Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Denies Call-in 'Save XP' Petition
CWmike writes "Gregg Keizer digs deeper on a report that said Microsoft was logging calls from customers who requested that the company extend the retail availability of Windows XP to find that some users claimed that they couldn't get through to the support lines. Microsoft denies that it organized any kind of call-in petition and pleaded with users not to dial its technical support numbers to ask for an XP extension. 'As a courtesy to customers in need of technical assistance, we ask callers not to call Microsoft Customer Support Services to request an extension for Windows XP,' a company representative said. Microsoft declined to comment on whether its support lines had experienced a call-volume spike starting last Friday, when the Neowin notice first appeared."
I have been using Windows XP for years, and I have never had a need to use any other operating system. I've had problems with faulty computers, but not with the Windows XP system. On the other hand, Vista is really slow and buggy, it really needs some reworking. Hopefully Windows's next version might be something more like XP.
Learn about Programming (C++ ASM) and Web Design and Development (PHP, CSS, Photoshop) from InfernoDevelopment.com
What I find really weird about this whole situation is that most companies would be happy if their customers were this fanatic about a product!
Yes, because XP is even more poorly designed than Vista when it comes to managing admin rights. No user should ever run as a local admin, even in XP. They should use RunAs to escalate privilege when needed. I would never trust my CEO with local admin rights. They're just install some variation of a britney spears virus. The sooner XP disappears, the better.
As a courtesy to customers in need of technical assistance, we ask callers not to call Microsoft Customer Support Services to request an extension for Windows XP,' a company representative said. Microsoft declined to comment on whether its support lines had experienced a call-volume spike starting last Friday, when the Neowin notice first appeared.
Umm, if you ask people not to call, doesn't that strongly imply that people are calling?
doc
Customers: Hey company, we want to buy a product from you.
Company: No!
Customers: Um...please?
This doesn't mean that people like XP, it just means that they prefer it to Vista. I'm a Mac guy and I have no beef with Vista (I somewhat prefer it to XP, not that I really care for either) and honestly think a lot of the hate just comes from the people doing the sheep thing, though HP and the like feeding it the crappiest hardware money can buy certainly doesn't help.
Especially in the context of software, the negative feedback towards the newer product puts MS in a very awkward position. Aside from security patches and trying to edge out a bit more performance, there's not a whole lot that can be done with XP. And given its lifespan, three major service packs, and hundreds of hotfixes and patches, the codebase is probably a nightmare to maintain as far as operating systems go. Furthermore, it gets them labeled with a lack of innovation right when their competition is really starting to gain on them (baby steps certainly, but look at monthly numbers rather than total market share and it's much more significant) - and the longer that XP lives on, the more trouble you'll cause when you try to get people to move to the latest and greatest. Vista could be lighting-fast and have a perfect UI and you'd still get people freaking out because they've learned and grown accustomed to the stupid quirks of XP over the past seven or so years. Despite what they say to the contrary, most people hate dealing with change so the longer you give them to get used to something, the more aggressively they'll reject the "latest and greatest".
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
No user should ever run as a local admin, even in XP. They should use RunAs to escalate privilege when needed. I would never trust my CEO with local admin rights. They're just install some variation of a britney spears virus.
The sooner XP disappears, the better. So obviously the solution is to teach users to click on Accept every time a box comes up. Because that's all that the Vista UAC has done, is train hundreds of thousands of users that when a box pops up, you hit accept to do what you were trying to do.
Often times the need to have someone to blame is given as a perk of software sales models such as the one Microsoft Windows relies on. But what does that paid Windows XP license get you right now?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
You forgot 3) The games I enjoy don't work in WINE. Hell, they barely work in XP, but Vista completely breaks them. But thanks for playing, we have some lovely parting gifts!
Here-freakin'-here. I use Vista on my laptop and desktop. I honestly can't stand XP anymore because it's stupid. Especially with the laptop. Sometimes it just wouldn't register the lid closing and it'd run the battery down while baking in my backpack.
Vista's only faults are abysmal 3rd party support and its nagging "designed by committee" aspects. But it is vastly superior to XP in many ways. Mostly they are:
1) Installation is no longer a pain in the ass. With all the new hardware coming out XP is increasingly in need of extra drivers before install. On a floppy disk... and only a floppy disk.
2) Plug and play is actually plug and play. Very rarely do I have to search online for drivers. I just plug it in and bam. Installed.
3) Connecting to a network and file sharing also no longer a pain in the ass.
4) Hibernate actually works.
5) I run 64-bit and I don't feel like an outcast of society. I run Adobe Premire and After Effects so 8GB of memory is not unreasonable. XP can't see more than 3.25GB of system memory and the 64-bit version of XP is... no. Just no.
The difference being, of course, that if Vista were lightning fast and had a perfect UI, us geeks would be proselytizing it rather than damning it.
The fact is, we're tired of the bloat. We look at other OS's (not necessarily XP, mind you) that do more with less, and we ask "really, what is this actually doing for me?".
The truth is, not much. It has gotten to the point where Vista is only really good for web browsing, and the like. Thanks to Vista's poor backwards compatibility, with both hardware and software, in a lot of business cases it just isn't an option.
And if you think the windows empire was built on the backs of home users, you are mistaken. Home users are a pleasant result of businesses requiring business machines, and the users of those business machines brought the PC into the home. It's a side market that has become nearly as large as the main market, but it's still not the main market.
I'm all for the latest and greatest, but lets try making it actually better than what was there before, yeah?
