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Windows XP Lives, Thanks to Linux
CWmike writes "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols puts his thumb on what really happened to spur Microsoft's change of mind on sparing Windows XP: The smashing success of Asus and others' Linux-powered UMPCs and mini-notebooks caught Microsoft completely by surprise. It turned out people wanted inexpensive, hard-working Linux laptops rather than overpriced, underpowered Vista PCs. If anyone thought this was a flash in the pan, that Asus just hit it lucky once, they haven't been paying attention. Intel is putting big bucks into its Atom family of processors, which have been designed for UMPCs, or as Intel would have it, MIDs. Intel has encouraged both the computer makers and the Linux companies in its Moblin initiative to run desktop Linux. The Linux companies have picked up on this. Canonical, Ubuntu's dad company, has come up with an UMPC-specific version of Ubuntu 8.04, the latest version of this popular Linux distribution, for Intel Atom UMPCs. At Computex, by my count, more than a dozen new UMPCs were announced both from vendors you've never heard of and from big name companies like Acer and Asus. You can also expect to see Dell releasing its 'mini-Inspiron' with Ubuntu by June's end."
I'll be checking out the new systems to see if they would make great portable multi-media systems.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I wonder, with the surge in this UMPC form factor, if not only efficient OS's are favored, but perhaps new networked games with cross-platform ports (and a smaller footprint).
I scent a market opportunity for game companies to port more games to Linux...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
So Microsoft has to keep XP going to slow the adoption of Linux? Yet malware writers are now using Microsoft's patch cycle for XP at least (and can Vista be far behind?) to rapidly create exploits. And of course XP is still rife with security issues. I wonder how long XP can stay afloat with malware on one side and Linux on the other? (especially if Microsoft stops fixing XP security issues)
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I do not think MS is going to completely spare XP, more likely it is just delaying it's execution. As time goes on, the hardware will be caught up enough to run Vista and MS will have had time to "fine tune" it enough to make people get along with it, then they will kill XP.
OK, so they're extended the life of XP Home Edition until 2010 to capture more of the mini-laptop market. So? Name me one network admin who will use XP Home on an ultra-portable. These things are perfect for someone who needs a small, lightweight laptop to administer a network rack, and XP Home is practically useless for that.
The target market for XP Home has had Vista pushed on it for the past year and a half, and most of that target market probably doesn't know enough about Windows to care about XP vs. Vista.
Only extending the life of XP Pro will have any meaning.
Anybody want my mod points?
And in the mobile phone market, it seems like Google and Apple (Goople?) are playing nice with each other, which will allow iPhone to rule the high end and Android to dominate the middle-to-low-end phone market. I don't know anyone who loves Windows Mobile, but a lot of people are pretty excited about their iPhones and/or the promise of Android.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Doesn't Slashdot's constant stream of "OMG M$ iz doing dis cuz of teh lunix!!!11!" seem a bit incredulous? Surely Microsoft must be making decisions, somehow, based on what they think is best for their company rather than based on what Linux is doing, right?
I mean, you have a company with about 94% of the market... and Slashdotters keep saying that, amazingly, Microsoft is making decisions based upon what an operating system with LESS than 1% share of the market (0.64%, to be precise) is doing. Seems a little... crazy, maybe?
I can see maybe MS paying attention to what's going on, and more than likely watching what a company with actual GAINS in market share over the past decade or so is doing (namely, Apple, which has around a 4% market share, maybe a bit more). But Linux? Really? Why? How does that help them in any way?
The FUD just doesn't add up, or make any sense. Feel free to explain it, however. Because IMO, it seems like a one-worldview kind of problem. Slashdot spends SO much time and energy thinking about Linux, to the exclusion of everything else... that people here have convinced themself that EVERYTHING in the world somehow relates to Linx. Because they only have that one pair of glasses with which to look at the world.
Computex was a total disaster for Microsoft. The stock is down about 4% in the last few days.
Actually I'm pretty pleased with my Treo 750. The ability to SSH, change providers, and easily develop software is what made the decision over an iPhone. I'm not trying to start a flamewar, just saying that there are plenty of people out there that are quite happy with Windows Mobile. That isn't to say however that I wouldn't by an Android capable phone the minute it came out.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
We use them exclusively in the field, when somebody drops it or somehow breaks it (and people can get very creative about what they do) we're only out a few hundred dollars compared to the over $2,000 we used to spend on toughbooks.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
I feel part of this is a reaction of people to slow, buggy computers that crash all the time: a computer is useless if it doesn't actually work. User don't care how fast the computer is. They don't care how fancy the OS is or how many bells and whistles the applications have. As long as it does what they need it to do, they're happy.
I've actually met people who are suspicious of Macs. They're too easy. They're too reliable. They're not like other (i.e. Windows) computers. There has to be a catch, somewhere. Us Mac fans just say this is how computers are supposed to work, and it's Windows that has it wrong.
...laura
You're right; PC sales have historically been for faster, more capable computers. These "UMPCs" seem to be the opposite; not as powerful or capable, and so if you're shooting for your OS to run on PCs NOW and in the future, and not targeting older ones, there will be issues.
That said, MS isn't stupid, and they'll make sure SOMETHING MS runs on these.
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
The market must be different over there. I keep an eye out for Eees wnenever I'm out shopping for kit, and I've only ever seen the Linux ones. I reasoned that it was (a) people familiar with XP on a bigger screen will think the Eee's screen small and cramped, while the custom Linux interface fits just fine, and (b) these are cheaper, and this end of the laptop market is all about price. I don't really get the point of Windows on these machines; they're not your primary workstation, nor are they in any way a gamer's box; they're portable net terminals and maybe media players.
Never bought one, because I'd heard about the bigger screen of the 900 series; the wasted space at the sides of the 700s is ugly. But then the 900s got too expensive for a cute-little-laptop impulse buy. Now I'm hanging on a little longer for the Acer Aspire One, which is about my perfect spec. Linux box, 1024x600, eight gig storage, one kilo mass, two hundred quid. Sold.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
If Vista didn't suck so much and wasn't as bloated as a dead whale carcass, Windows XP wouldn't have a reason to stick around. It's not just Linux, give credit where it's due.
The fact that Vista took 6 years to get here meant that the minimum specs for running Windows.CurrentVersion didn't change for 6 years, which created a market for ultra-cheap subnotebooks that would run like shit if they had to run Vista. Linux wins there, and XP's Microsoft's stopgap to try to compete with it.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Microsoft always misses the first bus, but they come back with a vengeance. Remember when they thought the internet was not important? Many times, they let someone else lead the way and step in later to take over the market. I loved Word Perfect, Lotus 123, d-Base, and many others, now I am stuck with a work computer with Word, Excel and Access.
Back to making money, supporting the MS systems manufactured to break and need IT pros to keep running...
What OS do you want to abuse today?
No one is going for the same old shit anymore. Vista IS a maintained XP. All they did was gloss the GUI and gum up the core with constant indexing and DRM madness. Every version of Windows has been like that but the market has wriggled free. Who's going back to paying M$ for SDKs when GNU/Linux does the same or better for free? As hardware makers go, so customers will follow. Ballmer declared developers as all important, but only as "pawns and one night stands". The same reasoning applies to hardware makers, customers, and everyone else. The whole OOXML attack at ISO proves that nothing has changed at Microsoft.
Vista has made a bunch of revenue. Whether that revenue will offset the sizable development cost of vista along with the spreading "I don't like it" sentiment that it has brought upon (both actual and perceived) is the question, which I don't have an answer to.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
It's worse than just the retail numbers. Microsoft takes credit for every machine that is sold with Vista, whether or not that machine is sold with an XP install or whether the user subsequently wipes Vista and replaces it with something else. So basically every laptop sold to a business with a site license has counted as a sale of Vista, even though almost every large business replaces it with their own image.
My company (over 50k employees) took four years after the release of XP to adopt the new OS. They're moving more quickly on Vista, however, with rollout scheduled for 2009. It'll be really interesting to watch--about 50% of our entire workforce and 80-90% of our management are over 47 years old. There's going to be a great deal of bellyaching when users are suddenly confronted with the brand new user interface for both the shell (Aero will be on by default) and office suite (2007). I'll adapt fairly easily, I expect, since I'm still in my 20's, but I feel sorry for the poor folks at the Helpdesk when it hits.
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If they are, then they are a horrible failure at it. Vista, while useful for simple tasks, is a steaming pile for anyone other than users who don't mind doing it the one way the Vista engineers envisioned and enjoy the sub-par interface included in the package. I run Vista Media Center because it has better hardware support than XP MCE (mostly due to the poor programming in XPMCE and total lack of follow-on support). Yes, it works. No, it is neither intuitive nor useful. Just scroll through The Green Button forums to find out how many usability issues there are. And what's worse, most user requests fall on deaf ears or worse - often the MS people who try to help out honestly indicate that many critical features will never be added. Vista still doesn't ship with most of the common audio and video codecs. I'd say it's for licensing reasons, but they don't even include free codecs (and with their muscle, you'd think they could get most of the for-pay decoder codecs for next to nothing).
