Slashdot Mirror
MS Offers Vista Upgrade Pricing To All
SlinkySausage writes "With a vague whiff of desperation, Microsoft is offering anyone who downloaded one of the betas or release candidates of Vista upgrade pricing for the full version. The 'special' deal is a sweetener for the fact that the betas will start expiring and becoming non-functional from May 31st. APC Magazine in Australia writes: 'Windows Vista is starting to look like those Persian rug stores which are always having a "closing down" sale... All stock has been slashed, save $$$, why pay more?'" Perhaps Microsoft is cognizant of straws in the wind such as a recent InformationWeek survey indicating that 30% of business have no intention of moving to Vista, ever.
I wonder how much MS really makes off Windows, particularly at the consumer level, in terms of profit per unit. It's easy to see in some business lines where the profit really is (ink jet printers versus cartridge refills, concessions versus ticket prices at theaters, etc.), but it's a little blurry in software. It probably makes good business sense for MS to lower the price on their OS by $100 or so per unit and make it up in other lines of business. 'Course, I still won't upgrade until I get more or less forced into it because of DirectX 10 (damn you, gaming addiction!), but it might get them more actual sales.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
I remember there were a lot of naysayers regarding Windows XP, back when it was introduced, but WinXP did well, in spite of the fact that Win2K already had what companies needed. Probably because WinXP at least wasn't a huge downgrade, compared to Win2K.
Not so with Vista. My impression is that is't a downgrade. What with the stupidly slow file copy problem, the increased hardware requirements (even if you disregard the graphics card), the DRM, the need for (some) staff re-training... This time the anti-momentum is stronger than with XP.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
From what I've heard the major problem with Vista is that it was designed by committee with dozens of people involved in even the most minute aspects. The problem with that of course being that that more people = more compromise and a compromise is, from one viewpoint, simply a solution that leaves everyone equally unhappy. From my testing of Vista and reading the various feedback threads, I think that's been an excellent tagline for Vista thus far...the OS that will leave everyone equally unhappy with it.
The culture at Redmond simply looks like it's gotten so insulated from this "reality" thing that they're sliding into a world where they don't understand that most people do not like the OS. The OS is a required evil to get to what they actually want, which is the applications. The faster the OS gets to those applications and gets the hell out of the way, the better...for most users at any rate. Why this concept seems to elude OS designers is beyond me, but Microsoft needs to come to terms with the idea that when I sit down at a computer to check my email, I want to use my email program, not the OS. If I want to play a game, I want to play the game...not work with the OS. If I need to write something, I want to write...not deal with the OS. It's quite simple really, which is probably why they don't get it.
XP made a killing on the fact that consumers were fed up with the 9x line. Particularly, WinME. The disaster to end all disasters, which was still probably worse then what Vista currently is.
The question is, what will replace it?
With projects line Wine and Mono, hopefully 5 years is enough time to eliminate all MS XP/Vista dependence for their home-grown apps.
At that point they can choose a vendor-supported OS based on price and the quality of the vendor, not vendor lock-in.
Within 5 years companies will want their OSes to be portable across hardware. If a generic-box-PC fails they'll want to take their HD out of the failing generic-PC box and put it in another generic-box-PC which may have a completely different CPU and motherboard. If you try that today with XP you run all kinds of risks and it might not even boot. In 5 years companies will use OSes that can tolerate this or put them into a "thin-layer" VM environment to make all their generic-box-PCs look identical enough to eliminate this problem. Think Southwest Airlines and the way they "dumb down" their newer 737s so the entire fleet "looks identical" to their pilots.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I think one of Microsoft's big problems has they have overpriced the boxed versions of Vista. It is a crazy state of affairs when my local computer shop is selling complete PCs cheaper than the boxed versions of Vista.
Are they perhaps more like apartment buildings always under the threat of demolition that sign you to nonbinding, shorter, cheaper leases because you never really know when the wrecking ball might be out front? The cheapest and, relatively, nonsketchy place we found to live in Mountain View was like this.
When slightly used will do? This is the mantra of a local exercise equipment dealer here. You save a lot of money that way.
In the computer world, the question is Why buy the operating system, when you can get a new capable computer?