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
personally, I dont think it's really microsofts fault, and that's coming from a mostly happy apple user. MS are an easy target because they have the most clueless users but if you moved all those users to another platform they would not suddenly start caring what the computer says. people in general seem to try and be as completely ignorant as to how things work as possible. it's almost like they think that by being ignorant to how it works, they can then pass off the blame when the computer does what they told it to do.
"do you want to delete the file 'final report.doc'? doing so is a permanent operation and can not be undone."
"ok, whatever! just hurry up and stop asking me stuff... hey, where'd my file go? fucking worthless computer! always doing the wrong thing!"
TIAEAE!
Mmm, trollicious.. and if I might feed further- I switched from Ubuntu to Vista Ultimate on a 2 year old laptop as my primary home computer.
I'll probably switch back, or to something else, but I've been pretty happy with Windows for the last few months. It all depends on your needs, expectations and resources.
Most of what you're describing has more to do with Microsoft's attempts to maintain backward compatability over 25 years than anything else. You can still run DOS applications from that age (with some caveats) on XP.
And when enough people are using linux on the desktop, you'll have 'Cardmaker sponsored by Freeze.com - LINUX EDITION', enter your root password to proceed.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
Well, isn't it the same thing that Microsoft FUD used against, say, Linux? Basically, "OMG, you'll need to learn a different GUI and, verily, as a company retrain everyone from CEO to janitor, if you switch from Windows."
Mind you, I use the term FUD here rather loosely, because I think that, while MS's propaganda did include a lot of exaggeration and fear-mongering, the underlying idea _is_ true. Most people don't think that learning a new OS, just for its sake, is fun. The computer is just a tool, and they want to just do their job with it with a minimum of extra effort. That includes that once they learned a skill set, they want to keep applying it all over the place. It's not even a MS invention, it's how we got the Common User Access spec from IBM. MS just adopted it (and mistreated it like the stereotypical evil stepmother;)
I see you even answered your own concerns at the end of that phrase.
If you're a Mac guy, you have a lot of disposable income to blow on hardware. Now I won't get into whether the Macs are overpriced or not debate at this point, but let's just say they don't cater to the bottom end of the market. There isn't really a new Mac that's equivalent to the 300$ boxes people buy at WalMart. Again, I'm not debating whether the hardware is worth the price, but I'm saying that it genuinely _is_ higher spec than most PCs people have at home. And than what most moms and pops on minimal wage jobs can afford, PC or Mac.
Vista _is_ a resource hog, and it crawls on most new computers. Aero alone spanks and tortures a cheap shared-memory GPU like a bad dominatrix, and once you disable it, you're left with something which, for most normal people's needs and understanding of it... still acts like a bloated and slow XP. It doesn't really offer much that Joe Average would need on his home PC, or even notice the difference, and XP didn't have.
The memory requirements alone are a problem on a cheap 512 MB RAM PC, and make stuff swap that ran perfectly well on XP... especially after half of that RAM gets filled with crapware. (And I don't mean just viruses, but also all the idiocies from RealPlayer to, yes, OOo who think it's a great idea to default to keep themselves loaded in RAM all the time to seem faster-loading. You can end up with a 500 pixel wide tray nowadays without doing anything special.)
Vista's constant indexing can make many computers crawl, especially after you install an antivirus. Which ends up basically scanning each file again and again each time the indexing accesses that file. So basically it's like running with a full antivirus scan in the background at all times. Poor or sometimes wrong IDE drivers also don't help, as they can make any version of Windows basically sit and wait for IDE transfers. Now neither of those is a MS problem as such, but the combination is deadly anyway. Vista essentially amplifies what would have been a minor problem (it's ok to wait an extra half a second when you open a file, while the antivirus scans it) into something horrible (it's not ok to have your computer busy virus-scanning all files in the background, as a result of that indexing.)
Again, that won't seem much for you, if you have a couple thousand dollars to blow on a top-of-the-line Mac, and it wouldn't seem much to anyone who can blow a comparable sum on a l33t PC either. But it can be horribly annoying to someone on a $300 beige box.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm guessing your 'needs' often involve whips and dominatrix types? :p Just because you can afford good resources doesn't mean you should fritter them away on something like Vista IMO - and worst of all is that even if Vista was as good as XP (but not better), it just encourages Microsoft to keep releasing sloppy software with little innovation or improvement.
which is totally what she said
I don't know too much about how other people work, but when I do something that requires me to be root, I know in advance that I need to be root, so I open a root term (or switch to it), do the work, and get out.
This is sharply contrasted with Vista: you are in the middle of doing something you want to do, and are interrupted with a security message that you didn't expect.
The first becomes a natural part of your workflow; the second becomes an unpredictable (and hence annoying) interruption of your workflow.
Also, on Linux, the set of things I do that requires me to be root is reasonably small and changes slowly. It's also mostly confined to administrative tasks.
I don't have first-hand experience, but my understanding is that on Vista, too many user-level applications have to ask for permission to do their job, which means that interrupting the user becomes a more common event.
Lets face it, in 2, 5, even 10 years from now will anyone still be using XP. Yes, I know there are still computers running 95, but on your desktop at home or in the office unless under special circumstances it is very unlikely you will have XP. It was an awesome OS imho but everything must die eventually. Fortunately for me wine supports Everquest 2 and I can find native apps for almost every other thing I do with my computer. So this last January I installed ubuntu and have not looked back. Microsoft has made enough mistakes to push me away as a customer and because Linux can do what I need it to, Why would I need vista? By the time Microsoft releases an OS that is as good as XP if not better it will be to late for those that have recently moved to Linux to go back.