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Why Microsoft Shouldn't Worry About Cannibalizing Their Userbases
New submitter coyote_oww writes "A ComputerWorld analysis article suggests that Microsoft should stop worrying about one product cutting into another product's sales, and concentrate on putting their best foot foward regardless of the impact on product lines. The big impact would be the price of Windows: '... Microsoft must, at least in the main, sell devices based on lower prices. And the only significant component of a Windows-powered device that can be cut further — hardware margins are at or very near the bone, and have been for years — is the Windows license.' It's still possible they could sell Windows versions at different rates for different devices, but that could get hard to justify to consumers over the long haul."
What I want is a Linux that games as well as Windows. That just might come to be because of Valve. I could finally get rid of Windows if I can game on Linux reliably.
For full disclosure, I have started using Linux in the windows 98 era for the sole reasons that downloads and music playing kept being interrupted by Windows crashing. I setup two PC's, one for browsing, music playing and downloading which was an "old" linux box (basically my retired windows gaming PC) and a windows PC purely for games and productivity. Over the years, I shifted more and more productivity to Linux and it became my work station with the Windows PC being used purely for gaming.
And then Windows got better and Linux got worse. Of late it is Linux who crashes or doesn't do stuff for no good reason with no text config files to edit or log files to debug. While Windows since 7 is if not perfect it is at least marginally stable and only pulls the phantom network card trick only twice a year.
For example, I recently installed xubuntu and configured my NAS as samba shares defined in /etc/fstab. Should work right? No. On boot I have to do sudo mount -a and then watch error messages scroll past that the shares are already mounted (but not visible and/or accessible in any way). When they are mounted, if I play a movie file and then wait 1 minute, xubuntu seems to "loose" the share and its filemanagement app takes 5 minutes of freezing to do anything.
Windows 7 isn't much better, instantly forgetting a mapped drive if it can't find it for a split second but that is an old bug. Simple samba mounts in /etc/fstab USED to work in Linux. Then they broke it. Regular Ubuntu is even worse because there .gfvs or whatever that horror is called tries to dynamically mount stuff you already defined in fstab and then get it wrong.
Attach a android phone and Ubuntu shows how out of touch it is by trying to mount a camera. Nobody has camera's anymore, everyone does have a smart phone. If you want to attract casual users maybe you shouldn't throw away standard desktop design and instead focus on allowing people to easily hookup their phone?
Active nvidia drivers, loose your icons... why!?! What does the video driver have to do with your desktop theme?
Suspend computer, resume, open video file. Crash of desktop, what is this, Windows 95?
I am addicted to sloppy mouse focus, something neither OSX nor Windows can handle, so I am stuck but I am startling to like the experience less and less.
Mostly because stuff that used to work, now doesn't. It seems the PC in general is going backwards. Come on Intel, get some multi-headed video support, with display ports already. This is fucking 2013 why am I dealing with issues that were solved half a decade ago?
And here is another rant, why does every desktop on Linux insist on including its own crappy media player that doesn't handle any files and crashes on 99% of files when there are two good reliable players available (vlc and mplayer).
The Linux culture of late seems to reason: App X is 80% complete, lets replace it with App Y which is 40% complete! Unity and Gnome 3 would have created far less outrage if they had been released when they had achieved full feature parity with Gnome 2. But they didn't. People had just gotten Gnome 2 setup to be workable and then it was replaced with a system that crashed, lacked basic features people had come to rely upon and only worked on a handful of machines.
That is like a 2 star Michelin restaurant just about to receive its 3rd star firing its kitchen staff and replacing them with monkeys and then wondering why their business went bankrupt. If these people ran a F1 race they would respond to a record setting test lap by rebuilding the car from scratch. With lego.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.