As for networking - sure there are some positive steps, but overall it's a convoluted mess to administer as a layperson, with half a dozen different dialogs controlling networking functions, and many bits of information are still only available from the command line.
MS will still dominate because of their position with a few business apps (calendaring and contacts come to mind as must-haves), but if someone really put some time into a desktop-mobile combination with an out-of-the box virtual machine to run the few necessary MS-bound applications, MS would need to take a good hard look at operations to figure out how to prevent a serious market shift. (Okay, that might be a little bit of wishful thinking)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"No joke... ME is universally known as the worst of the Windows versions of all time (even worse than Vista)."
I don't know about that. ME was a stinker but people where not spending $200 to buy Win98SE to install over it.
In all me years I have never seen an OS get level of resistance that Vista is.
I think Vista is a waste but the shear hate that normal people are showing for it is shocking too me.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Yeah, they still haven't come back from that mistake. That's a big part of the motivation to buy Yahoo. If there is one thing that Microsoft has proven they are good at, it is buying a company and diminishing its value as they try assimilate it.
Embrace, extend, extinguish...
1, 2, 3, 4, 5... That's the combination on my luggage!
Gentoo is not hard core. Any monkey that can use a command line can do a Stage 1 Gentoo install (I'm proof!). Linux From Scratch is hard core.
emerge "teh hardcorz"
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
actually, a friend of mine has been working on creating a durable-ized eeepc. Current method he's trying is encasing pretty much the entire outside of the thing in about a 2" layer of modified (mixed with some kind of metallic powder to allow decent thermal qualities, as it would have to be passively cooled.) soft silicone, along with a sealed keyboard, watertight plugs for all the ports, and gasketing around the edge of the screen and keyboard interior, covered in some army surplus untearabillium-infused fabric (same fabric as the older green Canadian combat uniform pants) to protect the silicone from abrasion.
No idea how well it's going, as I haven't talked to him in a few weeks (He's currently working with the base forces for the summer, but is doing this project on his own time), but it seems like a workable idea. The eeepc is sufficiently cheap that it's almost ideal for this kind of prototyping.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Many of the other Linux flavors are just as simple... I consider myself a Linux noob yet I've smoothly installed OpenSuSe, Fedora Core, and Ubuntu. OpenSuSe was so easy that I even had my little brother convert to it. As a matter of fact, I'm still using my OpenSuSe install... no one wants random Windows crashes during a CS lecture or compiling your exam programs right? I also use IPCop on an old 486 as my router, replacing a Dlink that had to re restarted every 10 minutes. 5 months up with no restarts. A user can definitely be happy with that, even if the install wasn't smooth ^.^
Excuse me, but Microsoft was clued into the "UMPC" trend back when everyone on Slashdot poo-pooed the idea. It went a slightly different direction than they imagined but they obviously saw it coming for some time now.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Okay, let's have a reasoned logical argument about where OS X is going - you from the point of (I suspect) an OS X user and me, someone who uses mostly Linux, a bit of XP (and quite likes it) and has never yet found the need to ever own an Apple product.
Yes, Apple is gaining market share and over here in the UK, even I have seen a new Apple store open in my local shopping centre. But here in the UK, and I suspect in the rest of Europe, for desktops Apple is still pretty much in third place - behind Windows and Linux. Yes, that may change in the future but the fact is I see a lot more people using Ubuntu than I do OS X, the main reason being that here Apple machines are not the equivalent in pounds or euros that they are in dollars in the US - invariably a lot more expensive here.
In the USA, the demographic is different and I'll accept that over there Apple's share probably puts them in second place, maybe as high as 12% with Linux in third place.
So, having established that as a premise, then where are the new Apple users coming from?
In the first instance, they're coming from the Windows user base. Whether or not Vista is actually a great OS or a piece of crap, the fact is that it has had a really bad press in the eyes of most people. On top of that, it's a lot more expensive than XP was (if you're a home user who wants all the features in the Ultimate Edition or whatever it's called) and it's just not that easy any more to copy a disk at work of all the Microsoft software you want. Therefore, you have to buy Microsoft software now which means that the price difference between buying a PC with Windows and an Apple with OS X is closing.
Secondly, there's the "cool" factor of Apple. Personally, I completely fail to understand why a "tool" that is a computer has to be "cool" but I won't deny that some people are that way inclined.
And finally, who uses Windows, OS X and Linux on the desktop? Well, for starters, if you're going to pigeon-hole everyone, then write the three down as "OS X------Windows------Linux".
In other words, OS X is a diametrically opposite alternative to Linux. Some people don't want to use Windows and have no interest in understanding about how a computer and software work, they want to get jobs done and entertain themselves, they don't mind paying a premium price and so they gravitate to an Apple.
