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Vista Sales Expectations Too High, Office Doing Well
PetManimal writes "A comparison of first-week retail sales of Vista compared to first-week sales of XP back in 2001 found that Vista sales were 60% lower. Steve Ballmer has admitted that earlier sales forecasts were 'overly aggressive,' but at least there is some good news for Microsoft: early Office 2007 sales were very strong compared to the early sales of Office 2003, despite almost no advertising or marketing until the retail launch at the end of January."
Then let's settle into a nice discussion about how vista sucks because it's more of the same and office 2007 sucks because it's not more of the same.
Vista received a huge marketing campaign, but most people who kept track of what Microsoft was doing for the past 5 years know that Vista could've been much better than what it turned out to be due to the development crash in August 2004.
Office, on the other hand, was praised as something which would make life much easier for people because of the new ribbon. There's even a home and student version for people who can't afford paying for standard edition.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
confirm response, accept or deny?
Vista bugs me too much. I killed it.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
"Wow."
...
And now I feel dirty...
But then again perhaps the lower sales reflect a consumer base more accustomed to the failures of Version 1.0, or, for those with more technical experience, are aware that much of Vista's development cycle seemed to consist of stripping out features, such as WinFS and whatever else it was.
It could also, of course, represent a level of success with the still-competent Win XP.
...I know this is /. so I'm hoping, at best, to modded funny for that last sentence, there's still no dumb-ass mod, right..?
Why didn't they make Office 2007 Vista-only?
Having had access to the Vista RTM for several months through my MSDN subscription, Ive had a decent amount of friends and family asking me if they should upgrade. I always tell them thats its a fairly nice OS but its not worth the money. Take it if its free, but otherwise stick with what you have. There aren't enough feature updates to justify spending $100+.
People rarely talk about just how viral Office updates are. You save a doc in 2000 format, and suddenly 97 can no longer open it. Save it in 2003 and 2000 can't open it. And so on. A customer/vendor/friend sends you a doc file, and you can't open it. Time to upgrade!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Microsoft replaced a hundred menu items with a dozen toolbar buttons. Granted, buttons change with context, but on the other hand, 12 100 and there is no way to see all the program's functionality in one place. They should have just kept a menu bar, then it would be a clever innovation. In IE7, which uses a similar trick, there is no easy way to open a local file rather than an HTTP URL without re-enabling the menu, which is not an option in Office. In Media Player, its totally baffling that the default screen has a huge visualizer, but they couldn't find place for a little menu bar.
Look, the reality is at most 10 percent of business even wants WinVista (remember WinMe?), and the consumer interest is even lower than that.
Most of the sales of Microsoft Office will probably be for people using MacOS - where Microsoft makes the highest return per unit sold - but here we'll only buy an Office upgrade if it runs on XP, as we have no interest in the video and speech aspects of WinVista - we're doing serious research, and the idea that someone can walk in to an office and have our computer do things by talking to it is just nuts.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A comparison of first-week retail sales of Vista compared to first-week sales of XP back in 2001 found that Vista sales were 60% lower.
And of those who did buy Vista, most didn't even want it!
I've helped four friends/family/FOAFs out so far who just bought a new PC and wanted to know how to get rid of Vista (the major OEMs no longer even give you a choice of XP).
They all, without exception, had the same set of complaints... They didn't know where to get at all the normal Windows tools, and despite having "upgraded" for a faster computer, their new machines, it felt significantly less responsive (I've translated a bit, and removed the streams of obscenities).
Short of piracy (or actually buying XP), I explained to them how to make Vista as XP-like as possible. Still not perfect, still a CPU and memory hog, still moved quite a bit around from the XP layout, but at least they could then use it.
Pathetic. If Microsoft wants to offer a new OS, fine. But they've gone out of their way to make it almost impossible to get a new, legal copy of XP, just so they can boost Vista's market penetration.
what OS they want?
