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Microsoft Feared Mac Vs. Vista In '05
CWmike writes "Gregg Keizer sifted through many threads of e-mails released under the 'Vista Capable' lawsuit to dig up this jewel...More than a year before Windows Vista's release — and long before Apple started poking fun at the OS — Microsoft officials were already worried about comparisons between Mac OS X and Vista. An e-mail thread from October 2005 showed that an article in the Wall Street Journal by Walt Mossberg grabbed the attention of managers at Microsoft. In a column headlined What PC to Buy If You Are Planning On a Vista Upgrade, Mossberg alarmed one Windows manager who forwarded a bit from the column.... 'You won't have to worry about Vista if you buy one of Apple Computer's Macintosh computers, which don't run Windows,' Mossberg had written. 'Every mainstream consumer doing typical tasks should consider the Mac. Its operating system, called Tiger, is better and more secure than Windows XP, and already contains most of the key features promised for Vista.' Warrier added a comment of his own: 'A premium experience as defined by Walt = Apple. This is why we need to address [the column].'"
I'm sure many will remember the comparisons of the screen shots and betas for Vista vs. OS X. It was remarkable how much Vista looked like OS X. In both feature (bloat) and GUI. Microsoft is as much, if not more, to blame for the feature comparison. Redmond continued to flaunt using Cupertino as their proxy R&D. When Microsoft finally shipped the goods, the comparisons it seems, were only skin deep.
With a BSD backend, a controlled hardware architecture and the ability to run tools from all platforms via MacPorts or VMWare or Wine, Mac has shown it is not only a better user experience in th long run but a far lower maintenance computer. There are fewer problems due to the maintained hardware architecture by Apple and no viruses to speak of due to sandboxing and BSD's UNIX background.
It does hav bugs like any OS which luckily they are fairly quick to address, and they have a much faster turn around for new versions of the OS (one every year versus every 3-5 years for Windows).
Would I prefer it to be more open like Linux? Oh hell yes especially now that they are adopting HDCP and other DRM related technologies. I suspect however that the Vista fiasco and Netbooks have caused enough people to consider a switch to Linux and with Apple embracing OpenGL for game development on iPhone and iTouch, it will only be a matter of time before it is on equal footing as a game platform and openGL is equally considered thus giving Linux a footup as well; afterall, Blizzard already has admitted to having a Linux Warcraft client internally that they haven't released.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Microsoft has a lot to worry about. When it has come to the big technology shifts, DOS and later Windows have always been trailing-edge technology.
Uh... this is news? Any good businessman always watches the competition and tries to estimate how many customers might switchover. That's not "fear". That's just good old commonsense.
It's news because people forget. Remember when it was found out that the mailed anthrax came from the US's own gov labs? People have already forgotten that too. People need to be reminded of the monopolistic software prison they live in. They don't have to use Windows, and there is better software out there.
I think that's true of the Mac hardware, but I'll take Ubuntu over any recent Mac OS. I'd say the same thing of the iPhone - my T-Mobile G1 hardware sucks in comparison, but the Android OS is a fine competitor.
I think Dell loves to compare their products to Macs. Same features, at half the price.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
I'm getting really annoyed at the Mac commercials that constantly slam PC's.
I get the opposite reaction. I find Apple's ads cute, fun, and surprisingly truthful as Microsoft runs desperate "I'm a PC, so I'm nowhere near my computer" ads.
And the iPhone and iPod Touch ads are musical, elegant, and actually make me want to buy the device, as opposed to the other carriers' ads that show dominoes of inventory but no one doing anything cool with their phones.
Microsoft might be looking for a bailout right after Congress gets through with Detroit? Makes sense if you think about it. Both Microsoft and Detroit have (or should have known) for many, many years what was wrong with their products. Detroit ignored the fuel crises of the 70's and Microsoft ignored the instability and increasing difficulty users had keeping their systems stable. Other similarities exist between Detroit and Redmond, in that both seem unable to properly address the known issues in their product offerings. Vista puts a flashier face (lipstick on a pig - too soon?) on a flawed O/S and GM gives us a freakin' hybrid Tahoe? Yeah, and the people who made those craptastic decisions receive HUGE financial compensation and really don't give a rat's behind what you and I think. Don't worry though. I'm being a tad bit melodramatic. Microsoft, (like GM at one time...) has more money than God and is, in the current venacular...too large to fail. Enjoy.
