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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!"
Is the hologram on the DVD. That is pretty fucking cool! Otherwise... meh.
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
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.
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.
I don't know if "Spayware" was a typo on your part but it seems oddly appropriate, given your "hard drives turning off" statement. Of course, "Neuterware" would've been more appropriate, but what can you do?
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?
Making the largest corporate users happy is the same thing as making the end users happy
Nope. Making large corporate users happy is the same thing as making CORPORATE IT DEPARTMENTS happy. It's a different kettle of fish.
What sorts of things do corporate IT managers want?
* Standardization
* Security, especially protecting data.
* The ability to set policys, and lock the users out of policy-violating actions (such as installing new software)
* Ability to push required patches/updates out to users quickyl and efficiently
* Ease of recovering from outages/problems
* Easy back up of files.
* Secure communication and collaboration tools.
* Make my employees more efficient--make it easier to find and use tools and shared data.
Basically, make it easy to maintain, secure, and don't let the users do anything I don't want them to do.
What do end users want?
* Ability to get news and information
* Entertainment, be it DVD playback or streaming audio.
* Communication with friends via a potentially diverse array of protocols
* Play the latest games and work with the latest peripherals.
* Share video, pictures, and other content with others on demand.
See the difference in the lists? One of the reasons Apple is doing so well in the consumer market is that they focus on the second list (well, except games per se, but that's a different topic). They focus on what individuals would like technology to let them do.
Microsoft is in a major bind with piracy - they MUST make it easy for large-scale, unattended corporate installs. This means no serial number to punch in every time, and no major verification routine. As long is this is the case, pirates (aaaarrr) will just snag these installs and run with them. When you're trying to get something like 50 million corporate installs, your bread and butter, going all streamlined and easily, you're never going to be able to adequately protect against piracy.
At the same time, the harder they make it to pirate windows, and the more people have to upgrade to even do it, the easier it is to "pirate" Ubuntu. Which, with every passing version, adds another couple % of people onto the list of "does everything I usually need to do". That % is nowhere near 100% yet, but it covers a sizable chunk of the largely computer illiterate "email and interweb" crowd. And it's almost easy enough for them to pirate at the moment. Have you seen install.exe yet?Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
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.
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.