People rarely talk about just how viral Office updates are. You save a doc in 2000 format, and suddenly 97 can no longer open it. Save it in 2003 and 2000 can't open it. And so on. A customer/vendor/friend sends you a doc file, and you can't open it. Time to upgrade!
That's one of the nice things about the free Open Source software in Open Office - you can open and save to all the formats.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Seriously..you assume that all non slashdotters are NASCAR fans?
;)
I would really rip into you if it were not so busy following the Anna Nichole Smith scandal
A goal is a dream with a deadline
People upgrade to keep current and compatible. I find little to no software that doesn't run on Windows 2000, forget about XP and Vista. They have XP because all the computers they bought came with it. Little incentive really came into play to upgrade to XP just as little incentive exists for upgrading to Vista.
People upgrade MS Office to ensure that when they are doing business with people, they will be able to open up the documents sent to them. MS Office is probably the ultimate achievement when it comes to viral marketing. (Or maybe I'm not using the term correctly?) But what I'm trying to say is that it has nothing to do with new features or new UIs and everything to do with supporting new file formats. And while end-users don't understand that it's a practice that is abusive to consumers and the marketplace in general, they understand that if they don't upgrade, they will run into problems such as not being able to open documents critical to their business activities.
Could it be that no one has the hardware to run Vista with all of its features turned on, and to make such an upgrade after purchasing Vista would invalidate the license, forcing another purchase of Vista?
People will wait until they need to purchase a new machine that it comes with Vista.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Seductive, Bloated, Addictive, Attractive, but DOA.
The sales of MS office show that the ribbon interface is part of the reason. Especially without the marketing push.
My mother in law saw Vista on my laptop, saw me searching, using the start bar, and using Office 2007. She was very eager to upgrade, and she asked how she could do that.
I explained that she could buy the disc at a place like Office Depot, Best Buy, or wherever else she likes to get software (she's always just stuck with the OS on her machine from birth->death), but I also warned that she should make sure that the software she wants to run on her machine will run without problems before she bothers to do a big upgrade.
Quickbooks, some realtor software, and something her office uses have notes about compatibility problems with Vista. She stopped looking after that.
This is the first Windows release that I've used in which roughly half of the things I install have had some compatibility issues, noted in advance or discovered by me. It doesn't keep things from being usable in the general case, but it's more than just media FUD at this point.
They/we will fix it with OS/software updates over time.
A new OS is a much bigger commitment than a new Office suite. You generally are going to have zero compatibility problems with old documents and that's all you really need to worry about. If you end up not liking it, it's also not a big deal to replace it with your old version. A new OS is much more serious, and there are many more compatibility issues to worry about. It's not the kind of thing most want to rush in to.
I've been testing Vista at work and it's a good OS, but not ready for deployment yet. It's not Vista itself, it's apps and drivers. There's still plenty of hardware with drivers that aren't up to snuff, and a number of apps need to be updated to work on Vista. It's not the kind of thing I'd recommend most users walk in to yet. In another 3-6 months I'll probably look at deploying it to some of our labs.
Office, on the other hand, we are installing for anyone that orders a new copy. The volume keys are valid for either 2003 or 2007 so we are installing 2007 and will revert to 2003 if they don't like it. So far, nobody has asked to revert. There's just not really any technical issues. Yes there's a new interface and all, but all your documents open and that's the real concern.
"One should also keep in mind that corporations often have to buy the new office in order to stay up to date with other corporations that made the switch due to compatibility issues, ect."
That's assuming two things. One that people are having compatibility issues, and two that they haven't installed the compatibility pack. But nice try. Now if you'll excuse me, I have an old Linux distro to install. The review is this Monday.
"Dim-Witted" and "Money-Grubbing"
{ please, discuss among yourselves }
A goal is a dream with a deadline
The tech support of both the university I work for and the one I am visiting stated in absolute clear terms: "DO NOT UPGRADE TO VISTA" because all those organizational apps they created over the years do not work in Vista (or at least not tested).