Amazon is listing Windows Vista Home Premium for $218, slightly less than the US$239 retail. For another $300 you can get a fully capable PC with it with 1GB of RAM and a suitable video card to get a 3.0 on the performance scale.
This particular market is skewed at moving PCs, not selling operating systems.
Have you Meta Moderated t
Powerpoint 2007 *IS* broken on XP. A huge step backwards from PPT 2003. Just when you thought Office had matured, the bugs are back, and they come together with bloat and sluggishness!
Can't say that it's not broken on Vista though...
The retraining and hardware requirements were the exact excuses I used to start brining Linux into my offices, one computer at a time. We don't have any special software or anything (just Firefox and Microsoft Office, which I am gradually replacing with OOo). Instead of paying $1200 for a decent office computer that can run Vista smoothly, I can pay $600 for a computer with Linux compatible hardware and know I won't have to upgrade for a good long time. The training is going much smoother than I anticipated, actually, and thus far, I've had several employees ask if I could help them run Linux at home (pointed them at the local Linux users group, naturally).
Why buy expensive hardware and retrain everyone after paying over a thousand dollars per seat (Vista + Office) when you can buy a cheaper, more reliable computer? And the best part of the deal? All those shitty downloadable Windows "games" can't be installed!
Take your DRM and shove it.
I will not pay money for a product that puts a collar around my neck.
That is all.
It would be interesting to see what percentage of Vista sales were for 'Vista Home Basic' (i.e. the bare minimum default MS OS that vendors put on new boxes). It would be more interesting to know what percentage of those boxes get wiped and have XP or Linux installed on them.
[Insert pithy quote here]
the stupidly slow file copy problem
I am going to go out on a limb and theorize that this "bug" is a deliberate act. It reminds me of IBM in the mainframe/terminal days, where they added delays to ensure that response time was always 2 seconds. And for average users it is good to have average response times -- if you give them a fast one for some things and a slow one for others, they will notice and whine.
In this case I think something much more potentially sinister is at work. Vista has introduced a "copy lag" that can later on (once we have all accepted the lag) be used to scan files for 1) malware, 2) DRM reasons, 3) do other things we don't want Vista to do.
Saying that I wouldn't put it past them is an understatement.
I come here for the love
My impression is that "never" meant "We are not going to upgrade to Vista as it currently exists." In a couple of years, Vista may be patched to the point where it is considered worth upgrading, but those IT survey respondants are implying that they're not going to make any plans to upgrade before that point.
In fact, I feel the same way about upgrading to Vista on my own window machines.
I guess it will be Ubuntu. I switched to it at home, I'm not 100% happy with it (big fonts, I want double click top left to close a window etc.), but its otherwise very similar to Windows and easily good enough. Fewer root kits is a big plus!
I'd already ditched Internet Explorer on Windows to use Firefox, so I'm using Firefox on Ubuntu too now and not really seeing any differences. Open Office was a plus, but I found I hadn't used MS word for so long now and don't expect to need OO much.
Video, again fine, I put VLC on it, I'd given up with the DRM laden Media player upgrades a long time ago. None of the media I want requires Media Player anyway. Printer was a doddle. For games I have a Wii & PS2 and didn't use my PC for those. MP3's play fine, flash drives, and my mp3 player and camera plug in without problems.
All very uneventful. I don't need Wine or Mono to run Windows apps, since the products I use every day (even Skype) are also available in Ubuntu.
If they offer Vista for $3, and include Office, I might try it. But I'd need to know that the DRM wouldn't require me to use any special uninstall programs. I know that's a leading category of PC productivity software, but I just don't want to have to pay to free myself later.
Backed into a corner I suspect I would be willing to pay more to uninstall it than to get it though.
I think the plan for now is to move to Macs, triple booting OS X, Ubuntu and XP. With XP networking disabled it should be fairly safe to use and it won't really matter that they stop providing security updates. MS software is fine if kept properly litterboxed.
Except for Slackware and Debian...yes.
Package maintenance, that's another issue altogether.
The opposite of progress is congress
Thanks to virtual machine technology, we will never truly have to upgrade for hardware reasons. As long as some other OS supports the hardware, we can run Windows XP in the VM.
Just think of how long Windows 98 has stuck around, despite the lack of new drivers and software support. And now with VMs, we could probably keep running it, and see it run quite fact actually compared to the hardware of its day (especially once 3D accelleration is added to VMs).
I think the upgrade path for those wanting to stay on Windows XP could be a move to Mac OS X with Parallels, or Linux with Parallels/VMware/etc. Or possibly even just Windows XP runnning on top of a thin OS layer that provides just the VM.
Though it is the lack of software support that will eventually get you, if you care about security patches and suport contracts. Though a large amount of new software still works on Windows 98 even today, I'm not sure that it has a supported browser anymore, now that Firefox will require 2K/XP or later. It still is handy for a VM though - a single user OS like Win98 that doesn't have a lot of network services is actually not that insecure when it is just a VM inside a real OS.
I think WinXP isn't quite as suited for that sort of task right now, but there is a lot of development work going into XP and VMs, so we could see XP hand on even longer than 98 has.
I worked for Ericsson until the end of 2006 and all of their corporate desktops, bar a very few specific exemptions, run Windows 200 to this very day. They're not alone either, the big corps are extremely conservative about these things and frankly 2000 does everything they need just fine. This is changing, it's harder and harder to get maintained drivers for the latest hardware, but frankly what special hardware do 90% of corporate desktops need to support? Not much.
Is this a disaster for Redmond? Are they gnashing their teeth at this awful failure at Ericsson? Of course not, it's really no big deal. The corporations pay just the same for 2000 as they do for XP. MS does need to keep maintain a fresh and modern code base to stay competitive in many niches (games, multimedia apps, development tools, servers, new specialist hardware, etc) but the fact that Windows 2000 is fine for the vast majority of users is no pain for them because the revenues still keep rolling in anyway.
With Vista there is a new element and that's Microsoft's efforts to advance the API so that new compelling multimedia and advanced communications enabled applications will provide a new lock-in to Vista. This will probably work. Vista already has a vastly greater market penetration than all the Linux desktops put together, and if it doesn't already surpass the Mac (like the one I'm writing this on) it will soon, so windows developers will have no qualms about adopting the new Vista APIs.
Sorry, but it's the truth.
Much appreciate the response. Seriously. Afterwards, I thought much along the same lines.
Although it is a prime example of the practice of lies having effect, I do agree that I should not have use it.
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I can think of a few things: the old backup program, ntbackup.exe, is no longer included. The replacement, sdclt.exe (Vista Backup) is a joke. You can't even select the files you want to backup, or put the output in a file of your choosing. It doesn't backup registry hives correctly and doesn't use volume shadow copies (both of which ntbakcup does). The ntbackup for XP or 2003 is incompatible with Vista.
.HLP files is broken. Some parts of the OS still use .HLP files for documentation (like the What's This? for the offline files share control page), so those links are broken now.
Winhlp32.exe is no longer included (the file called winhlp32.exe is a stub that pops an error message telling you that a functional winhlp32 is no longer shipped), although for some reason its Win16 counterpart, winhelp.exe, is. Any program that uses
There are fixed promised, but OpenGL is still broken, or very slow with most video drivers.
The new sound system does not support any kind of hardware acceleration or features. Companies like Creative are scrambling to get game developers to adopt OpenAL with an end-run around the Vista sound system so that users aren't left with $300 sound cards equivalent to an AC'97. This does nothing for older games that depended on DirectSound for this.
Here's a list of more things.
On a separate note, wouldn't it be easy to manufacture counterfeit dongles?
w are_keys.asp
I don't think it would be easy but of course I bet it could be done. It still would be much more difficult for the average joe to buy a counterfeit dongle rather than just get an activation key from somewhere. Thats what it is about, stopping the average joe, the hardcore people are not the majority so much less has to be done to worry about them.