Other people want more power and control over their computers, they don't mind steep learning curves and tinkering with their machines, so they gravitate to Linux. They may also not want to (or be able to) pay for software and brand new hardware so they too will take the Linux path. Yes, some may try out Ubuntu, find it to be too hard to work with and maybe go back to Windows or even buy an Apple.
So what I'm trying to say is that you should not make any direct comparisons between OS X and Linux because they are complete opposites. OS X users generally see Linux as "primitive" and like the eye-candy and GUI an Apple gives them, whereas Linux users see OS X as a locked down operating system that can only run on very specific machines and cannot be "tailored" to run as a desktop, server or however they want on whatever they want.
As I said at the start, I've never found any reason to buy an Apple computer. Any OS I touch (whether Windows, BSD or Linux) I tweak and streamline to ditch all they eye-candy and just get "maximum bucks for CPU cycles" so any machine where that ability is locked away from me just doesn't interest me.
So please stop hailing OS X as "The Great White Hope" of operating systems because it isn't, just like Linux isn't. The two of them are "alternatives" to not having to be entirely reliant (or ever reliant) on Windows. And bearing in mind that I personally do everything from playing games & media, writing documents and spreadsheets, a little photo-editing, some shell and Perl programming, supporting Linux servers at work and for some private clients, OS X just doesn't get a look in and probably never will do.
Yes, some people like OS X and good luck to them - but at least an equal number of people don't give it a second thought.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I had an Orange SPV M3100 which is an HTC windows mobile 5 based phone and it was quite honestly the biggest hassle I've ever had with a phone.
It was glitchy and had issue with displaying jpg backgrounds but only sometimes. It would completely forget it's calibration settings but not on a consistent basis. It'd be fine for months then it would forget them every time I turn it on for a week. It is also the only phone I've ever had that, if it loses the signal for any extended period of time it has to be turned off to find a signal.
Having said all of that it wasn't the worst phone I've ever had. I loved having Wifi on a phone. However Nokia's N95 phones offer the same sort of features but run better and have better game support. My biggest problems with the phone stem from the fact Orange is quite possibly the shittiest phone company ever.
People may expect problems with their desktop but with phones and similar devices they expect it to just work and Windows Mobile doesn't offer that as well as the others.
Translation : "WAAAH! WAAAH!". That's what your post sounds like.
your phone is somehow tied into your cell provider
Sure, if it's an iPhone. And yet. Otherwise just buy an unlocked one/unlock it yourself.
your computer is the *AA's if you don't use Linux
You know, there are other alternatives to Linux than Windows Vista, which is all you can possibly be refering to. Anyone using Vista on their home computer needs to hand their geek badge over anyways. So your point is moot.
the makers of game consoles constantly try to brick you if you use a modchip
Oh no, the makers of a product try to ruin your experience with their product if you try to ruin their business model which is sell underpriced hardware for no profit (even loss) to make money on games which the only purpose of a modchip is to play for free.
all your media you haven't pirated or downloaded off of a DRM-Free site is tied to your account
Oh noes, the only alternatives to DRM-free solutions are.. DRM-based solutions! WAAAH!!!
I'll tell you why it's a great time to be a geek, I can watch TV shows that are not broadcasted in my country on a device that fits in my pocket, for free. I can play every game I would play on Sega Genesis as a kid on the same type of device, for free as well. And I can administrate the company that employs me's infrastructure from my bed, with the same wireless device. Oh my, what an awful time to be a geek!
You just got troll'd!
Well, it finally happened a few weeks ago. No looking back now - I bit the bullet and reformatted the whole kit and kaboodle and installed Ubuntu 8.04 as my only OS to see how long I could go without Windows. Getting Warcraft/DOTA working on Wine was the point of no return. Boot up time is a fraction of what it used to be without all the usual Windows and antiVirus/spyware overhead crud. Everything else is much snappier and I no longer need to fear the day when I have to deal with Vista.
Add one more to the converted masses.
I installed Ubuntu Linux and did a "first run" of Microsoft Vista, side by side, and Ubuntu won the race. I assume that means Vista didn't really come "installed," but rather with just an installer pointed at some .CAB files.
There really wasn't a significant difference either way, and I didn't do much other than wait and confirm an occasional dialog/default. The idea that Linux is harder to install than Vista has never been true. Linux installations became insanely easy long before Microsoft shipped its Edsel.
By the way, the Vista installation was on my teen daughter's new laptop. Performance was so poor that I reformatted and switched her to Ubuntu. The original Ubuntu installation was on her grandmother's PC. Both are working out just fine.