Upgrading to Office 07 is easier - provided you save documents you want to send to others in the older formats.
Given directx 10 will not run on XP I have the feeling that the way MS will screw consumers will be the same BS that Microsoft has always used. Get a major manufacturers to release DirectX 10 only cheapo must have video card and or sound cards. This is the same thing they did to windows 2000 and 98. What will happen is that the devices will work in a crippled fashion with older versions of DirectX...but the dumb consumer will want all the features so will go out and either buy a new computer or a copy of Vista. Just watch I am willing to bet that the all in one CPU/GPU offering from AMD will require DirectX 10.
Thing is, MS has the legs in terms of cash to wait for Vista to mature into a market force, even if all of us wait for Vista to mature into a better OS. People howled when XP came out, and now people don't want to give it up. When Win95 came out, it sold very well despite all the Win95 = Mac 88 jokes. Within three years expect Vista to the dominating operating system. Today's expensive hardware required to run the fancier parts of Vista will be next year's cheap hardware. The drivers to run everything will come and DX10 games will eventually show.
I will wait until I need to/want to upgrade, but I expect Vista will grow in usage even if I never adopt it. Whatever adoption rate regarding Vista is happening today, don't expect it to stay that way. Also don't expect MS to be crying that everyone isn't picking up a copy today.
It's almost as if the crappy product with very little innovation is selling poorly, while the well thought out product that has some innovative features is doing nicely. Who woulda thought.
XP has only recently had the majority of it's major bugs ironed out, and by that I mean to a point where the OS is usable/not a virii-sponge, so why would the average user upgrade to vista?
"I'll see you next time." - LeVar Burton
People upgrade to keep current and compatible. I find little to no software that doesn't run on Windows 2000, forget about XP and Vista. They have XP because all the computers they bought came with it. Little incentive really came into play to upgrade to XP just as little incentive exists for upgrading to Vista.
Check the article again, the slow retail sales are in comparison to the XP release. So your argument doesn't really hold.
Ballmer didn't "admit that previous sales forecasts were 'overly aggressive'".
The implication of that statement is:
- Ballmer/Microsoft issued a sales forecast in the past
- They were pressured on the accuracy of said forecast
- They admitted that their forecasts were overly aggressive.
However, that's not what happened here. The sales forecasts in question were made by external analysts. In this case, it's Ballmer and Microsoft disagreeing with the forecasts. The word "admit" implies that you are conceding something that you tried to conceal before.
Why does Slashdot need to spin every story to try and make it sound even more negative than it is?
Mmmm.. Donuts
The argument is that there *was* little incentive to go from 2000 to XP right away. Through time, it happened anyway but mostly because 2000 was less available or at least less visible. Now here we are with Vista and the same thing is happening.
In short, I'm arguing that history already shows us what to expect. There are no apps that induce upgrading to Vista and Vista itself is not motivation enough.
and i see no reason to upgrade - even to xp
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
Unless you need more than 256 columns for excel, why on earth would anybody pay for such a worthless "upgrade" ? I suppose, eventually, you will get office-2007 docs that you need to open, but that will not happen for time yet.
*Open FireFox*
...
You are trying to open a web browser, do you want to open it?
[ Continue ] [ Cancel ]
*continue*
This web browser was not signed by Microsoft, operation aborted.
[ Okay ]
*click* *Open IE*
You are trying to open a program made by Microsoft. Good choice!
[ Okay ]
*click* *slashdot.org*
You are opening a port to connect to an external website. Are you sure? It might be dangerous.
[ Continue ] [ Cancel ]
*continue*
You are connecting to Slashdot.org. Are you sure you want to go there? How about MSN instead?
[ Continue ] [ Go to MSN ] [ Cancel ]
*continue*
You appear to be posting to Slashdot. Any comment you write might be read by third parties. Are you sure you want to continue?
