To me that if a failure then of Microsoft. There are always improvements that can be made which were not implemented. Win 3.0 does all the basics too if you run just 2 or 3 apps on a 2002 era computer.
In comparison, MacOSX has improved and gets new features while Windows 7 seems years behind in all but security with Mountain Lion finally gettng full ASLR that win 7 had. For the record I am not a Mac user or an Apple fan boi. In 10 years MacOSX improved security, integrated app store, icloud automatic backup and integration with the virtual file system so you can save files from any app, a much improved browser, much improved battery life and re-engineering to low power devices and laptops, applet integration, xpose and applet previews, document stacking at the bottom bar, voice dictation, GPS finding and integration (icalender gives off a reminder when it senses you are in the office etc), and probably a hundred other things that if I were a Mac user could quote you.
They provide incentive to upgrade. MS in comparison in 10 years has a better security model, much improved browser, cutier gpu graphics and that is about it. No wonder businesses like XP and do not see the hassle to upgrade. There are things that could entice business and consumers to upgrade like the Mac example above. Some are finally coming to light in Windows 8 but with METRO it is a no go.
Windows 7 sales suck as evident in marketshare. g.statcounter.com just finally showed Windows 7 take over 50% after 3 years of RC! That is terrible and is evident something is wrong. MS counts all sales as Windows 7 sales even if they use XP afterwards. Windows 98 was on its way out in 2002 if I remember properly but that was less than a year after XP came out. Not 3 years like now.
Vista really put MS in a pickle as they wasted time to fix it with Windows 7 rather than adding new features. MS needs to catch up as Mountain Lion does look sweet even if I hate Apple they are not sitting down without a fight.
Sharepoint is a success, it locks you into IE, Windows desktop, Windows server, IIS, SQL server, Exchange, Office, and probably a few products I have forgotten about.
That my friend is a failure that is now biting them in the ass. IE 6 is so proprietary it can't be replaced. If you have an intranet system where you have 300 use cases on it, vbscript that does god knows what to a SQL server (obsolete proprietary version that is incompatible with newer one), that also uses some VBA macros for Office 97/2000 that is not compatible with anything newer than 2003 you got a problem!
Worse, Office 2013 requires Exchange 2013. Now your solution also uses Excahnge 2003 which wont work with the newest. Your apis are not compatible with Windows 7 so now what?
The answer is stick with XP, IE 6, Office 2000, and do not pay MS money and sit on it with your thumb up your ass until 2014 then worry. This hurts Microsoft's revenues.... fyi newer sharepoint is compatible with all browsers, and IE 9 is standards compliant and a decent browser now. Problem is it is so decent it can't follow quirky IE 6 standards. MS did this hoping it would encourage people to upgrade but instead created more lockin and a fear of change to upgrade. WOW.
It is time they reaped what they sowed and yes that is part of the lost decade for MS. Windows 7 is ble in terms of marketshare for an OS that iwll be turning 3 soon. Windows XP, and Windows 95 and 98 grew much more in 3 years and took over the whole Windows market!
XP wasn't Vista either. Why didn't they just push out SP4? Oh, right. Money. The answer to any question that begins with "Why" is "Money".
Of course money. They are a business. It costs money to make service packs and newer versions of Windows offer the features anyway and of course people buying them support the costs for maintance and security.
The fact that you prefer XP in my opinion is a failure of Microsoft. In 10 years of development time they should show you something that makes you look at your ancient XP setup and say WTF its time to move on.
Still Windows 7 is a much more secure and up to date system and strongly encourage you to upgrade. Instant search, speed up on newer machines with quad cores, sata, and ssds alone. However, I do admit compared to MacOSX there is not much more innovation. Mountain Lion has tons of more features than 10.1 if you dig down and use it as a comparison. MS has a problem
3 years after Windows 7 went RC it should own 80% of the market or more. Not barely hitting 50% according to g.statcounter.com and even less with netappliances statistics!
Employers still prefer old XP and many are refusing to upgrade.
Slashdotters stuck on Windows may love it but it is not a smashing success either. Windows 7 should have MUCH higher share by now in 2012.
So doubling your revenues and net income is now considered a "lost decade"?
What the numbers show is Asia buying computers for their offices and factories for first time users. What the numbers do not show is people who stopped buying their products because their 10 year old versions are fine and no newer features motivate them enough to change.
Now since the market is saturated the revenue will slow to a trickle as well. Watch
XP was a piece of shit in the hands of everyone but Windows experts. Prone to malware, gradually degrading performance for no particular reason (requiring re-installs every 3-6 months), and an ugly, intrusive GUI. I really don't understand this new-found reverence of XP. It was a pile of poo, and nowhere near as good as any modern operating system.
You got used to it, I guess. But that didn't make it fine.
Human psychology to fear change. When shit hits the fan... cough VISTA... people then develop a fear and prefer to stay what is familiar. XP loyalists took our advice and it changed their mindset. Same idiots who said Win 7 = Vista SP1 before using it re-enforced how great XP was.
Now they do not want to leave as they have a learned behavior that you can stay ahead by fearing change and doing what they have been doing for 10 years.
Same principal applies to politics. Bush is looked up in a much more positive light for some who voted for Obama.
How many people still use XP and refuse to upgrade? How many OFfice 2003 users are out there? 10 years ago during Gates reign how many people still ran 10 year old office and operating systems? My point exactly.
MS is losing existing customers too and the expansion in Asia who are first time computer buyers hid the stagnation. Now since they all have computers revenue will reflect the stagnation as well. MS needs new areas to remain competitive or figure out how to make a new version of Windows sexy with loads of features that MacOSX has?