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway This is the road to hell
You can make that argument when any new major iteration of Windows comes out.
Windows 95 is slower than Windows 3.1 on the same hardware.
Windows 3.1 is slower than Windows 1.0 on the same hardware.
The key here is the phrase 'on the same hardware'. As operating systems do more, they take more hardware to perform adequately. And it's not a Windows thing, it's a MacOS thing and a Linux thing.
Agreed on almost all accounts. Like you said, Vista does some new things, but most of it is not relevant for the user experience, really. Vista is different from XP, and I actually rather like it, but I will not be upgrading any computers to it - period. It's just not worth the cost. If a computer comes with it, that's nice - I'll take it - but any computer with XP on it stays until I have a reason to upgrade.
1) You missed the point again. He didn't defend MS. He criticized the Apple ads. They're not the same thing if you view them outside of an extremist, black and white, there can be only one pure and perfect OS mindset.
2) There are no "important facts" in the Apple ads, nor have there been.
3) I know a lot of people who are typical computer users. They're not buying Macs, but they are specifically avoiding Vista almost exclusively because of the Mac vs. PC ads. This amazes me. They're largely the same people who forwarded me emails saying that Obama is actually a Muslim terrorist a month ago, and who now obsess about Palin's wardrobe. They buy into advertising more than they should, they don't care about proof, and they're the most abundant consumers in the world.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I believe that's the purpose behind 'Snow Leopard'... Apple have taken a time-out to work on the underpinnings of the OS, and tune-up the performance.
The two things I'm most looking forward to are OpenCL (a standard way to access any GPU from user-code, AFAICT) and Grand Central (a way to easily harness multiple CPU's in a standardised way. Between the two of those, I can see Apple leaping ahead in performance over "normal" PC's...
From my perspective, I see it as Apple sweating the details, so I don't have to. They have a history of doing that, and I for one appreciate it.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
IMHO, Mac is a bigger threat to Linux than Windows/Vista/XP ever was or will be.
For the longest time, I wanted to move to a *nix OS. I kept trying ubuntu, FreeBSD and the likes, only to switch back to XP because of office apps and all business were using stuff like Office Suite of apps. Further, tried Cinerella for my video editing on Linux, it has potential, thats all I will say.
Recently got a Mac (some say I switched to the dark side). Interestingly, I find it has all that I need and nothing I don't. Best of both worlds (*nix, Windows etC). I have my *nix, I have my office apps and I have my video editing. My wife has no issues using it either.
It's just not worth the cost. If a computer comes with it, that's nice - I'll take it
You may come to regret that attitude, as I have. I needed to buy a new laptop (old one broke) and I considered whether I should pay extra to get a new XP license with it, but because this was an unexpected purchase I ended up deciding to save the money and go with Vista.
Big mistake.
For one thing, I discovered Vista's DPC latency is always, always worse than XP. This is a big deal for me as I record music, not professionally, but for myself and it's one of the things I use my computer for. Basically can't do it in Vista, the OS defers too many procedure calls.
And I've spent literally *days* now trying to get the OS to run the way I want it to run, figuring out what I can safely shut off and basically trying to streamline it to where I don't have a mess of useless junk running all the time and slowing down my system. (I have a ThinkPad, so I'm not talking about crapware that came pre-installed, I'm talking about Vista processes, services, etc.)
I actually ended up turning Aero off and going back to the Vista Basic interface. Aero is just tiring to look at after a while, and seems to serve no real purpose. I see no justification whatsoever for dedicating all those resources to it.
Someone said in another thread about Vista that while it's basically a functional OS, it fails at what an OS is supposed to do and that's let you run the programs you want to run without getting in the way. It is instead an impediment. It's like a spoiled child constantly begging for attention and throwing tantrums when you don't give it any. I feel like I need to babysit it all the time; I am literally working more on Vista than I am doing anything productive on my computer.
If I had it to do again, I would spend the extra money for the XP downgrade.