[ Continue ] [ Cancel ]
*continue*
You appear to be posting material that is disparaging to Microsoft. This is forbidden by section 66, paragraph 6 of your Windows Vista Super Mega Chair Monkey Team Hyper Force Go! ULTIMATE Edition EULA.
[ Report Yourself to Microsoft for Being Naughty ]
*BANG*
For sale: Like-new computer w/Vista. Slightly shotgunned.
"we're doing serious research, and the idea that someone can walk in to an office and have our computer do things by talking to it is just nuts."
Yeah! It's much better when they can walk in and start typing.
The reason Office 2007 is selling better than Office XP at the time is that Office XP was a step back in terms of usability compared to Office 2000. Office XP is too cluttered and un-intuitive. Now people are hanging to anything offering a different alternative to Office XP.
It's interesting that Dell doesn't sell XP on the low end machines but it's still available on the mid and high end. Their consumer calls go to India and business calls don't. Are they turning the home users into a large beta test group using the cheaper support resources?
They also have a laptop for $499 which they haven't had in quite a while. It's only available with Vista. Maybe M$ is giving it away (or almost giving it away) to Dell to infect the market?
A quick check of the HP site doesn't seem to have any XP options even on the high end.
A horse and buggy should be fine for anyone. The buggy whip makers would love you to death. Also, a 8088 with 640k ought to be enough for people like you. You could use Wordstar, dos 1 and an old daisywheel printer. All of that should be enough for you, why upgrade?
Anonymous Coward is mumbling non-sense, accept or deny?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Because of the nature of Vista (Graphics Hardware acceleration being one), it's unlikely for us to see a lot of OEM/Upgrade copies of Vista. I think most people wanting to try Vista will either already have a powerful computer (a minority among most people), or will have Vista packaged in with a new PC.
I'm a Mac guy, and personally don't see anything compelling about Vista at the moment and am happy with dual booting into XP, but I think it's too early for people to claim that Vista is a failure.
Our internal web site uses the DHTML Edit control - which doesn't work with Vista (for no good reason). So we've let all our staff know not to upgrade, at least not for now. We've investigated a number of workarounds, but they're all going to be work for us to implement, provide less to the user, and make development more complicated. This one feature means Vista is a stiff downgrade for us and will keep many of our users off of it at home and at work.
MS's general legacy of good backwards compatibility is the only thing that's kept us with MS over the years. If they continue to break that, we're not going to stick with them on the desktop. It's that simple. MS needs to understand that the features they push us to use in 2002 don't just have to work until 2006. We have to have some confidence that the feature we use today will be available in 10 years (or longer) especially if there's no real reason to remove it.
Anyways... just needed to vent a bit there.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
What surprises me is that XP has been almost completely removed as an option for consumer-level machines. In the past, such as when XP came out, you could often still get machines with 98/ME or 2000 during a transition period. Some even had both on the disc (and dual license keys on the sticker.) With the exception of business machines, XP is rapidly disappearing from retail machines.
Were I work, we found out that we can't even buy XP anymore (we buy openlicense stuff through dell). To run XP on a new machine, we need to purchase Vista and downgrade. Given this kind of push, the disappointing numbers are surprising and even worse news for MS.
I've been using Vista RTM and Office 2007 for a while, and at work we've deployed them to 20 or so systems in a computer lab to let the typical end-user (i.e. the people the software *should* work for) try it out. My (technical) experience: "Wow, Vista is more secure. And slower." Office 2007 kicks ass." (That said, I don't use XP almost at all any more, a couple of the tiny UI changes have won me over) The general user experience: "Hmm. Windows looks prettier. And I don't know where any of the tasks from the file menu went." The next 6 months are gonna be rough for people who need to relearn the interface to do their jobs. But after that, everything will be a lot better, as Office will be easier to learn this way. When people ask me about the new software, I tell them that Vista is cool, but not worth paying to upgrade from XP. And I tell them about how cool Office 2007 is.
