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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.'"
You know, I agree with most of what you write, apart from the "everyday home user" stuff.
If they are not interested in the everyday home user then why on earth would they be currently in the middle of ploughing through half a billion dollars woth of mass market TV adverts trying to convince people to go "Wow" when they first see Vista?
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
Or remember Enron saturating the airwaves with ads for their new bandwidth commodities market? How many of the viewers were really commodities traders? I think it's just a "show of force."
Is Microsoft really trying to accomplish anything or spread any message, or simply maintaining their larger-than-life image?
This took Microsoft over SIX years to send out. People aren't saying it's not a gradual improvement, people are asking why the hell it took Microsoft SIX years to make such gradual improvement, how long its going to be before they make their next incompatable "gradual improvement", and whether or not Microsoft even has an R&D department. Most of the things they did were very clearly innovated by someone else.
-Security's a problem? Let's create something that will let us blame the user. (UAC)
-Games going to other OSs are a problem? Let's rewrite an incompatable DX10.
-Third party drivers for video crads are crashing our driver model? Let's just gimp the third parties so that they can't and do it ourselves. (Bonus for gimping OpenGL.)
-GUI/useability is a problem? Let's just slice and dice some Linux and OS X elements.
The problem is not that Vista is incremental in change, it's that its incremental, it took six years, and Microsoft is forcing the incompatability anyways.
FanFictionRecs.net
Sorry, Vista is not stable. And systems that aren't stable are often very insecure.
_ cpu/
For example, look at this error message you get when installing Apache on Vista: http://cse.unl.edu/~mpeters/Site/lulz.html
IE7, which forms one of the cornerstones of Windows Vista, also suffers from some pretty serious problems. Here's a screenshot showing IE7 consuming 99% of some fellow's CPU time, in addition to over 1 GB of RAM: http://www.allsorthost.com/is_ie7_ment_to_kill_my
This reminds me of some ads I've seen "BASF... We don't make the things you buy, we make the things you buy better." Remember those? It was like they were purposely saying, "99% of you within the sound of our voice, we don't care about you... you can't even choose to buy our products or not, because they're everywhere in everything. To the other 1%... look how much we can waste on this - that's how big we are."
My thought when seeing those was it was more geared towards potential investors. If you've never heard of the company you're less likely to buy stock in it yada yada.
Of course, that is just what popped into my head when I tsaw the ads, so it could be completely wrong.
I worked in retail once. We sold Office 2003 for $199 NZD. We made about $14 per copy, so we stopped selling software. The computer industry in general never gave retailers much in terms of margins. Laptops etc. would make sometimes less than half of what other products would at the same selling price.
Still . . . if you don't stock it, that's $14 in someone else's till. Well at least that's what my boss always used to say. I told him it's not worth the time and effort for $14. Software and IT weren't really our clientele anyway.
[Insert a story that goes on and on about a guy who works in a retail store here.]
So the moral is . . . if you work in retail (or in my case, an independent retailer belonging to an appliance group), then don't stock software. Bananas, bonsai trees, and corrugated iron sheets also don't seem to belong in retail, but I found that out the hard way.
That's where WinTel and the rise of the 'CIO Culture' coincided. WinTel produced products optimized to make CIOs important, CIOs grew important trying to make WinTel, particularly Windows, work. The Intel part makes gigabucks on supporting each new product, that provides additional demands on computers. (Truly, what do you do now that requires several orders of magnitude more computational power than you did 10 years ago? If you're like most people, running email, word processing, low compexity spreadsheets, simple graphics programs for presentations and the like, I'd assert "not much." Sure we have more glitz, but does anyone think that MS Word now is that much more functional than MS Word 5 was on Windows 95???)
CIOs and Micro$oft have been an evil combination. CIOs gain authority by fielding systems that have some sense of 'business case' but that require expensive tech support staff. Windows moves capabilities away from end users and to CIOs and corporate overhead. End users get stuck with problems that only CIOs can fix, but the CIO -never- has to pay for employee downtime when the computer goes south. In the meantime, the Microsoft monopoly grows, and no CIO gets fired for buying Microsoft, no matter how bad the crap from Redmond is (and there has been some -real crap- from Redmond.)
This clearly started with WinNT's focus on 'the managed user experience' and was obvious to me by 2000. So I'm only surprised it's taken others so long. Geez, and they talk about -Steve Jobs'- reality distortion field!!
dave (they get my Mac when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers, -or- they indemnify me against all of the delay, downtime and inconvenience of the alternatives...)