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Jerry Seinfeld Will Plug Vista
Barence writes "Microsoft has signed up comedian Jerry Seinfeld to its $300 million Vista PR blitz, as it attempts to turn around the negative perception surrounding its operating system. Reports suggest Bill Gates will also appear in the ads, which, given the comedy timing he displayed in his 'Bill's Last Day' video, and the deadpan manner of Seinfeld, could result in a huge hit for the company." Reader Zarmanto notes in his journal that "Mac users might be quite amused, considering that (like many other TV shows) the set of Seinfeld always had a Macintosh prominently displayed in the background."
"Mac users might be quite amused, considering that (like many other TV shows) the set of Seinfeld always had a Macintosh prominently displayed in the background."
Just an FYI, mac users are pretty similar to PC users. Most of us just don't care.
Instead of paying already rich celebrities to pimp out Vista, how about invest that $300 million into developing a SP2 that fixes the damn thing already.
Vista has established a reputation as "the operating system you don't want". People hate it. People that haven't tried it hate it. Some people sit around and worry that someday someone will make them upgrade to Vista. An ad campaign simply can't compete with people talking to others about how much they hate Vista.
It's funny, but I've never heard people openly talk about how much they hate a Microsoft product before. Personally I think Microsoft has made a LOT crappier products than Vista. Outlook, IE6, and Exchange are a lot worse than Vista.
AccountKiller
Wouldn't that generate better PR than using a deadbeat comedian?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Seinfeld hasn't been on the air in over 10 years at this point (new episodes at least).
Well, Richard Stallman's been re-running the same damn hippie crap on his channel for at least that long. And over at Apple? Steve Jobs has been wearing that same black turtleneck since 1986. And how about that Penguin? Man, that is fresh!
Actually, I imagine that Seinfeld's "establishment" personality is probably going to work very well in this case. It has the potential to be brilliant, with lots of good humorous irony potential. His AmEx spots have generally been pretty good. We'll see.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It works quite well, the security's a welcome addition.
What security? You mean that little pop-up thing asking you "are you sure you want to do that?" every time you click something. The little pop-up that annoys people to the point where they begin to just ignore it, or figure out how to turn it off? Or is there some other amazing new security features in Windows Vista that I'm not aware of?
Looks like some M$ fanboi modded you down for being correct.
Vistas "security" features are pathetic and too little far too late. Joe Sixpack might take it seriously "Ooh, aah, dis noo operatin' systums got increased securitah!" but at the end of the day it's just security theatre.
Debian FTW
Is advertising that powerful? I'll admit I haven't used Vista a lot, but there doesn't seem to be any improvement over XP. The blind test was a nice idea, but I'm guessing are used to a fairly stable, fairly usable OS.. sorta like XP.
Vista is a service pack to XP. Apple has the right idea here. Get a decent base, then release updates of that. The difference is, Apple release them pretty much as updates to their core and advertise it as such - Microsoft do the same thing, but say it's all new.
I don't have anything aganist MS, but Vista was a non-starter. Despite the money they've put into it, I think they'd be better moving on and just trying to brush Vista under the carpet. I'm unsure how much mainstream press Vista's downfalls have had, but two years of bitching is going to be hard to just throw advertising at.
Then again, people are that stupid.
The problem is that users learn to ignore the pop-ups, and they happen so often that most users can't even tell if it's because of their own actions, or those of a malicious attack. Because of this, the messages serve no real security purpose, since even if someone were to maliciously try to abuse someone's computer, the user would probably just dismiss all of the pop-ups without a second thought. Also, most of the 'security' pop-up windows are not from other programs requiring administrator rights, the majority of them come from the operating system itself, for example you have to go through a couple of them just to open the device manager.
For lack of a better signature...
ReactOS will never mimic Windows perfectly, so why the hell should anyone bother dual-booting ReactOS and Linux? What benefit do you get that you don't get without Windows and Linux?
"It's free as in beer" is unacceptable; Windows is essentially free and everyone knows it.
"It's free as in freedom" is equally unacceptable because nobody important gives a shit.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
The problem is that users learn to ignore the pop-ups, and they happen so often that most users can't even tell if it's because of their own actions, or those of a malicious attack. Because of this, the messages serve no real security purpose, since even if someone were to maliciously try to abuse someone's computer, the user would probably just dismiss all of the pop-ups without a second thought. Also, most of the 'security' pop-up windows are not from other programs requiring administrator rights, the majority of them come from the operating system itself, for example you have to go through a couple of them just to open the device manager.
To play devil's advocate:
I'm an Ubuntu user. I used to be all cautious about "sudo", but frankly, there's just so much that I don't know about Linux/Ubuntu system administration, that most of the time I'm just copying and pasting commands from webpages, all liberally sprinkled with sudos. You want to be able to listen to mp3s? Type "sudo bla bla bla". You want to be able to watch divxes? Type "sudo yakity yakity yak". Want to be able to sync your music collection with your iPod? You gotta type sudo.
