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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.'"
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.
I suppose Microsoft BASIC was good back in the day.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
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
Is the hologram on the DVD. That is pretty fucking cool! Otherwise... meh.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
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
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.
I'd get supremely bored of testing an OS for hundreds of hours, too. My lord, man, have you never heard of applications? I'd shoot myself after the 300th hour of "fun with notepad".
Although there's no must-have features, they'll bludgeon everyone with the DX10 stick and the "we won't patch XP any more stick after 2011" until everyone has bought it.
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.
Stop me if I'm wrong, but the "largest enterprise customers" are end users
I have copy of Vista Business, so I installed it on a spare disk. The hardware compatibility test app GPFed, which wasn't a great sign. I went ahead with the install to see what would happen. The installer archived all of the XP files on the disc, then installed Vista without any problems - or so I thought. Turns out there were no Vista drivers for my brand name NIC. Bought one of the few NICs with native drivers, so I was able to connect to the net. But what? No sound? No drivers for my sound card either.
That was as far as I wanted to go at this point. The stark reality about Vista is that driver support is minimal at best. Rather shocking considering XP had drivers for much more hardware. I'm really curious if anyone knows why driver support is so minimal at this time. Does the consumer version have more? If not, all of the people who bought Vista are in for an uncharacteristic surprise.
<tinfoilhat>Is the lack of drivers a conspiracy to get people to upgrade hardware?</tinfoilhat>
Why are the hardware vendors so far behind supplying drivers?
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
This gets modded interesting? WTF? I double checked the Vista product page, and it's so easy to understand that a trained monkey could choose the right version of Vista. That speaks volumes about the intelligence of the parent.
Would you rather try to pick out the right Linux distro? A comparison would be 300 pages long and have a 10,000 point venn diagram, filled with obtuse technical jargon not fit for consumption by the masses.
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
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
all those old XP drivers wont work if you want DRM.
No one wants DRM.
Spending six years and six billion dollars to achieve little more than a (debatable) improvement in security and a glossy but irritating GUI is wrong.
Imagine what a company that cared about its customers could do with those resources.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
http://www.allsorthost.com/is_ie7_ment_to_kill_my_ cpu/
This image has been doctored. I will not trust it.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
That wasn't what he implied in the article. Scott Finnie's complaint was that the security prompts are too frequent & annoying, such that people will just click through or turn UAC off. Doing it that way means they can demonstrate how secure it all is - its all about the appearance of being secure and yes, avoiding negative publicity. Finnie also made the point that listening to end users is no longer their priority - if it was, they'd have implemented user access controls in a more subtle, non-intrusive and usable fashion.
you're forgetting the crucial point, No one* wants Windows to be secure
I beg to differ. I'm a Mac user, and I certainly do wish Microsoft would get their act together w/r/t security. I don't want to keep getting spam from botnets, and I don't want my cable modem bandwidth wasted by my neighbor's zombies trying to send me copies of their malware.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
QBasic was one of the first languages I ever played with. For me it was just a toy, so I didn't need it to be tremendous -- but as a toy, I actually thought it was a lot of fun (that's why I taught myself C ;-)).
I think Microsoft's biggest mistake wasn't anything they screwed up with the language per-se, but hiding it on the Windows CD instead of giving it to everybody in the Start Menu! Imagine how much more computer literate everyone would be if their OS shipped with an easy-to-use programming language visibly installed! I'd argue that it'd do more than increase understanding of computers; playing with logic I will swear actively increases intelligence.
Programming is great fun. People need to get into it before they're too old or they won't see it. It'd be like expecting a 40-year-old to play with Legos... (We get the creative spark trained out of us as we age. I'm trying desperately to hang on to mine! [Got any pointers?*])
*(I can see those jokes with punchlines like '0xd3adb33f' coming from here already!)
Anyway, Windows needs a dead-simple BASIC or LISP or whatever, with a dead-simple graphics library, and some cool little example programs with source, and it needs to put them all in a folder on the Desktop with a good searchable helpfile. The world needs more Legos.
Um, no, we have not come a long way. Perhaps it is correct to say that Microsoft have come a long way, but nothing more. MS are just now implementing features that were commercially available in the bad old "NT/9x days" from other OS vendors. The truth is, we've basically tread water for a decade waiting for MS to catch up, while watching MS (unethically, if not illegally) strangle better technologies the whole time.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Spending six years and six billion dollars to achieve little more than a (debatable) improvement in security and a glossy but irritating GUI is wrong.
Imagine what a company that cared about its customers could do with those resources.
hum.. let's see.. six billion dollars.. how about 1000 copies of steve austin??Uh but that's not why Vista was made. It's not about security at all.
:p.
What you see here is Microsoft slowly boiling frogs.
The main reason for Vista (or any MS Windows/Office release) is so that Microsoft won't end up "Yet Another Windows XP Compatible Vendor" just like the BIOS market - lower margins etc.
If Microsoft didn't keep introducing new APIs and try to force people to migrate to Vista for DirectX10, people would gradually come up with viable compatibles for DirectX9 and Windows XP. You can already see signs of that with Cedega and WINE.
If Microsoft waited too long to change stuff, a lot of people might go, hey I can still use this WinXP Compatible O/S for my stuff and I don't need all that bloat and DRM. And then it's bye-bye high profits etc.
If people would just think long term and kept telling Dell, HP etc, and software vendors (games) that they don't want Vista and stick to XP for a while longer, then there's hope for change and after that _real_ innovation.
But I don't see much hope for that - hardly anyone listens to me
People will switch to Vista just because Dell/HP/IBM/OEMs preload it, even though Vista has significant disadvantages (DRM bloat etc) and mostly insignificantly improvements.
It was a Dell box (surprisingly quick delivery, ordered Monday, delivered Thursday). The nvidia display driver sucked and the fonts were disgusting (looked just fine post XP).
Replaced it with stale piss (XP-legal) the next day.
It is still not ready, and M$ is just turning end users into free beta testers yet again (shame on Dell for bowing to M$ and eliminating customer choice on some models).
Anybody who think aero looks good must have also loved all those chromey bits on 1970s - 1980s japanese cars).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen