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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.
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.
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.
The intent seems admirable if it were altruistic, but Microsoft have shown their predatory stripes. They very nearly undid the major anti-virus industry by initially refusing to include that large business sector in to see their code. Microsoft would certainly like to hold all the cards, but that very attempt could have doomed them as businesses would want to know why Norton, McAfee, etc are not there to protect them because Microsoft believed (the very company which left so many security holes in Win95, Active X and Win XP) they could do a better job of protecting the buyer.
Microsoft bundles average quality products and gives their own line of products the inside track, which have hurt competitors for years. You might check your system performance monitor to see how much memory is being used when you first boot up and like to know why 380+ MB of memory are in use before you launch your first app. Microsoft have preloaded a tonne of library code in case you might run Explorer or Office apps. That you don't have Office doesn't seem to derail the boot process from including them to occupy your memory anyway. All this to make Microsoft's apps appear to load faster. Try loading a competitor's apps and see how many seconds you have to wait for them to open up.
The ulitimate in useability is to keep the damn system lean and let the user decide how much crap they want when they build/install and OS. You should always be able to go back to the distro and add more, but you don't really get a choice with Windows, do you?
Systems get bigger because they have to - to be able to run Windows.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Since I dont have either, maybe I should switch her.
I have nothing to lose, apparently.
emt 377 emt 4
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.
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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.
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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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