As a novice Linux user, I've become numb to these "sudos", just as you accuse novice Vista users becoming numb to the pop-ups. Just the other day, I had an Linux-knowledgeable friend of mine ask me to change one line of a configuration file to another. The file was writable only by root, so of course, I "sudo gedit", made the change, and saved it. And I have no idea what that change does. I'm just trusting my friend not to screw me over because that's the path of least resistance. I'm sure a lot of novice Windows users just blindly follow the advice they receive from their more advanced Windows using friends.
There's simply no fix for stupid/lazy users. I'm stupid and lazy when it comes to Ubuntu. There is nothing you can do to change that because frankly Ubuntu is such a tiny part of my life that it's not worth the extra time and effort required to actually fully understand all the implications of every sudo command I type in. I don't keep any valuable data on my Ubuntu box. If it comes to it (perhaps because someone gains root access to my box and locks me out), I can simply reformat and reinstall Ubuntu.
Guess what? A lot of people feel the same way about Windows: They simply don't feel it's worth their time and effort to learn all the implications of every prompt they click "yes" to. And if it comes to it, they'll just reinstall Windows. It's simply not that big a deal to them.
And just like your complaint about the majority of the prompts coming from the OS itself, a lot of the sudos I have to type in seem to come from the "Ubuntu OS" itself. You might try and get technical on me and tell me that this module or that section strictly speaking isn't part of the "OS", but really, I don't care. I'm using Ubuntu. I go into the Synaptic package manager, something which, as far as my user experience is concerned, is entirely "part of Ubuntu", and it's giving me that sudo password prompt. So really, from my personal perspective, Vista is no worst than Ubuntu (and Ubuntu is, IMHO, the best Linux distro ever), but it has the added bonus of actually being able to run all the Windows-only apps which I simply refuse to give up.
Well written. Kudos to you sir.
The reason that Vista has a new driver model was that Microsoft wanted to build DRM into its driver model. Unfortunately for Microsoft DRM isn't really a feature, but an anti-feature. No one *wants* a computer that tries to stop them from copying files.
You are certainly right that the pain of transition from XP to Vista was similar to the pain of transition between Windows 98 and XP. The problem is that the benefits to the upgrade are not nearly as profound. Windows XP was so much better than Windows 98 that people were willing to put up with the difficulties. Windows Vista, on the other hand, has comparatively little to offer. In fact, in several ways Vista is a step backwards. No one wants to pay extra for even more intrusive DRM and a User Account Control that is intrusive without really aiding in system security.
I would also point out that third party hardware and software vendors are not in the business of selling new copies of Windows. That's Microsoft's job. If selling new versions of Windows requires some help from the people that create the hardware and software that people actually use, then Microsoft should have done a better job of making that happen.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that the hardware vendors saw Windows Vista as a chance to sell everyone new hardware. Rewriting old drivers for Windows Vista doesn't make these companies any money, but forcing Vista users to purchase a new printer (or whatever) does make them money. The same is true for software vendors. Patching old versions of software so that they work with Vista doesn't make the vendor any cash. Selling a new Vista-compatible version, on the other hand, does generate revenue.
Microsoft's hardware and software partners were only acting in their own best interest. Microsoft would have done the same thing had the roles been reversed.
The end result of Microsoft's Vista moves is a general trend away from Microsoft. Apple's got nearly 15% of the U.S. computer market and a whopping 66% of the over $1000 computer market. Microsoft still is clearly the 800 pound gorilla, but it no longer can be considered a given that a PC is running Windows. To a certain extent this trend is due to Vista.
Instead of creating growth for Microsoft Vista is causing people to rethink their reliance on Windows, and Microsoft doesn't really have anyone but itself to blame.
The new driver model wasn't "for DRM," but for system stability. Nvdisp is responsible for what percentage of bluescreens again? It's mostly a conceptual extension of Windows XP's user-mode driver framework, and it lets Vista do nifty things like inform you from the system tray that "your display driver has been restarted" rather than bluescreen.
There's no DRM in Vista unless you're playing Blu-Ray discs. Or using iTunes. But then it's more accurate to say that there's DRM on the Blu-Ray discs and in your iTunes library. UAC can be turned off, and it does help security. I work at a help desk, and I've found that whjile most users will click through whatever "this is a virus!" warnings they get, there's also a large minority that freak out when Firefox offers to add an exception for our self-signed security certificate.
Some people say "If I don't know what it is, then maybe I should hit 'cancel' until it goes away." These people are outnumbered by those who hit "OK" until it goes away, but they're the group UAC is aiming to protect. The rest of us are smart enough to know where the "control panel" is.
Not quite sure what you're getting at with a "forcing users to purchase a new printer (or whatever)" to make money. When my dad was going to college, he bought a Windows 3.11 desktop with an HP Deskject 660C (I think that's the model number, anyway.) My Vista rig prints to it just fine - follow Microsoft's guidelines, documentation, and warnings (this is deprecated! this will change! we're not kidding this time! please quit using the 10 year old DirectSound libraries! etc.) and you won't have too much more work to do.
DATABASE WOW WOW
And grossed $160 million overseas. And had a ridiculous amount of merchandising and tie-ins. And grossed about $70 million domestic on DVD sales.
Yes, it was a blockbuster.