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Microsoft Pleads With Consumers to Adopt Vista Now
SlinkySausage writes "Microsoft has admitted, in an email to the press, that 'some customers may be waiting to adopt Windows Vista because they've heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues, or because they think they should wait for a service pack release.' The company is now pleading with customers not to wait until the release of SP1 at the end of the year, launching a 'fact rich' program to try to convince them to 'proceed with confidence'. The announcement coincides with an embarrassing double-backflip: Microsoft had pre-briefed journalists that it was going to allow home users to run Vista basic and premium under virtual machines like VMWare, but it changed its mind at the last minute and pulled the announcement."
Y'know against support problems, non working applications? No?
Thought not.
Deleted
Just say No.
XP is the end of the line for me and Windows. We've had a long and bumpy relationship, but it's over now. Time to move on.
Money for nothing, pix for free
I"ve spent the past couple of months trying to switch to Vista and I keep going back to Windows XP. There simply is no compelling reason to use Vista. Not only is it noticeably slower than XP, there are dozens of annoying little things that constantly get in my way.
Windows XP was a major improvement over Windows 95/98 (which is what most people were using when XP was first released) but Vista is a major step backward. Not to mention horrendously bloated and absurdly over-priced.
Device and application incompatibilities never stopped anyone from upgrading. With Vista, it's not so much that there's a reason to not upgrade, as there isn't a reason TO upgrade.
There are two possible groups of people here. Possibly three:
1. Those who already have a PC, are reasonably knowledgeable about it and are quite happy with how it's all running. What's in it for them? Re-learn how to do a bunch of tasks only to wind up with exactly the same as what they've already got but with a few extra bells and whistles.
2. Businesses. What's the benefit? Microsoft likes to peddle things like "increased productivity", mainly because it's impossible to measure and hence impossible to argue with. I would, however, point out that "the IT department having to make sure that everything runs on Vista, scripts don't break and users don't get confused with an interface change" doesn't increase anyone's productivity.
3. Those who either don't have a PC, or do but are unhappy with it (probably because it's dog slow under the weight of all the spyware, but they don't know that). This is the only group which may go with Vista - but they'll go with whatever the PFY in the store tells them to go with. If Apple started offering sufficiently generous kickbacks to retail partners, you can bet that their market share would go up quite a bit.
Part of Microsoft's success is the fact that Windows is everywhere, it provides a foundation for everything else to run on the majority of desktops, and if you want to use popular desktop programs, more often than not it's going to be Windows-only, and thus whether you like Windows or not you have to use it. Windows was in your face, all the time, and it can't be discarded (dual-booting is an option but it's actually rather inconvenient, especially if you want to run two things that require two different OSs at the same time).
Cheap, efficient virtualisation totally throws most of the downsides of multiple OS booting out the window (no pun intended). Suddenly you could run Linux or OS X as your desktop and totally ignore Windows until you need to run a Windows program. Windows thus goes from the Master Control Program of your computer to just some shared library that a program loads in order to run. This represents a loss of control over the user, and the one thing Microsoft fears the most is the loss of power, regardless of how small the loss is.
Microsoft loves your money, but it loves your obedience even more. Being able to discard Windows from your sight when you don't require it means you're not being a good little Windows user. Therefore, you deserve to be punished, hence the licensing restrictions.
Didn't think so either.
In any normal market the product price would be lowered to increase demand.
Vista is no more of a "technology" release, as putting a spoiler and spinners on a honda is a "innovative" improvement in style.
If they were really minded towards science and altruistic academic improvements, their OS would consume less resources [and power] yet still get the same amount done as before. It would be more standards compliant to make development cheaper and more reliable, it would embrace all vendors of software, even the OSS side, etc.
Vista, in my mind, is basically a GUI change [not upgrade, just change] and explorer.exe re-write.
Put this in your noodle and ponder. Windows is the least standards compliant OS in the world [that is in current production], and YET they can't even keep their own software working with it. That is, they hold all of the cards and still can't make a play. That speaks volumes as to the quality of the shite software they put out.
When something like OpenOffice breaks in Fedora, you could say, well it's not Fedora's fault, they're aiming at UNIX/Linux standards by using industry standard libraries [X11, motif, glibc, etc, etc, etc], and the software just didn't work. But when people write for the proprietary Windows libraries and then Vista goes and breaks it all, that's just amazingly shotty engineering.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
First, why upgrade my computer's OS when MS's own evaluation app warns me that my installed apps won't run or will need upgrades (my hardware level is just fine)? Secondly, I've been walking my parents through the process of learning Vista (lots of: where's this, how do we do that, why won't the printer work, etc), after they got a laptop with it, and I don't see the need? Sure it looks pretty, but I need to work, not sit back back and think about how pretty the desktop is.
Why, only about a month ago, we were being told that Vista licenses were selling like hotcakes, with an astounding 40 million being sold in the first 100 days -- the fastest launch in history!
I have a computer that is almost 4 years old; what are the specs?
