizing home users was worth focusing on the exclusive large enterprise market. I am pretty sure they can afford both.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
But if it ain't broke, nobody buys the upgrade.
If you run Windows properly you can still use it in 20 years to write text documents and make fancy drawings.
As it's now 2007, we want an OS that feels like 2012 so that when 2012 arrives we're ready to upgrade again. For a lot of users, in 2002, Windows XP felt like 2007 in terms of stability, features, etc. Even Windows NT feels usable today for people who just do the same work day after day for the last 10 years.
How can one say Microsoft is really targeting the enterprise? Many companies are still running Windows 2000. If the enterprise is such a big goal, upgrades would be sweeping the land.
It appears rather that Vista is a mere stepping stone to the next version. If it ain't broke, no one will buy the upgrade so Vista can't be the be all and end all.
What does 2012 feel like? Will people have giant monitors or an array of monitors? Are they finally going to be able to communicate their commands through voice or pen as well as they can to another person? Will your own personal hard drive and applications be accessible from ubiquitous public terminals or handheld devices? Even if the implementation is clunky, I would like to see some of that futuristic ilk in Vista.
Instead Vista appears to create fear in the user, not from hacker attacks but from information that may be acquired surreptitiously to prod users about software payments. A Trojan horse of a different stripe. So if the argument is that Microsoft is programming to sell to corporates, that idea is bang on the money.
Corporates should upgrade their OS, but maybe not this version, which is a mere harbinger that they'll have to keep their systems clean. This version may be more secure, but the next version should have more goodies. Besides Vista right now slows everything down and ought to have better performance in future editions.
MS doesn't care about either publicity or enterprise users with this release. Vista is all about DRM, period. This release is all about satifying content providers (content enslavers?) not about any kind of end user, enterprise or individual.
Security (a.k.a, User Account Control (UAC) for Trigger-Click-Happy People who click "Yes" no matter what).....Bad Microsoft
You aren't paying attention. The criticism is directed at the poor implementation, not the fact that it was implemented.
Edith Keeler Must Die
User: I bought the Vista. I can't find its internet. Where are the internets??
...
Kris: Vista is a bare bones operating system; additional functionality such as Internet Explorer is available in the Microsoft Plus pack; or alternatively, you can download Firefox...
User: Huh? How can I download a foxy fire if I don't have my interweb?
Kris: Off a magazine cover CD, possibly; or...
User: [interrupting] What about Macs? Do they have interwebs? I want some interwebs!
Kris:
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Seems like everything you listed there is a complete focus on the end-user rather than the other way around. Most end-user's don't think about security (especially back in the late 90's), they simply expect everything to work. If MS had started by making it difficult to do all the things you mention because of security I don't think they would have taken over the market the way they did. Seems to me that the reason MS has been so successful in the OS market is because it was super simple to connect everything.
Now that they're starting to focus more on security they're blasted for not doing enough for end-users. Blasted for not doing enough for security in the past. Blasted for... pretty much everything. I'm certainly no MS fanboi, but it seems that somebody's gonna complain up a storm no matter which direction they go. If other OS's out there are as good or better than Windows for the majority of users who aren't techies then let's see it. But I don't see how anyone seriously complain about the features in an OS that has dominated the market as a direct result of their implementation. Seems to me MS got it right (their general popularity pretty much speaks for itself) and because they're on top everyone's gotta poke em with a stick. Who cares about how MS implemented Windows 98 anyway? That was close to a decade ago!
I am Jack's smirking revenge.
Vista contains quite a few very nice new features, volume shadow copy(sure novell's had it for 15 years, but not on the desktop), bitlocker(sure you could do that with third party apps, or if you configured it reasonably well, linux, but whole drive encryption is still pretty new, especially having it work in an efficient manner. Even the DRM is about as "innovative" as operating systems get(that's not to say it's a good thing, but not all innovation is good).
Most of the truly innovative technologies in Operating Systems are really low level, new file systems, new kernel designs, new process schedulers, emulation, etc. We haven't really seen much innovation in any of these things in a number of years, certainly not anything that just changes the whole way we do things.
ReiserFS is just another way of looking at journalling file systems, not a major new step. GNU Hurd has been working on a microkernal design for nearly 20 years and it's still not ready for prime-time, Microsoft has been working on WinFS for a long time too, and maybe eventually they'll have it, but not this time.
In essence Vista is what 2000 was supposed to be and XP almost was. It's a reasonably functional and reasonably secure multi-user operating system from Microsoft. One which is relatively secure, but which can still run most of the programs you want to run on it. Yeah, it took them 10 years to get there, but if you think of what things were like in the NT/9x days, where you had to choose between an OS which wouldn't work at home(and didn't even always work in the corporate environment) or an OS which was about as secure as a sieve, we've come a long way.
They 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.
This is not exactly a revolutionary observation. Ever since the PC entered the corporate market Microsoft has been this way. The "end user" has been nothing more than a cash cow to be milked.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
That's actually a very good idea, though. It costs them next to nothing to print the ticker symbol, and if one in a million people checks it out and decides to invest, that's a big win.
Advertising on the scale of Vista, though, seems like a huge waste of money. I think everyone who's likely to buy Vista already knows what it is, and that it's available now.
Just the hardware requirements alone mean that 99% of customers will not and should not buy the upgrade. It's just not cost-effective to buy the $99-$270 upgrade, get new memory and a new video card and still be stuck with your old computer.
I notice that it still costs about $850 to buy a "Premium Ready" computer that will run Aero. One thing Vista will do is to increase average selling prices for PCs by quite a bit, since I can't see people getting excited by the features in Vista Basic.
D