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Microsoft Disses Windows to Sell More Windows
mjasay writes "I stumbled across this fascinating Microsoft tutorial entitled "How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade." It's an attempt to coach IT professionals on how to sell Windows desktop upgrades internally. Apparently the value of Vista is not readily apparent, requiring detailed instructions on how to connive and cajole into an upgrade from XP. The most intriguing thing about the tutorial is its implicit rejection of Microsoft's older technology. Just a few years ago Microsoft was pitching the world on how secure and cool XP was. Now it's telling us largely the opposite, implying that XP is a security threat, costs too much to run, and so on. With Microsoft marketing against itself, perhaps the Mac and Linux camps can simply wait for Microsoft to self-destruct?"
I guess you've never read the “Intel Retail Edge” program manual or virtually any software's change-log/release notes.
It's been a long time since I've seen such crap on the frontpage of /. Almost every product out there gets released under these values, including the Linux kernel and MacOS. “It's more secure, upgrade now!”
That's the point. XP came out years ago, and finally in 2007 a new version of Windows was released after much bitching by the market (us). Now that it's out, we're attacking its release because of the reasons we wanted a new version of Windows?
Excuse me if I don't see the point of this news...
Er, I am a software developer who has to work on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows (XP and Vista). And believe me, Linux and Mac OS X have both changed drastically under the hood since their initial releases. Look at Linux kernel version 0.9 versus the kernel 2.6 series; device access methods are vastly improved, memory management is a whole ton better, and outside of the kernel, the libraries in userland have moved forward quite frequently. As for OS X, Mac OS X 10.0 was damn near unusable for anything except legacy NeXTStep software, but 10.5 is actually the least-painful OS to develop for of any I deal with. (Not trying to show bias, just that Leopard's system APIs are very polished even compared to Tiger, and I personally find the developer documentation less painful to wade through than Vista's.)
Many changes in Vista are simply immediately apparent to even end-users, because there is a ton of new eye-candy (in addition to the extensive under-the-hood reworkings). Leopard, most of the important changes are under-the-hood modifications (better access to filesystem, such as the FSEvents API, the new 64-bit throughout setup, system self-signing of downloaded applications, etc.), with less new eye-candy, but speaking as a developer, there are some equally sweeping changes under the hood.
Every operating system progresses as time goes on, as long as it is still in active development. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X...
--Rachel