Desktop computers haven't gotten all that much faster (excluding some insane gaming rigs out there). Why should people go out and buy a new machine when their 3-4 year old computer is comparable to most new computers? The same is true of printers/scanners/etc.
If it isn't broken, and works well, why replace it? If your "upgraded" OS won't work with it, then it's not much of an upgrade is it.
Two data points. My wife and my son.
I had not discussed Vista with either of them. Short story: Both of them bought new PCs this year, both of them after Vista's release. My wife wanted a Dell but ended up picking up an HP at Staples because Dell told her she couldn't get a Dell PC with anything but Vista. My son wanted a Dell and, as it happened, it turned out he _was_ able to get a Dell preloaded with XP, and that's what he got.
Both my wife and my son are what you might call computer-literate, but neither of them has any love for computers. They browse the Web, they do a little word processing, a little spreadsheet, they download and print pictures from their digital cameras, and don't buy new computers until they're forced to.
In my wife's case, she'd been using Win98 SE on a 2000-vintage Gateway. (She picked Gateway because she liked their cow-themed boxes and because in 2000 they had retail "stores" that catered to non-techies). What forced her to buy a new PC was the lack of updates for her Win98SE version of Norton Antivirus, and for IE--and the increasing number of websites she visits that cause her version of IE to hang or crash.
Her approach to me came about a day or two after Vista release and what she said was, "You know, I think I'd better buy a new computer now before I'm stuck with one that has Vista." What put her off of Vista was the impression she'd gotten from the mainstream news that it was a) brand new, and b) rough around the edges. Incidentally, she wanted a Dell, but ended up buying an HP because at the time she called Dell they claimed, truthfully or untruthfully, that they would not sell her the low-end machine she wanted preloaded with Vista. (The reason I even suggest untruthfulness was that the person she talked to said that Dell would not sell any PCs preloaded with XP to anyone nohow no way, that they had switched 100% to Vista, and claimed that every other computer maker had, too). So we drove to the nearest Staples and she bought a sweet little compact HP, new in its box, that had XP SP2 preloaded.
A couple of weeks ago, my son called asking whether I had any idea why performing a virus scan on his machine would make the screen go to black and make the machine reboot. Long story short: Bad fan on the power supply. After reviewing options, he decided that the option he liked was to buy a new machine.
Again, I had not discussed Vista with him. Again, _he_ called _me_ and asked whether I thought he should get Vista. He said he was leaning against it, "because Moose" (a friend of his) "says I'd be crazy to get Vista at this stage," but he was on the Dell website and couldn't find a home machine without one. He asked if I thought it would be all that crazy to get Vista. I gave him the most honest answer I could, which was that if you just want a plain-Jane reliable box, well, XP is mellow and mature and not too bad, while Vista is new and does have significant teething pains. I added that if he was going to go with Vista he should get Home Premium, not Home, because it would be silly to have the headaches and not at least get all the fancy new usability and UI good stuff, and that he should have at least double the minimum "recommended" RAM and disk space and should ask hard questions about the video card.
He called me back an hour later to say that he'd found that if he ordered the machine as a "home" system, he could only get Vista, but he'd found that the exact same CPU... which incidentally happened to be one Consumer Reports liked... was also sold under "small business," and ordered that way XP was an option. And the machine ordered as a "small business" system with XP actually cost a little less than the same machine ordered as a "home" system with Vista Home Basic.
He went with XP.
So, yeah, I'd say Microsoft has a problem. But I think it's a problem with Vista, not a problem with perception, and they'd be better off improving Vista than conducting ad campaigns. No ad campaign is as powerful as word-of-mouth and the word-of-mouth on Vista is bad.
And, just maybe, when Microsoft thinks about "customers," they should be thinking of my wife and my son and attending to their needs... not the needs of PC manufacturers and the RIAA.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I am not buying Vista primarily because Nvidia has yest to release actual working drivers with the same performance characteristics as the XP drivers. I play games I need performance, pretty simple. Not Microsoft's fault directly, but still not going that route until I can get the same or better performance.
The other reason I am not buying is the utterly insane price. My OS shouldn't be the second most expensive componenet of the entire system.
The only thing in the system I paid more thana the price of a copy of Vista for is the SLI Video Card setup.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
"GE is full of really smart people, and if the ever get organised then they will be a force to contend with"
People used to tease us at Apple about this, back when I worked there in the nineties.
See what happened when they got organized?
I think the real point is if it has something that I need. I realize that Microsoft needs it but I don't really care what they need.
If they made an updated version of XP that didn't add restrictions and was refined to be more efficient I would be interested in buying it. I'm not interested in anything that is new in Vista. Slow animated transitions? (I took them out of XP too...) More complex visual displays? A completely redesigned layout that isn't more efficient or intuitive?
Now why would you expect me to want to buy this again?
You've never used a laptop for extended periods have you? Thats extra amount of unnecessary computing really sucks down the battery life.