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Mom Blasts Ballmer Over Kid's Vista Experience
Lucas123 writes "While on stage at a Gartner's ITxpo conference today, Ballmer got an ear-full from the mother of a 13-year-old girl who said after installing Vista on her daughter's computer she decided only two days later to switch back to XP because Vista was so difficult. Ballmer defended Vista saying: 'Your daughter saw a lot of value'; to which the mother replied: 'She's 13.' Ballmer said that Vista is bigger than XP, and 'for some people that's an issue, and it's not going to get smaller in any significant way in SP1. But machines are constantly getting bigger, and [it's] probably important to remember that as well.' Says the mother: 'Good, I'll let you come in and install it for me.'"
Can I mod the submission?
...in learning something difficult?
Ballmer's comment seems really prick-like to me. It probably wasn't meant as such, but still.
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If Microsoft were anything other than one of the most dominant monopolies the world has ever seen, this would be a hideous and grave error.
As it is, people just shrug their shoulders and say, "Who is John Galt?"
> She's 13. Am I the only one missing the point here?
So, in short, the 13 yr old had no problem with it, but the mother couldn't understand it, so it's a bad OS? Yeah, that's GREAT logic.
Also, "she's 13" is not a valid retort for why it shouldn't matter that she found value in it. She obviously knew how to use it more than the mother did.
Ballmer was in an impossible situation here. He could make her look the complete fool and catch hell for picking on that woman, or let her 'win' and catch hell for letting a woman beat up his operating system. He chose the right route, for once.
For the record, Vista was the wrong route.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
...in my experience Vista is easier to transition to than most operating systems I've upgraded. Most hardware still works. Every program I've tried so far has worked. Can you say the same thing for 98 to XP? No. OS 9 to OS X? No. Linux to newer Linux? Well, yes. :)
Take a machine that runs 98 tolerably well and upgrade it to XP. Pain. Take a machine that runs XP tolerably well and upgrade it to Vista. Pain. Nothing is new here. You upgrade your OS and you'll probably need to upgrade your hardware too. And purchasers that doesn't realize this only have themselves to blame. Did I just agree with Steve Ballmer? Damn it, get me a razor blade...
Selling an OS is, in this respect, not a lot different from selling a car.
Some buy their cars for the greatest reliability. Some for performance or efficiency. Some people buy their car to have the newest and flashiest on the block. Some for safety. Some because they know the brand or it's what their friends have.
And some people just fall in love with the color or, wow, big cupholders or heated seats, and they're sold.
Vista is NOT harder to use than XP. It's virtually the same, especially from the point of view of a non-power user. UAC might be a huge nuisance, but parents or whoever can just turn it off. I wouldn't give a 13-year-old admin privileges to a machine in the first place; you're just asking for trojans otherwise.
Ballmer was probably thinking "either you or your daugher or both are just stupid" but knew he couldn't say it so he was trying to be passive and just said some BS to try and get the lady off his case.
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And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I'm a home Mac user.
That's it. I've never seen the public react this way to a Windows release before. Not Linux geeks, but the average Windows users.
Yea, yea, every new release faces nostalgia of the previous release blah blah. It's way worse here.
Average people call Vista shit. Businesses run away from it.
The Vista brand is ruined. Now even if they fix Vista, the brand will never recover.
I hope Microsoft learns something from this. First impression lasts forever. Don't release software unfinished.
What a load of horse crap! The machines being sold are generally more powerful, but the machines are not getting bigger by themselves. But in no uncertain terms is Microsoft stating that people are expected to buy newer, bigger, more powerful machines... and why? Just to run their OS? Here I was thinking that computing was about the data and the programs that operates on it... Goes to show me how wrong I was... it's actually about the OS!
Don't you all see! Vista was a wise move by Microsoft. IT has been long been agreed upon that one major contributor to windows' insecurity is its popularity. If Microsoft comes out with an OS that nobody wants, they won't be popular anymore, and suddenly they'll have a secure OS!!!
DUH!
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I feel it's somewhat hypocritical of the mother to use the fact that her daugher was 13 as a defence - if she really placed little value in her daughter's opinion, she shouldn't have bought it solely on that opinion in the first place.
I don't think the woman was saying that Vista itself was harder to install. Like many others she's complaining that there were many issues after the install like with drivers, stability, etc. Since MS changed many things in Vista this was not unexpected especially for a 1st generation product. She figures that maybe something she did caused it, and Ballmer is trying to put the best face forward. I think he and Gates both know what a fiasco Vista has been and that the installation process is a small role in how unfinished many feel that Vista is. Gates and Co are trying to get everyone to install it so that MS can make money.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Precisely. She's not willing to be held accountable for the fact that, in the end, she made the operating system purchase and was not pleased with it. So she's blaming Steve because her precious daughter 'doesn't know any better' ... even though she was apparently the sole motivation for the purchase. It's sad how little personal accountability people have these days.