There's certainly a lot of interest in that. There was so much talk out there about the possibility that Windows 7 was going to be this kind of "New Windows" with legacy software running in a thin emulation environment that it became conventional wisdom at one point. They could do this... a lot more easily than Apple did... because the Windows application model is not tightly coupled to the API exposed through it... for example, the Pocket PC test environment in the Pocket PC SDK is just a Windows application with a different set of DLLs available to it. Whether they will or not is a different matter, but it's something they certainly could do.
Part of the reason I don't see them going that way is that currently the complexity of the Windows API is where their application barrier to entry lives. Given a simpler and cleaner API it would be SO much easier for projects like Wine to emulate it on top of UNIX-based systems.
Actually, if you knew anything about how federal funding works (NSF, and DARPA for example... I am sure NIH et al do the same) there is plenty of oversight. Most funding grants requires to provide report and justification on how, what, and by whom each penny in the grant was spent.
As a researcher myself, I think the original poster has no idea on the amount of overhead that goes into managing a grant. $12K in the big scheme of things is not that much. A normal paper may cost triple that just on student salaries.
In fact, for each $1K of funding I get, the amount of time I have to invest in obtaining it, working with it, and then justifying it via multiple reports would make any sane person think twice about getting a PhD. Also, for each dollar in external funding, the uni most likely "taxes" you half of it. So that they can subsidize the education of little pricks like the original poster. What an honor!
And Vista is faster than XP on the proper hardware
ie Dual Core, 4GB+ ram
My dual core 3ghz processor with 4gb of ram says otherwise when going from XP to Vista. Intel stuff no less with up to date drivers and also a high speed SATA drive.
File copies in XP took twice as long in Vista for files of equal size on the same hardware.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
I personally think the most impressive virus was CIH, which could be considered to be zero bytes in size, due to the fact that it didn't increase the size of executables it infected. It didn't damage them either, it filled alignment gaps in the PE (.exe) file format, making the infected exe "denser" than the uninfected one. Pretty clever.
I am not a PI, but hope to be once I finish writing my PhD thesis.
You may have excellent qualifications to make suggestions as to what is or isn't feasible, the relative amounts of work required to do a task one way or another, or even the skills necessary to conduct the research yourself. However, if you are not the PI then you can simply collect your paycheck at the end of every pay period, do your work to the best of your ability, and get on with your life.
However, the PI has to spend 6 years proving to the University that he is worthy of tenure, write grants to prove to funding agencies that his research is worth funding, & write manuscripts to prove that his results are worth paying attention to. Ultimately the responsibility for the success or lack thereof his research program is carried entirely on his own shoulders. Consequently, if he's wrong about the best way to proceed, he'll be the one that has to deal with his failures, NOT you! The last thing a PI needs is having to convince yet another person to do things the way he wants to do them. Especially if it's the PI's money being spent on equipment the PI will be using.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
You could use Win2008 in desktop mode. It's vista from the other end... starts with everything switched off and you enable only what you need.
It's actually quite snappy.. bit of a memory hog but not too bad, and would have made a worthy successor to XP if it had been released in that form in the first place.
Like my customer that wanted to pipe his rush limbaugh stream through the house. to his airport express on his whole house audio system.
Installing airfoil and running it gives a big vista "YOU ARE A MEDIA THIEF!!! HELP! HELP!" warning message.
It still works because airfoil get's around the silly Vista protected audio path, but it angers this very rich man.
I told him that he should consider downgrading to XP or moving to a Mac as Vista does nothing for him except get in his way.
He called us last friday looking for a company t hat can downgrade all his machines to XP. I sold him a raft of OEM XP Pro licenses and the required hardware to make it legal to downgrade them, and a phone number of a very good tech that can do it for him without loss of data.
I'm guessing they will never upgrade to Vista at the company he owns now....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Not necessarily. MacOS X, 10.2 was faster than 10.1, and 10.3 faster than 10.2, on the same hardware. It wasn't until 10.4 that you actually started seeing a performance hit on G3 and slower G4 computers.
In any event, I'm not sure that I'd call the jump from 10.1 to 10.2 to 10.3 'major iterations'.
In any event, I'm sure you don't know what you're talking about. The full list of features in each iteration was astounding. The difference between 10.1 and 10.2 was of the order of those between Win 2k and Win XP. The fact that they update minor version numbers doesn't change the fact that they add enough to call it a major iteration.
Don't believe me? Check out for yourself on wikipedia: 10.1 10.2 and 10.3. Thank you, come again.
Of Code And Men
If Vista were actually doing more for the user than XP, then people wouldn't be quite so upset.
Vista is more secure than XP. Unfortunately, people it turns out, really don't give a shit about security.
or the extra pseudo-security features that don't really do anything,
Forcing legions of inept users to not run as administrator is not pseudo-security.
I'll concede that some the warnings amount to pseudo-security, but the reality is that Vista is much more secure than XP. Signed drivers, the inability to put administrator items into your startup, and a whack of other measures all significantly hardened Vista to a damned LOT of the XP malware out there. Unfortunately it also broke a bunch of shoddily written legitimate apps, and users care more about running that crap than security.
since there are still exploits from the Win2K days that work on an out-of-the-box Vista install
Vista is much more secure than XP. Its not remotely impregnable, but it could be considered to be like a police armor compared to XP/2K's T-shirt and short-shorts.
But the bigger problem for windows isn't remote exploits, its its own users. Windows is a victim of its own success, the malware ecosystem for windows is unique.
Even if Windows were impregnable, due to its marketshare, it would still be the dominant target for exploits that rely on the meat using the PC. So Vista is challenged not only with being secure, but with protecting users from themselves... which has led to Vista being tasked with the impossible.
But give it time, there is nothing about OSX or Linux that makes it more secure against idiots installing keyloggers, rootkits, and other malware into their systems. If they ever have the same sizeable legions of inept users then the malware authors will target them too.
But give it time, there is nothing about OSX or Linux that makes it more secure against idiots installing keyloggers, rootkits, and other malware into their systems. If they ever have the same sizeable legions of inept users then the malware authors will target them too.
I usually try not to be inflammatory but are you smoking crack? XP is a member of the Microsoft OS Family. All work on it from 1985 to 1993 or so was based around the fact it was to be a non-networked, single user machine. Anytime there as a trade off between speed, ease of use and security. Well, security lost. After 1993 they tacked networking on top of that, then in the early 2000s they started trying to combat the internet and the bad security rep they had.
Since Microsoft OS's have to support legacy apps and still contain plenty of old code. It is like a building with no locks on doors, windows or elevators on the first 5 floors, only above that point. If someone lands on the helopad on top, it is all locked down and takes some work to get into. If someone arrives at ground level they automatically own the first 5 floors.
Both Linux and MacOS are based on Unix. An operating system that was designed from day one to be networked, multi-user and have at least a modicum of security right from the start. Now with almost 40 years of security improvements.
MacOS and Linux have both learned from Microsoft's mistakes. The difference is MacOS and Linux have been able to leverage this knowledge and make things more secure and better. Microsoft can't. It is hamstrung by legacy compatibility.
There is also the Microsoft Monoculture. MacOS Suffers somewhat from this as well. Find an exploit in windows, and there is a good chance it can run on 2000, XP, Vista and Seven. Find an exploit on Linux and well. It might work on Redhat but not Fedora. It may be a problem for Ubuntu, but not Slackware. Even if "Linux" owned 90% of the market. It still might be 35% Ubuntu, 30% Fedora based and 35% everything else. Heck, if you are paranoid, just run FreeBSD or Slackware. Still all of the great linux goodies but on a platform known for being secure or obscure. It is not likley someone is going "I am going to write an exploit and p0wn all of the Arch Linux users out there!"
Now to point. Most Linux users install software via their repositories. If it is not in the repository, they don't run it.
You so deserve to get p0wned if you download a java app, have to modify your .bashrc to include JAVAHOME. Or to do a apt-get build essential & configure & make & make installl.
Tell them to remember, synaptic good, gdebi bad.
Most linuxs force you to run as a non-privelaged user and don't bug you as much as Windows UAC does, so that you don't actually disable this security. Same with the Mac. Running as a non-privelaged user is easy to do. Doing admin things takes a password, but the system does not beat you over the head asking for authentication like Vista does.
vi +
The user experiences is in many ways more intuitive, but that's not the issue...
What people say "intuitive" they actually mean "familiar". They are familiar with the old interface, and don't want to change to the new one even if it is better. They use the same argument against linux or mac too.
That's pretty much true. I work for a company that a while back yanked out all of their Windows XP systems and replaced them with Ubuntu.