Which version is that?
I hate MS as much as anyone (I'm a Mac Fanboy if ever there was one) I have to say, though, the new features in Sharepoint 2007 are good enough to perhaps entrench microsoft in the coming onslought of office products from Google and others. It's a solid collaboration tool. The new slide library tool is going to be a big hit with office like mine that have about 2,000 slides to manage. Sharepoint may be the only MS product I've ever been excited for.
There are already more Vista users than the few linsux/open sores users now.
I think it's funny to hear these exceutives couch their phrases behind action packed verbs!!!
Replace "Overly agressive" with "too hopeful" to get back to a normal person.
'I hate MS as much as anyone ..'
Try and persuade your company to use this award winning collaboration suite from Zimbra.
'was Re:Sharepoint (Score:99 Free Advert)
davecb5620@gmail.com
The real reason is in the long run.
I've tried both.
The only thing I like about Vista is the reduced size of the start button. Really while at first it seemed a good new Windows version, after some heavy usage it showed all its weaky spots. It's not UAC or anything like that which could anyway be disabled, it's a number of small glitches (no up a folder button, which leads to no way to go to parent folder in another window with a single click, no title in explorer windows, no respect of system colors settings, thumbnail view is crap etc) which add up to make the entire product crappy.
Office on the other hand seemed weird at first (the very first). But after some use you can really appreciate its revolutionary user interface.
So probably the applications I develop will not get transparencies in the near future. But they will get a ribbon soon.
Microsoft would be nothing without the preloads. But they have the preloads. Anyone who thinks Vista sales won't take off, must have forgotten this.
Just be patient. As brand new machines are sold with Vista on them, the number of Vista users will grow. Then people can start running apps that only work with Vista. Then those people will want to exchange information with people who aren't running Vista yet. And then people will start to "upgrade," even if they're not buying a new machine.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Xp actually is proficient at what it does. If it isn't proficient in the last 5 years someone has produced an add on to it. Let's not pretend Vista is doing better or worse on it's own merits. The PS3 sold out the first week so even if something is flawed it can sell X amount of copies if the need is there. There was a need for 98, 2000, XP, you can even argue there was a need for ME (that wasn't filled). But there is yet to be a need for Vista.
Last I checked, OpenOffice.org 1.x didn't open OpenDocument, only OpenOffice.org 1.0 Text Document (or whatever they called it in OOo 1.x).
I love to hear how that is different from the MS Office situation.
Je ne parle pas francais.
All I know is it works fine on my WinXP laptop at home - I save out the files in ODT and DOC formats and XLS for spreadsheets - since I don't use heavy win call formulae, it has no diff from my end.
But I haven't tried the Mac version yet on my son's Mac Mini and we frequently dual-boot our Linux boxen into Windows (legit) to run Office, so haven't tested out the Linux version much.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So far I've spoke with 11 (yes, this one goes to 11) friends/family/FOAFs so far who just bought a new PC and can't praise Vista enough. I'd be willing to bet that you haven't spent more than an hour using a Vista machine.
I don't have to pay $300 a user to upgrade. I would consider that a pretty significant difference.
Who is John Galt?
I have seen this arguement countless times, and it's crap. I can not take a hourse and buggy on the freeway, in that respect a car provides a measurable advantage.
When comparing Office-2007 with earlier version just posting that earlier versions are a "horse and buggy" is meaningless. Please be specific, if I don't need more than 256 columns, why whould I upgrade.
Vista is just a Microsoft marketing ploy to sell XP!
I'm using Vista now exclusively on all of my machines. The only app I've had problems with is iTunes. Here's a few that work without a hitch, Photoshop 6.0, Acrobat Pro, Fireworks MX, Flash MX, Dreamweaver, OOo, Gimp, Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera, and half a dozen legacy in house apps. I especially recommend it for any laptop that meets the sys reqs, as the sleep actually works (in XP I had to reboot to get my wireless nic to work everytime it went to sleep.)
