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More Evidence That XP is Vista's Main Competitor
Ian Lamont writes "Computerworld is reporting that Windows XP Service Pack 3 runs MS Office 10% faster than XP SP2 — and is 'considerably faster' than Vista SP1. XP SP3 isn't scheduled to be released until next year, but testers at Devil Mountain Software — the same company which found Vista SP 1 to be hardly any faster than the debut version of Vista — were able to run some benchmarking tests on a release candidate of XP SP3, says the report. While this may be great news for XP owners, it is a problem for Microsoft, which is having trouble convincing business users to migrate to Vista."
I think games might be the key for Microsoft to increase Vista uptake.
Vista is the only operating system that supports DirectX10 at the moment. if it stays that way and games start making use of DirectX10 features then games will have no choice but to use Vista.
There is also the small matter of "Vista only" games such as Halo 2 and the eagerly awaited Alan Wake from Remedy, the makers of Max Payne. that too will be a "Vista only" title.
The only possible reason I can see for users/corporations upgrading to Vista is if vendors start releasing packages that are dependant apon features that XP does not include. For instance, if/when hardware manufacturers and game publishers only release DX10-compatible versions, or if Installshield upgrades their packages to require you to suffer the annoyance of UAC before confirming that you are certain you know that you want to install whatever software... companies still use them instead of MSI's right?
... for your next operating system, please use Windows XP as a benchmark and starting point. Create a product that beats Windows XP in relevant categories (note that "amount of eyecandy" doesn't count - usability, speed, resource usage and security do). I'm sure you will have no problem selling that.
If you already have a PC, you'll run XP (or in my case W2K SP4) 'cos it just works. If you buy a new PC, you'll run Vista.
That's basically it. A few people will have bought a Vista upgrade - maybe they're ahppy with it, maybe not. If not, they'll either live with it or revert. It's not to do with competition, it's to do with a saturated market.
The only story here is: people sometimes buy new PCs.
Until there is a killer app that only runs on Vista, I can't see why most people whould make the change.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Of course the enterprise market isn't moving to Linux they're ass slow to move to ANYTHING. These companies are so huge that it takes years to change the way they work.
What I want to know is the made up (because you know what stats are like) figures of Linux growth in the Small to Medium businesses since they make up a larger majority of businesses then a couple of giant mega corps..
Home users will have little choice but to migrate as and when they buy thier next new PC, buisness users will be slower but some manufacturers are already putting out machines that are very difficult to find XP drivers for.
vista will replace XP just as XP replaced 2K, it will just take a bit of time.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
does anyone see Bill and Company significantly improving Vista before they stop supporting XP?
Microsoft Support Lifecycle
oh, certainly. i've been using vista for a few months now and i like it just fine. i think businesses are just waiting to see if there are any major bugs and, of course, to test their specific software packages for compatibility. there is obviously the speed issue too, but that's always the case with a new os. mind you, i did have to disable all of the 'security' features to be able to work with it. i just found it funny that the desktop question applied so well to vista this time.
No one I know wants to upgrade from XP to Vista; the only person I know that had Vista hated it and downgraded to XP. Now, I remember when XP came out lots of people loved it immediately because it was more stable than 98 -- apparently, not that many had 2000. I got 2000 myself soon after and didn't upgrade to XP until SP 2 came out. Many /.ers have said that XP was none too great until SP2. I wasn't on /. back in those days and I don't know how XP was regarded on the "nerd sites" back then. So, was it like this with XP before SP 2?
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
I've been sitting on Vista since it nearly came out on my home PC. The primary reason was because of my job repairing computers. I knew that users would get machines with Vista pre-installed. I've wanted to switch back to XP and just live with that but I managed to talk myself out of it not because Vista is better, it's because most everyone that goes to the store will buy a Vista machine.
If the manufacturer of drivers are the problem then those people need to get their acts together. Either way I'm tired of having an OS that is suposed to be newer and better then XP but is anything but up to sub-par to XP. Get the damn thing fixed, jeeze people pay enough for that thing.
One last thing, take the dang confusion out of the 7-9 different flavors. Have two like XP and don't relabel everything just cause it's NEW. I still have a hard time finding Add/Remove Programs.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
More and more people though are switching or at least looking at Linux and Macs now as solutions. Even the non-technical people agree that Vista is slow and bloated, they hate UAC and don't like how they changed everything to make it "new". People are cutting through the GUI only to find that all Vista is, is just a skin change on XP that runs slowly and has half the components renamed. Office 2007 is the same, people want the look of 2003, 2000 or '97 and hate the new look of 2007, they are switching to Open Office. Free software has matured much more rapidly then the propriatary software that is in the world today, Vista was a huge step backwards from XP in the areas that people want, speed, ease of use, and good driver support. Just because MS's "futuristic" skin for Vista looks nice, once used, people see that it is nothing better then XP and in many ways worse, when I can get a used computer for $25 with XP pre loaded that runs decent (although I wiped it for Ubuntu as soon as I figured it was booting OK) or you can get a computer for $999 that runs Vista halfway decent, people will go for the $25 option when figuring all they need to do is surf the web. watch movies and e-mail. Microsoft is falling... fast, Linux is the only OS that is going to take over besides OS-X which Apple won't let you use on anything Non-Mac.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Its just going to take time to implement, integrate & upgrade everything to support it. You would have to be kidding yourselves to think MS just made up vista without regard for its core customers. The business version includes encryption, AD, GPO, security, performance, reliability that business users demand and to think Vista isn't an upgrade over XP or 2k in these regards is simply foolish. Auditing, Reporting, Authorization, Policy Management and Manageability have all increased 10 fold if not 100 fold over xp "out of the box" - THAT is what Corporate America wanted - and got! Lord knows They will have to implement the hardware to support it as they would with any other demanding project but that isn't a fault of MS or windows. There isn't an out of the box linux distro within ear shot of a Vista Business & Windows 2008 in end user support & management - everything would be left to 3rd party systems, agent based management and user trust.
Making a companies core product Vista only would make the company go bankrupt, not increase Vista sales.
To be honest, I don't understand the hate for UAC. Ubuntu asks me for my password before installing software or even updates, or doing a lot of other tasks like editing system files. How is this any different?
Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
Because Linux & OSX aren't running on your teenager's computer. S/he wants to install those awesome super cool smiley icons or some such other spyware-laden software and when the spyware tries to access the more restricted areas of the system it prompts little Johnny/Jilly for the administrator password. They're used to trashing their systems on a regular basis.
actually XP is incapable of running true DX10 applications because DX10 removes directsound. Because of buggy graphics card drivers, Directsound was all too often a cause of crash bugs. Vista, rather than talking to sound hardware uses a software layer to interface with soundcards so software makers never actually get direct access (and are less likely to crash because of this). This is what you're supposed to use instead of directsound and XP doesn't offer anything like this.
Just to know: most of the Windows applications you would use (especially corporate applications) would run just fine on an Windows 2000 Workstation.
Vista-only applications are a long way in the future
No software maker except Microsoft. How long until MS puts out some hit game that requires Vista to run? Or how long until they put out a new version of Office that requires Vista? How long until Visual Studio only runs on Vista? MS has enough of their own products that people can't live without that they could push almost everyone to use Vista without any help from anybody else.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I find that this is the biggest problem. Not that it asks for permission, but that it asks multiple times for one action. I was trying to rename an item in my start menu, and it asked 3 times for permission. It shouldn't even have to give permission to change an entry in my start menu. In Mandriva, I only get prompted for the admin password when I'm installing new software, or messing with system settings. Windows Vista seems to present me with prompts for just about every action I have to do.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Not if that company is Microsoft... Trust me, it's their strategy to eliminate XP just as much as they want to eliminate Linux. Both are hurting the bottom line now.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
Home users will have little choice but to migrate as and when they buy thier next new PC
Or they could choose not to buy a new PC.
Currently the market is saturated and everyone who could use a PC already has one.
To the average user Winxp is "Good enough" and most people don't like to upgrade unless forced too.
Sure there are plenty of technophiles and gamers, but they are a minority when it comes to the general consumer market.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I realize that I can disable the UAC, but that is supposed to be one of the big selling points of Vista; it now has "enhanced" security etc... It seems that disabling the UAC defeats one of the major reasons for having Vista in the first place. I was trying to give the OS a fair shake and disabling the features that are supposed to be selling points is not really doing that. I mean, I could also enable the administrator account and just log in that way too with (mostly) the same effect.
I have tried aftermarket sound drivers for the soundblaster live! -- they work excellently until I reboot and Vista restores the pos MS driver. This is besides the point that drivers are available for this card for every other OS I use (with the possible exception of Solaris). Just because Creative decided to EOL support for the card doesn't make it not work and I refuse to spend $50+ to "fix something that ain't broke".
I guess my point is that I see no reason to use an OS that spends more time getting in my way than just letting me do what I use my computer for. That being said I will stick with XP (for the very few times I use Windows) for the time being. It is very rare that I need to boot into Windows for anything and I spend 95% of my time on Linux of one flavor or another (currently Gentoo, Kubuntu Gutsy, Slackware 12.0 and CentOS 5.0 w/rpmforge repo). The remainder of my computer time is spent pretty much evenly between OpenSolaris NV86, XP and FreeBSD.
People are paying MS either way, so why should MS care which way people go?
Table-ized A.I.