Something interesting to take away from this. The 13 year old (the future of technology) wanted the gadgets - or rather - the useful yet entertaining and social aspects of Vista - rather than the technology underneath. Technology that serves a personal purpose, rather than technology that simply serves a purpose.
As we've all learned for ourselves now back when we started CS/IT/ENG/whatever, we constantly evolve using what we started with as a base. I can trace my usage of linux/unix now back to first using NextStations and IRIX boxes back in school.
What is Linux/Ubuntu/younameit doing to capitalize on the 13 year old market? What does Linux offer a teenager, or better yet, why would a teenage want to use Linux? Social interaction, gadgets/widgets, entertainment, etc may seem like a waste of purpose and time to us hardcore nerds, but these are very important to non-tech types. Once the 13 year old is interested, then the whole 'get em early' evolution begins.
A great example is the XO laptop. The XO has considered the social target audience of the product like few other hardware and software developers previously (except maybe Apple). As such, every review of the laptop so far by a schoolage child (the target) loves it. For Linux to succeed on the desktop for the masses, developers needs to consider what the desktop for the masses actually is - not what developers think the desktop to be where the masses adapt.
This would've been a lot more interesting if she'd challenged him about the actual problems she encountered...Perhaps she did, and it just wasn't captured? Ah well.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
Since I dont have either, maybe I should switch her.
I have nothing to lose, apparently.
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And it's even easier for me to install a waffle covered with maple syrup in my DVD player, but that won't make it work any better.
XP was not finished when it came out and now it is the flagship operating system. This happens everytime, there are problems cause some old POS hardware doesn't have a driver for Vista yet (or at all) and there are bugs here and there in the OS. Time will change it, whether the anti-MS crowd likes it or not, and MS will stay rich another day.
Exact Opposite, my wife said she was sick of all the notifications she couldn't figure out every time she started XP, and truth be told most of them were windows LIVE update,scans or defender updates (I think) I installed Feisty and showed the wife the only notification she will get to update and the two buttons she had to push to keep everything updated. She pretty much figured out Open office by herself and she hasn't bothered me much since (over computers). I play all my video stuff in Ubuntu (Gutsy), never missed yet, but yeah it took a few minutes at Ubuntu forums to get it all set up, well worth my time.
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Want piece in the bedroom? Pay attention to the wife and give her good service.
Hmmm, not the best comparison. I upgraded from XP to XP SP1 to XP SP2 without much of a hitch. SP2 had a couple hitches but all my programs still run just fine.
The XP->Vista is much closer to the 9-X transition.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
Obviously you've never had kids. "Mom, my best friend has Vista, and it's so kewl. Can you install it!"
"Fine dear."
Three days later...
"Mom, I can't figure out how to use this. Where's my music? How do I get my pictures off my digital camera? How come the printer won't work? Why does it keep asking me these stupid questions?"
After three days of that, I'd be pretty hot under the collar too.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Wrong move indeed. First off, you shouldn't have removed XP until you knew Ubuntu did what she needed. Second, you should have started her off on Kubuntu, which will at least have a familiar interface.
As for your mysterious file format and your "forgetaboutit" OOo install, we'll need more info to refute/help you on those ones. I find that anyone who has used Office XP or earlier tends to enjoy using the latest OOo, unless they have a bunch of VB macros that don't work quite right, or some badly-created templates that don't display correctly.
Really, the only problem I've found so far for normal users is that Word documents don't always convert indices and other complex objects correctly, and need to be re-formatted once imported into ODF.
In my experience, if you want your wife to stop bugging you about computer problems, buy her a Mac.
The cake is a pie
In fairness to the kid's mom (who is an "analyst", according to TFA; presumably that would mean she's an IT analyst or why else would she be at ITxpo?), she was comparing the Vista experience with the XP experience.
XP, for all its security holes, updates, and service packs, was a comparatively stable platform (NOTE: I'm not saying good; just stable), which most home and business users could learn to navigate with relatively little difficulty. Now along comes Vista, and this person -- with presumably some technical acumen -- experiences a 2-day exercise in frustration, trying to get things to work. One naturally expects that things will improve and become easier to use as successive generations of what is much the same thing are developed and released, not WAY more difficult!
To cite the revered car analogy: the first automobiles didn't come with adjustable seats, power windows (hey -- there's the Vista successor: Power Windows!), an electric starter motor, or even a steering wheel sometimes. But with time and redesign, succeeding generations sure became a lot easier to use, didn't they?
So the real question she was asking is: Howcum Vista, the latest generation, isn't easier to use than XP?
licet differant, aequabitur
That does have an impact on security, but mostly because the features it's now necessary to be backwards compatible with were never designed to be secure or stable in the first place in the old home versions of Windows. For example a lot of Linux features are designed to work in the same manner as old UNIX equivalents, but there seem to be less gaping holes in its security despite providing its own support for legacy code and in some cases extremely old hardware platforms.
This kind of cruft certainly doesn't make an OS any easier to secure, but in the interests of creating a reasonably stable platform for developers, you can't just re-write the entire feature set every few years and expect software to be ported. It seems to me that if well enough thought through it's very possible to make a secure OS while remaining mostly backwards compatible (e.g. by emulating old and insecure features on newer hardware).