>>Vista is, in fact, an amazing OS
In fact? Okay, what "in fact" is so amazing about Vista? What "amazing" thing can I do in Vista, that I can not do in XP?
>>But there is yet to be a need for Vista.
Only Vista will run DirectX 10. It is a safe bet that later version of office, media-player, and msie, will only run on Vista.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
W2k runs all of my apps and hw. And W2K is faster, doesn't have that fisher-price interface, and is earier to use with default setup. Hopefully, in two years I can get by with just linux.
Scotty: Hello, computer.
Engineer: Try the keyboard.
Scotty: Ah, a keyboard. How quaint.
First-week retail sales of boxed copies of Windows Vista were almost 60% below sales of boxed copies of Windows XP in the week after its 2001 release
Retail sales of PCs, virtually all of them sporting the new Vista OS, were up 67% over the same week in 2006. While that is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison -- many stores were clearing out their XP inventory in the weeks leading up to Vista's launch -- "it still reflects a fair bit of growth"
The good news for Microsoft: Consumers who are upgrading to Vista on their older machines are opting for pricier, higher-end versions of it. The average selling price of Vista was $207.13, up 66% from the average selling price of XP. That was due in part to the fact that more than 30% of the copies of Vista sold were the Ultimate version, which lists for $399. Early boxed retail sales of Vista down nearly 60% compared to XP
One might, of course, have expected boxed sales of Vista to be somewhat depressed by the distribution of free upgrade coupons distributed with PCs sold over the holidays.
I just priced a Dell PC. Just a small desktop box for the receptionist.
It costs +$150 to get XP over Vista. The default was for Vista.
I am so mad about it, I don't think I am going to buy from Dell this time. Seriously.
> Vista received a huge marketing campaign
So did the Edsel.
The Edsel was also late, overhyped, too big and heavy, had too much chrome and flash and was released just when everyone decided they wanted something smaller, more economical and cheaper. They bought compacts (miniMac, thin client) and foreign imports (Linux).
You must be kidding.
90% of the huge companies ( most of the MSO market ) are on those damned molp plans, so they automatically get the upgrades, even if they dont want them. ( and eventually they have to install them, again even if they dont want them )
Hell of a way to skew your numbers.
Liars.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Maybe because Vista requires activation and (last I heard) needed an extra server to handle activation every 180 days, and Office 2007 doesn't? This could matter to a significant number of IT groups in the corporate world.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
And the Redmooninites crawled out to scold me for claiming that not every PC made in the last 5 years is perfectly able to run Vista.
So - if this is how the deluded marketing minions of MS work, I guess we can expect them to blame US for not buying enough of THEIR software. Which BTW I'm fine with. A few weeks ago I commented here that I was happy to have finally sold my last batch of MS stock only to be laughed at by the PR flacks that it's the greatest stock on the planet. Well it took a HUGE hit today so the joke's on you PR interns.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I love to hear how that is different from the MS Office situation.
.sxc, etc), it's not OOo 1.x's fault that ODF didn't exist at the time.
For one thing, it doesn't cost any $299 (or whatever MS is charging) to upgrade from OpenOffice.org 1.x to OpenOffice.org 2.0. It's free.
OOo 2 still happily opens and saves OOo 1.x format docs (.sxw,
-- Alastair
Now that's just blatant flamebait. Compare the cost of upgrading each.
MS Office: $50.00
OOo: $0.00
Their Zune sales should make up for the shortfall!
Microsoft is king in the application development (Office) domain. They really oughta stick to that.
:)
Now if we could just redo Windows Vista and turn it into a UNIX-based OS with a nice windowing GUI...