There are some really good USB dongle makers out there that provide dongles for software protection. At my company we recently switched to WIBU Systems dongles for our forensic products and they are great. They can be used to encrypt/decrypt portions of the executables as well as to store encrypted data and are easy to setup so software will ONLY run if the dongle is plugged in. They are extremely easy to use as well. Check them out here:
http://wibu.com/wibukey.php
We previously had been using Rainbow Technologies Sentinel keys but they were a big headache. You had to have a file license tied to each individual dongle which caused many headaches when customers lost their original install discs among many other problems. Read about the Sentinel dongle here:
http://www.safenet-inc.com/products/sentinel/hard
Working with the Rainbow dongles really made me dispise dongles because people called in with problems ALL the time. After we switched to the other brand nearly a year ago I have only had ONE person call in with a dongle problem and it was because they had not installed the driver for it. My view of dongles did a 180 and I think they are great for software protection now. Another neat thing about the Wibu dongles is they can have many "slots" in them so that you don't need a separate dongle for all of the different companies software out there. If another company uses the Wibu dongles and you already have a Wibu dongle that has slots open then the new company can send you a file to reprogram your key so that it can be used for the new software as well. Granted, this hasn't really happened in my experience but at least the option is there. Another cool thing is if the software you are using is configured for it you can even "share" a dongle over a network and the licenses in it can be "checked out" so you don't have to hassle with carrying the dongles around.
Another thing is I have not heard of the Wibu dongles being cracked so they seem pretty secure in my eyes. I am sure if they were put into use at the magnatude of coming with every copy of Windows Vista that much more effort would be put into cracking them but I still think it could work since the majority of people would not hassle with ordering a counterfeit dongle and would probably end up just purchasing the software.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
Argh. I'm gonna rant here. It isn't directed at you, it's directed at the stupidity of DRM.
The big deal is that down the road, they may, for reasons of policies I have no control over, decide to deny me that activation. They may do so because XP has gotten old, just as they dropped support for Win98. They may do it because some asshat with a serial number generator has put my serial number out on the web. They may do it because I changed my hardware around too many times to suit them. They may not be around to do it because some better company - like Apple - or OS - like linux or OSX - arose and kicked their ass, or because they finally got destroyed in court for being ruthless, monopolistic, cold hearted business trolls, or because not enough people upgraded to Vista or Office Version 2732, and their other operations (like XBox) lose money, or because a sinkhole opened up and swallowed them, or because there was a huge earthquake, or because a meteor hit them, or simply because there was a mistake in their database / activation process, or even temporarily if their activation system is down or thinks I'm on one of the many government "unacceptables" lists.
If I give a company $$$ for an OS or any other program for that matter, I expect them to give me the OS and ANYTHING I NEED TO MAKE IT WORK and then never, ever, interfere again unless I (a) ask them to or (b) they ask me, and I say "yes." Activation is *bullshit* DRM and as such it is the very lowest form of subtly screwing over your customers. Piracy... the bloody pirates aren't inconvenienced in the least. They've got activation tools, cracking, hacking and whacking tools, all manner of leverage and time, and they could care less about the DRM other than as a source of much amusement. I'm a legitimate, ethical user, and I darned well BUY all my software and I neither have the time nor the inclination nor the comfort level to go scrabbling around for illegal tools to re-enable my LEGITIMATE software purchase if a company has any of the above issues or any of the no doubt myriad others I've not thought of.
I expect them to do exactly what I do: Arbitrarily treat the paying customers as people you can trust, require an initial gateway that you do your best to control that you open to them when payment is received, and don't do anything that costs your legitimate customers money (like developing activation) or time (like making them activate) or business, data, or worse (like FAILING to activate for ANY reason.) Does my stuff get pirated? Sure it does. It is powerful, highly useful software with broad functionality, so it is doomed to be pirated. You can find pirated copies, or the means to pirate, out there with a cursory look. Do I do anything to screw over the people who give me money for my app in a knee jerk reaction? No - because that would be STUPID. What I do is spend my time making my software more powerful than the competition, I make sure we keep the pricing affordable, and I never, NEVER, treat a paying customer as if he's a pirate, EVEN IF HE BLOODY WELL IS, because if you're NOT a pirate, and I treat you like one, then I am the asshole, and you know what? I'm not the asshole, the pirates are, and I have never been confused about that the way Microsoft, the music industry, the DVD industry, and large portions of the software industry are. And yes, I make more than enough money from my paying customers to be one heck of a happy camper, piracy or not, and even though I'm a very quiet competitor to Adobe with an application that is ver
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I do live in Australia and I'm familiar with the $75 Office campaign. In fact I'm running a copy of Office I got from this campaign. I will admit however that initially I was using a pirated version. I found the ribbon interface a pain in the ass for the first few hours of use, but after a short 'adjustment' period, I'm finding the new interface makes me more productive than ever. As a result, I bought the $75 student edition.