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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
I'd have to say that Vista is the greatest gift MS could have possibly given to Linux, BSD, and the Mac. When longhorn cratered, they rushed out a cosmetic update, that is so utterly mediocre, and yet requires hardware upgrades for even its trivial improvements. That puts a lot of customers in play who got sick of waiting, and aren't about to wait six years for MS's next try.
MS is going to lose a lot of their market share in the next few years, with Linux picking up most of the server business, and the Mac getting the desktops and laptops.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
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.
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!
Well, actually...
I got the chance to experiment with Vista at work. I played around with it for 5 minutes... and made a decision...
I switched. I switched my home computer from Windows 2000 (which I've happily used faithfully for... 7 years) and Windows XP (which I've hated since its inception) to Ubuntu Linux 7.04.
We have another happy customer. I've been running Ubuntu for neigh on... a month now. No serious problem to speak of... I've rebooted it twice for updates... and a couple times to get extra things working. Aside from that, I've been thrilled, and wont ever switch back.
The problem with Vista as I've seen it (in my grand 5 minutes of experience with it) is that its not designed for usability. Its designed to market itself. "Oh look, its so pretty! I want that one!" And then people buy it... and hate it because it lacks some fundamental usability bits that I felt it could have used.
Ubuntu is:
A: Pretty! Right out of the box (so to speak) the default styling leaves me thinking that its been designed with a user in mind. Sleek, with pleasing colors, and an interface most people could pick up in a few minutes.
B: Cost effective! It's a free download, and the default installer will install the OS on most common PC's in the market with no upgrade required. Not to mention that the text based installer will install it on many low-end or aging PC's as well.
C: Functional! I had very little trouble getting all of my hardware to work. Most of it required NO work at all. Even in windows I have to install driver updates to get things to work 100%. Ubuntu worked pretty much out of the box and required only 1 additional tweak to get my video card working 100%, and 1 tweak to get my mouse working (All 5 buttons, the way I *WANT* them to work).
And so yeah, when you say Microsoft has done Linux a favor... Your right! I think if people give Linux a try at this point, they'll be surprised. Pleasantly surprised, like I was. Linux could pick up some of that lost desktop market share.
Thomas A. Knight
Author of The Time Weaver