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
With Vista released, I started seriously evaluating the upgrade options for my home machines. One of the machines (a 3 year old P4 HT) had XP, so the choice was easy. I upgraded that to Vista. The upgrade went smoothly. There were a few compatibility issues in the first couple of weeks, which were addressed by software vendors quickly. Next, there was the dilemma of what to do with the laptop (5 year old P3). It is running XP alright, and I needed a new laptop. First, I thought about installing Linux on it. So I installed Ubuntu, and rest of the night was a nightmare. The wireless card didn't work. The options to configure wireless card in the UI suck big time. I enabled the card, the dialog box showed me it was enabled, but it didn't work and the next time I opened the dialog box, it was shown as disabled again. Then I discovered that I had to manually configure the security options using command line tools. Guess what, all these things get auto-detected on Windows (Vista and XP) and get configured without any hassle. Even my Windows Mobile phone can do that. Yes, Linux is free if your time has no value. So later in the night, the machine got back to XP. And did I mention that Linux doesn't support my native language (which is supported on XP since ages), doesn't run any of the professional audio/video/image processing software out there and doesn't like talking to my Xbox 360? The penguin better stay with the servers, but Windows 2003 Server is a strong contender there. Back to the upgrade of laptop, I was seriously considering MacBook. I needed a fast laptop with a small footprint. But Apple thinks that it would be below their dignity to give a decent graphics card and 7200 RPM hard disk on the 13" MacBook. So, I went back to the PC world, and got myself Dell XPS M1210 with Windows Vista pre-installed. This laptop is blazing fast, runs Vista very smoothly and all of my old hardware (including Pro Audio stuff) and software works fine on it. Regardless of what people here say, I am going to stick with Windows on my primary machines. And now I am thinking about buying some used machine and putting Windows Home Server on it to complete the ecosystem.
But it's Microsoft's fault that Word97 can't open a document saved in Word2003 format? Gotcha.
Je ne parle pas francais.
The problem is Vista Home Premium is the only version that is worth getting, and everyone knows very well that full install, not an upgrade, is the way to go. In Canada, that comes to over $300 with tax. It's just way too much money for an operating system.
Karma: Neutered
Oh, please.
$RandomLuser wrote:
You replied:
Implying that the difference between OpenOffice and MSWord is that OpenOffice is forward compatible, that is OOo 1.0 should be able to open OOo 2.x documents (as in documents in OpenDocument format).
I bet MSWord 2003 can open Word97 documents just like OOo 2.x can open OOo 1.0 documents.
Question: Why is it reasonable for OOo 1.x to not be able to read OOo 2.x formatted documents, but not reasonable that Word97 can't read Word2003 formatted documents?
Je ne parle pas francais.
It's Microsoft's fault that Word 2003 is going to cost the Word 97 user several hundred dollars.
OpenOffice 2.0 doesn't cost the OpenOffice 1.0 user anything.
It's also Microsoft's fault that if a Word2003 user opens a Word97 document, Word2003 is going to try to save it in Word2003 format, not Word97. OpenOffice doesn't play such tricks, because there's no financial incentive to. Microsoft chooses defaults to encourage users to pay for upgrades.
-- Alastair
Yeah, shiney!
If you think about it, when Windows XP came out most people were running Windows ME or Windows 98 (which I kindly refer to as the random blue screen operating systems). Windows XP was a significant upgrade from 98 or ME.
Windows Vista doesn't offer much over Windows XP beyond eye candy. Just about anything you want to do with your computer can be done with Windows XP. On top of that, Windows XP is stable. There just doesn't seem to be much reason to upgrade to Vista if you are already running XP. And money is always a good reason not to upgrade.
A poster takes two words completely out of context, incorrectly (he even admitted it), and then gets modded to 5, Insightful as of right now??? What's wrong with you, mods??
All I know is one works and the other tries to force you to "upgrade". MSFT calls the latter a feature, whereas I call the former a feature.
Ca va?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Posting as Anonymous -- because I cannot remember my login.
With XP I remember hearing about a hack that made XP Home act like XP Pro. I keep wondering once XP is not readily available (stick with it for now...) would it be possible to buy on Vista Home Basic Upgrade at between $89-99 -- do the double install trick to get a full/clean install and then activate that and use hacks or add-ons to get the Premium or Ultimate functionality without having to allow MS to rape your wallet? Or has MS already said somewhere that they are going to disallow the double install trick at some point? If what I suggest works at least MS would not get as much money from everybody and you would still get some updates because it would be a Home Basic version that you paid for...
I just hate car/computer analogies altogether.
Company that I work for won't be "upgrading" to Vista until 2009 according to our inhouse IT department. Personally, I just don't see the point. PCs with XP are fast enough for Internet/Media/Photos/Tax/Letters/Games. The last private OS switch that I made was to OSX, mainly because I got fed up with dealing with anti-virus SW, I don't play FPS games and because I like the integration and the HW (looks - I am shallow). The last work-related OS switch that I made was to Linux, because I am working on embedded Linux for cell phones. Vista? Doesn't offer anything that would justify switching; here I totally agree with our IT department. I am therefore not surprised that Vista isn't a sales hit.
Because upgrading from OpenOffice 1.x to OpenOffice 2.x costs nothing, takes 10 minutes or less, preserves all the functionality you had before, and increases compatibility exponentially.
Moving to an incrementally higher version of MS Office(TM) costs hundreds of dollars per seat, breaks older funtionality, renders documents you produced unreadable to users who haven't "upgraded" their MS Office(TM) istallations, and as of 2007 requires users to relearn how to do things they already know how to do for no good reason and with no way to roll the interface back.
I own a licence for MS Office 1997(TM), another license for MS Office 2000(TM), an upgrade license for MS Office XP(TM), and an upgrade license for MS Office 2003(TM). Now MS tells me that I can't "upgrade" to MS Office 2007(TM) with my current licenses, bought and paid for each time. If I want MS Office 2007(TM) I will need to buy the full version. Well, as it turns out I don't want MS Office 2007(TM). The only feature that interests me is the expanded Pivot Tables in Excel. That may have been worth a $100 upgrade but it isn't worth the full retail price of MS Office(TM).
Besides, I don't belive that MS Office 2007(TM) will run nearly as well as MS Office 2003(TM) on the XP(TM) system that I run in VMware under Fedora Core.
I don't claim that I'll be able to avoid using them, but I've bought my last MS Office(TM) and my last MS Windows(TM) licenses. If I need to produce a document readable by MS Office 2007(TM), I'll use my older version. If I need to read a document produced in MS Office 2007(TM), I'll use OpenOffice.
Thanks for the memories, Microsoft(TM), but I've moved on.
...but Vista was dead on arrival, and such was entirely predictable. Microsoft need to come up with an alternative, and fast...if they don't, they're going to be in serious trouble soon.
Parent is a copy-paste troll.0 42930
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=222814&cid=18
This is why Anonymous Cowards need to be eliminated.
When Visual Studio 2005 gives you fits on install (and, so far for me, works perfectly fine), you have to realize that the bar has been set lower than before.
Microsoft has historically done an unreal amount of work to make sure that existing programs work appropriately with new releases of their operating systems, and it feels like they spent less time working on compatibility quirks in this release than in previous releases. It's not about security. It's about things like message order for dialogs created with CreateDialogParam(), which has changed under Aero. Sure, applications should have been message-order agnostic, to a point, but getting this "right" was never part of the logo certification program. It's not even really fleshed out in the documentation.
Try shutting off UAC, writing to the temp directory, and running from the temp directory (something that works fine with UAC on). I have trouble seeing how turning off a security feature should cause unavoidable lock-down.
I professionally develop software for Windows and live with Vista as my primary OS every day. It's not about bitching about Microsoft here. Take a step back from the battlefront and recognize the reality of the situation: software will have teething pains for the next few months until vendors, and, to a large extent, Microsoft, solve the problems that a large number of applications are having under Vista.