Absolutely not true. You made the mistake of switching her applications, not her OS. Next time, ween her applications to Firefox, Tuhnderbird, and OOo before you switch her OS. I've done ten or so Fedora and Ubuntu installs on friends and families computers. If my 75 year old mother in law can use Ubuntu, with all the MS Office (mostly powerpoint) junk she gets from emails from her friends (Oooo! Another cute cats presentation!), then anybody who _wants_to_ can use it. Document compatibility is not a problem anymore. As for the super-brother's videos, have him send it in a standard format. If it's a specialty format that VLC or mPlayer cannot read, then it can probably only be read in some proprietary program that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars. Bet you pirated that, didn't you?
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I'm willing to go with that whole analogy, but I'd add that Mac OS X is akin to a corporation most people generally admire taking in a large share of these free tanks, taking some of the parts off that are unnecessary (or potentially even harmful) to the typical end-user/consumer (say, pulling off a machine gun turret), giving the tank a smooth, comfortable ride, a great sound system inside, and an attractive, sleek exterior - and then selling these "value added tanks", backed with their full support (free training in their stores and so forth).
Meanwhile, the GNU crowd has mixed feelings on all of this. Some think it's great and bought one of these "OS X tanks" themselves, while others still can't grasp why people would want anything other than exactly what they offer for free.
It's amazing how often people forget that cardinal rule of security, isn't it? Of course, leave it to MS to have their new OS beat people over the head with it. I am SO sick of the UAC popping up when I run programs I've proven to myself are safe. Why isn't there a way to say, "Yes, I'm sure I want to run this program, and don't freaking ask me again!"?
Uh ... then Windows should offer to update itself, just like Ubuntu does. Heh.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
As an adult, please define value for the rest of us.
Saying a teenager doesn't understand value, just shows that you don't understand value. Value is absolutely relative to the individual, and it varies wildly based on fashion, personal experience, age, sex, race, everything.
When you say that someone of a different demographic from yourself "doesn't understand value", what you're really saying is that you don't understand them, and that, therefore, you think the things they value are meaningless.
There are a lot of people who will profit from those people and their "meaningless" values, while you sit smugly telling them they're stupid for valuing those things anyway. Microsoft has become a monopoly doing this crap. It's heart and soul why Office beats the crap out of Open Office. OSS people need to take the needs of non-geeks seriously.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Running Win3.1 apps on Win32 isn't really a virtual machine. It's just a 16 bit process where all the Win16 API calls thunk over to the corresponding Win32 calls. Likewise for running Win32 apps on Win64.
And it does matter how large it is, as the Win32 code has to know how to deal with being called from 16 bit code.
found out that her movie making brother (a world class photog) would send her his latest shows in a format that I have yet to find a Linux solution for.
.MOV plays nicely on mac,windows and PC. divx is the choice for HD quality (outside of MOV) so I am guessing these are not HD so he must be sending them as the universally hated WMV file formats as all the other play perfectly under mplayer.
And yet he cant export these world class movies in a format that is easily playable on most platforms.
So his world class video editing software he specifically configured it from the normal mpeg or other standard format to the incompatable WMV?
maybe he should learn how to use his editing software. Vegas, Premier, Canopus and Avid all default to standard formats for export, and those are the only real video editing apps available for windows. if he did this on a MAC and final cut he really screwed up.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"All of Debian" probably includes support for more architectures than any version of Windows has ever even run on and apps allowing you to do so many different things that most humans are not even able to go through a list of their descriptions and understand what the apps are for. Are you seriously comparing that to what's shipped with Vista and the size of it?
By contrast, every new version of Windows seems to throw out huge chunks of the old system, and replace them with (often similarly ill-considered) 'new and improved' chunks -- and there are parts of Windows that are a side-effect of intentional mines put in to trip up competitors' products. Much of that weirdness has now been entrenched into Windows because Windows developers have been forced to work around and/or use those same logic-bombs.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Actually, I believe I detect a greater use of layering throughout the operating system, which if you must have bloat is a good thing, although it makes the bloat somewhat larger. I've had parts of Vista crash without bringing down the whole house. For example I've had the sound system do the audio equivalent of a snow crash, but have been able to do a normal shutdown, closing all of my files.
If you remember back in the day, OS/2 was supposed to be the wave of the future. Nobody seriously doubted it was a better OS, the problem is that it required a princely 16MB of RAM at a time when you were lucky to have 4MB. The problem may have been that Microsoft learned the wrong lesson, piling on more features while striving to avoid outstripping the resources customer machines were likely to have. The problem is that you can't have an OS that is complex, resource efficient and secure and stable.
So it may be that Vista feels like a step backward, camouflaged with a bunch of superficial frippery. But when you are on the wrong road, you do have to backtrack to get on the right one. The real question is whether a desktop OS ought to shoulder so much complexity. None of the killer aps of the last decade depend in any way on Desktop OS innovation.
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