Here is how they did it. First they moved everyone off Microsoft Software, and replaced it with what they would find later on Ubuntu. (Firefox, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, & Pidgin primarily.). After a time they instructed people to "Expect things to be diffrent, and diffrent does not mean bad. Some things will not work the same way, some thing may not even work at all, but some things will work better. You need to approach this as if you would approach an alien landscape, it's not the same so don't expect it to be the same." After that we did the change all at once. There have been complaints, some muttering here and there, and there have been issues, but overall it has gone over really really well, and the entire company is just as productive and happy on Ubuntu now. Maybe even more productive, we are getting to a point where there are very few IT Support issues regarding client desktops.. nearly none are work related, most are due to flash and pulseaudio..
But that's the big thing about interfaces.. people who are not interested in computers don't want to learn about them, and they don't want to learn a new interface even if it is better. They will get frustrated if they can't find their "C:\" drive, even though the thought of labeling a drive mappings by alphabetical charters is, and always was, archaic, confusing, and idiotic.
If they at least expect everything to be diffrent, things go a lot better.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
You know,now that you mention it,I bet it drivers the servers nuts in those places that only serve Pepsi here in the South. For those that don't know "A coke" is the slang term everyone here uses for a cola,be it Coke,Pepsi,Dew etc. So everybody that walks through the door is going to say "and a coke" and I have even heard the old folks say "give me a Pepsi Coke" when they actually want a Pepsi. I know I always say "and a large coke" when frankly I don't give a damn WHAT kind of cola it is as long as it isn't that diet garbage.
Now for the article at hand: Is there anyone who is actually SURPRISED that MSFT was scared of OSX? Between all the confusion they created with Vista capable,ready,premium and then having to figure out if you actually bought it whether you need Basic,Home Premium,Business,Ultimate,etc(I know there is a couple more that fit in there somewhere) it is a total PITA when compared to OSX. No matter what Apple you buy,from the lowest mini to the most expensive Macbook Pro,it is all the same OS. Why MSFT couldn't have just went with the Home/Pro that worked for XP I'll never know. Although I'll have to admit that except for the ultra cheapo Walmart specials nearly every machine that crosses my desk runs XP Pro. XP Home always seemed to be that "also ran" that those that bought shitty machines from Best Buy ended up with.
But between the bugs,crazy system requirements,lack of real backwards compatibility(WTF was MSFT thinking? BC is their bread and butter!) lack of decent drivers,etc frankly the only call I have had for Vista is "Please remove this crap from my PC and put on XP" so it really doesn't surprise me that the guys in MSFT were worried before it even came out.
OT,but I'm at a dead end and I'm hoping one of my fellow slashdot IT guys can give me a hand: Does anyone know how to reset the BIOS password on a HP Pavilion ze5600 without having to rip the whole damned thing apart and yank the CMOS? I had a lady drop one off this morning,and apparently her daughter and her boyfriend were having a bad one,and in anger the girl locks the BIOS to keep him from spying on her,and then the dumbass forgot what she put in for a password. I figure I can rip the CMOS battery out and reset it that way,but this thing is a royal PITA to take apart and I'm hoping somebody here knows a better way. So has anyone here had exp with these HP Pavilion laptops?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Because you cant buy XP.. but OEM XP is still available for purchase. We bought him 20 copies off of newegg and bought the requisite mice to go with it to make them legal by microsoft's own terms.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm not trying to minimize the work of other, but point out that as long as you go to work and don't screw off you'll get paid every day and your annual raises.
Even if a prof shows up 7 days a week and works their ass of, It's still possible to not get funding, not get tenure, and loose your job after 6 years with no recourse other than to find a new job and relocate to another part of the country.
Professors are like subcontractors in the construction industry. They can make their own hours and have a lot of discretion as to their day to day activities, but the stakes are definitely higher than for hourly wage employees.
besides, would you want your mechanic dictating to you which car to buy, or your cable company dictating the TV's you can buy, you may want their suggestions but no one likes being dictated to as to which tools they can use. You may be the professional IT person, but without the researchers doing their work, their wouldn't be as much need for IT work.
If they believe a Mac/PC/Linux box to be the best tool for them, even after you've made your suggestions, then it's ultimately on their head. If choosing the wrong tool screws up their career, it won't affect your paycheck.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde