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Ballmer Says Vista Selling Really Well
An anonymous reader writes "Steve Ballmer is in no way disappointed with Windows Vista. It is selling 'incredibly well,' he told a press conference in Herzeliya, Israel today. 'Vista sells on almost 100 per cent of all the new consumer PCs around the world,' the Microsoft CEO proclaimed. He added that the operating system was also selling on '45 percent of all of new business PCs.' Which is enlightening, since business users are about the only buyers of new PCs that get a choice." Anyone know anybody who bought Vista except as bundled with hardware?
Even Time magazine has notice Microsoft is "an Empire in rapid decline".
Who's this message directed at? The last people he's going to fool are corporate users. Home users continue to avoid buying new computers because what they have is working just fine. Even if he could convince them to go buy, they have a giant selection of $500 and less Vista failure laptops to chose from if they don't just buy a $300 EEE PC with GNU/Linux.
I am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
I bought Vista, I use Vista, and once I turned off UAC I've had no problems with Vista. I think the hatred for it is overstated, and largely perpetuated by people who don't use it - the only problem I've had is a lack of printer drivers for a printer, and that's because Samsung want to sell new printers rather than make new drivers for their old ones...
/. - I mean, uh, Microsoft suck!
Wait, this is
I have 2 computers running Vista. Neither of them came bundled with it. I am very happy with Vista... I haven't had any problems at all (even though I will likely be modded as such, I am not trolling).
Not all business users have a choice. Dell gives you a choice. HP does not.
We're an HP value-add reseller and we can't get xw4400 workstations without vista. We had to request a downgrade kit (they will only give 1 to each business address, even though we order hundreds of these a year) and then downgrade them to XP.
I had some friends who have it on their new laptops...
I know two people. One is now using XP, and the other got so mad he bought a Mac.
PC Magazine's editor sure gave Vista the thumbs down. The only thing any of my friends ever tell me is that "It looks nicer" so they like it but they have more problems with it than XP. That kind of opinion does not make me want to risk buying a new PC.
Intellectual property was the desert property of the twenth century.
Let me rephrase, of the Vista Customer's I have worked with, 90% of them have stated that they hated vista. As far as the technical support side, I don't support Vista, just their "internets" :P And usually the reason they don't like vista is because it runs so darn slow, and for strange reasons it plays magic tricks with people's NIC around windows update time =D
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
I sell computers and parts to over 4000 schools, universities and gov't agencies... Other than bundled Vista, which they all want Ultimate or business so they can downgrade to XPP... Not 1 purchase of Vista other than an experimental copy in which the head of technology for a 330 school district used Vista for 2 days then erased it and put XPP back on... Microsoft is fooling themselves and trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Vista is a load of crap and MS thinks we are so stupid enough to fall for their marketing nightmere!
Uhh... Windows XP? You know, most businesses are very conservative and would rather stretch their experience on XP rather than cause hardware upgrade, software upgrades, training, system administration changes, possibly new incompatibilities and instabilities and so on and so forth. Making sure your employees have the latest version of clippy is hardly what improves margins...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
some fanboi who modded parent post troll come up and explain me how you can fail in selling something if you forcefully bundle them with new computers.
Read radical news here
Keep in mind that a lot of people:
1) Use pirate versions of Vista, mostly in Latinoamerica and Asia.
2) Downgrade right away to XP or Ubuntu, usually wasting the license that came with the PC.
So I wouldn't take sales as a factor here.
It's remarkable how he can paint a happy face on the steepest decline in the history of the company.
If his figures are correct, the PC market just experienced the largest contraction ever and nobody noticed. Especially odd in that Intel's operating income is up 23%. Top PC seller HP's net income is up 16% on strong notebook sales and huge growth in emerging markets. Lenovo is reporting a 17% increase in sales on strong global demand.
Is anybody besides Microsoft seeing this decline? Is somebody lying to Ballmer? "Gee, no, Steve. Business is off everywhere. It's a recession. People adore Vista. You can put the chair down now."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If you don't believe what Balmer says, maybe consult some trustworthy third-party statistics and see that... he's actually right.
That's how they buy sofware in Russia.
If you are referring to "move files from one folder to another, ignoring any files that have namesakes in the target folder", that can also be done in XP. You move the files, and when the overwrite dialog appears, hold down Shift and click "No". This works as "No to all".
Under our enterprise agreement with Microsoft we get downgrade rights for any OEM purchase of Windows Vista Business. Everything we purchased since Vista's release has come with a Vists Business license, but has the corporate Window XP image installed. I suspect other organizations with Enterprises/Select agreements have similar practices.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
If you see a +1.2M UIN account posting the usual "I agree with you" replies to one of twitter's comments, chances are it's one of his sockpuppet accounts.
(I'll take my offtopic mod now)
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
It may not be a "100% secure" OS as MacOS is often claimed to be, but firefox + adblock + noscript have kept my Windows machines popup free for years now.
PAE is a feature of the modern x86 architecture, just like MMX or SSE. It was introduced with the Pentium Pro in 1995 (13 years ago!), and has been standard since the Pentium II (1997). PAE increases the number of address lines from 32 to 36. It also adds a new mode to the x86 MMU (Memory Management Unit) which supports 36-bit hardware addresses. The new mode adds a third level to the page table structure, in facilitate a larger page table entry size.
Both Vista and XP enable PAE, but with a major caveat. Both avoid using any hardware address above the 4 GiB mark because it turns out a lot of drivers can't handle such. That includes drivers which ship with Windows -- and Microsoft takes on part of the support burden of those. (Microsoft doesn't support third-party (non-WHQL) drivers and never has.)
The reason both OSes enable PAE mode is to get NX (No Execute bit) support. (NX is used as a defense against code injection due via buffer overrun. Microsoft calls it DEP (Data Execution Prevention).) The NX bit is only present in the larger page table entries. So they enable PAE -- and take the performance hit of the third level of page table lookup -- but don't actually use the larger hardware address word.
So anyway, because the OSes can't use hardware above 4 GiB, they (re)configure all your peripheral hardware to exist within the 4 GiB space. That includes configuration space, ROMs, buffers, video memory, the AGP aperture, memory mapped hardware I/O (DMA), etc. Any RAM at those addresses gets "shadowed" and is not accessible to the OS.
Linux doesn't have this problem -- it's been 64-bit clean for years, and will happily put your peripheral hardware above 4 GiB. (One can still run into problems with motherboards, BIOSes, and/or expansion cards which don't support hardware addresses > 32 bits, though. Some motherboards don't have the PAE lines "wired". Some BIOSes just don't support it. And some 32-bit PCI cards don't support DAC (Dual Address Cycle), which would let them accept a 64-bit address.)
But to support a hardware address > 32 bits with Windows, you either need to run the x86-64 versions of Windows, or run Advanced/Enterprise Server. (The "Standard" version of Windows Server is limited in the same way as Win XP/Vista.)
Note that all of the above is about hardware addresses -- the actual address lines coming out of the x86 chip. The virtual address space is still limited to 32 bits and 4 GiB. And all software -- including the OS kernel -- use the virtual address space for practically all operations. But with PAE, you can at least have multiple processes which total to more than 4 GiB.
(There are also techniques which let a 32-bit process make use of more than 4 GiB of RAM, such as bank switching (memory windowing). But such techniques are cumbersome at best. Ultimately, a 32-bit process can only directly access 4 GiB of memory. You need long mode (x86-64/AMD64) to get a 64-bit virtual address space.)
(Windows further limits most 32-bit user processes to 2 GiB, reserving 2 GiB for the kernel. There's a BOOT.INI switch which changes that split to 3 GiB for userland and 1 GiB for the kernel. But unless a program was specifically compiled to support that, it will still only use 2 GiB. And robbing 1 GiB from the kernel can impact performance in other ways.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.