Windows 7 is years behind. The only thing MS did good at is ASLR security in which Mountain Lion finally caught up in. Apple is ahead in power usage, applet support (Metro is a joke and not integrated like MacOSX), social features, voice dictation, cloud features, and so on. Windows 7 is just well stable and dull and lacking in comparison.
As an XP loyalists on one of the tech forums said. It is XP with 3x the ram requirements with a pretty interface. Why upgrade?
Looked at the last place I interviewed... all XP no plans to upgrade. Last consulting gig they were just finally upgrading to Win 7 almost 3 years after it was released. Before that a huge migration I was contracted for... for XP SP 2 still and IE 7 upgrade from IE 6.
Time machine back 10 years...
How many employers still standardized on Windows 2.0/3.0 and DOS 5 still? How many users were Windows 3.0 die hard loyalists who hated XP and refused to upgrade? How many people still thought mice were a fad and offered no business value in 2002?
How many intranet apps optimized for NCSA Mosiac in 2002 that were being developed? How many times did people buy new computers and newer versions of Office back in 2002?
See a problem here?
The only reasons MS apologists can point to sales increases is because of China and India entering the 21st century from the dark ages. That is it and not because people bought new Windows every 3 years because MS was so gosh darn innovative.
I did the opposite and used Linux in a virtualbox. I like aero and play SWTOR occasionally and need real graphics for photoshop or other graphics work for a site I am designing. Hardware acceleration sucked on Linux the last time I looked. I left it in March 2011 so maybe things improved since then?
Chrome and FF update too often for Linux which is frustrating. If all you need is server power and scripts then you do not need to use it as a host as the desktop with eye candy stuff should be the host while the other is the guest.
I do miss things about Linux. Windows is well kind of like a bla office all boring and corporate with eye piercing flourscent lights compared to Linux. But Mate does not have the resources nor support that Gnome 2 once did. I find that unacceptable as a gui and gnome 3 as well as Firefox 4 pushed me back to Windows.
But hey it works and does that much easier for desktop usage.What a shame
No the banks got in for like $7 - $15 a share depending on how big you were before it went IPO. THe mom and pops are the ones who had to buy at $38 on opening day.
That should be illegal but Morgan Stanley would still make billions if they sold all their shares today even at the lower price.
Zuckerberg did the lying here too. Bankers rip each other off and Zuckerburg did too.
However, because of flash systems and insider information the banks still gain money even if it losses value. THis is because they can short them and sell them microseconds before the value goes down and then actually buys them a few micro seconds later at a much less price and skim the profits etc.
Zuvkerberg might have lost 7 billion today but he does not ever have to work another day in his life if he doesn't want too.
How can you possibly say it was priced too high? If all of the shares Facebook was selling were bought by someone at $38, then that was the correct price. If they set it at $25 then the price would still be exactly where it is today but Zuckerberg and his friends would have made a lot less money.
The price the stock started at was set to make the current stakeholders the most money possible, not to help make early investors the most money possible.
So let me get this straight? According to you then the housing market was not overvalued 6 years ago? Pets.com and isellyoucrap.com were also valued fairly and accurately because the IPO for these companies were like $70 a share?
Today the point of the IPO is solely to make the investors rich. Nothing else.
Now if they were required to keep their shares and companies were forced to pay back full dividends at fair market value then I would agree with you.
Worse, they get insider information and get those same shares for 1/4th the price you and I get them and can use supercomputers to flash the value in a highspeed insider trading so you and I can never win. Tell me how they are there to help a company then and not to take other peoples' money?
"I think Zuckerberg was right to stay out of a public offering, and he should have.
There are too many "yes" men and shills in the public offering arena, patting you on the back while drawing a blade.
Stock markets... pppfftttt, more like legalized gambling."
I disagree as he just got a $20 billion dollar paycheck and to top it off Zuckerberg smooched them into letting him keep a majority stake so he is unfirable too!
Ethically it is wrong and I would have trouble doing it and probably would 90% of those reading this. The bankers are not the ones with the blades here but is Zuckerberg.
The whole point of going IPO is to gain funds to expand your business. Those who provide the funds get a piece of the pie in return. Facebook already has its servers, its employees, and is done expanding. Zuckerberg did that himself with a few private partners so he could keep a majority stake and then claimed he needed more money and kept it to himself. Wow
Seems he should have a career in Wall Street as they always try to blade each other there and he did an excellent job. Unless I am missing something of course and he really does plan to use $20 billion to expand and return more back than was spent?
What happens if you switch the Excel users to Linux running LibraOffice?
Your calls would go through the roof asking for some obscure finance and statistics functions in Excel and where did they go in LibraOffice etc. I found these advanced Excel users the hardest to support for that reason as they know more than you with that product.
It is nice if they all ran just emacs, engineering software, or terminals into some custom web app, but your cost savings end with the user apps. The City of Munich switched back to Windows for these reasons. The Office pros had a fit and raised support costs higher than it was on Windows and were relieved to go back to good old trusted XP and Office 2003 because of habbit.
They sound like awful people. Why do you want to do this?
The vast majority hates and fears change. If you want to argue that the vast majority is awful, I can get behind that... But let's just be clear on what we're saying here.
People only tolerate change when their is a reason. People also tend to fear change more if they had bad experiences. Vista for example is what caused XP to be more ingrained. Not because the length of time of XP usage but because it taught people to fear Windows 7.
Now people only replace cars if they want to or need too. If the car works fine people would fight tooth and nail to change. If it keeps having issues then they get excited about a newer car.
Since XP still works and IT works behind the scenes at work to make it appear flawless you are going to get resistance. Like, how much does it cost? What am I going to get out of it? What?! We are only changing because MS wants us too and this is the only version of Windows that works fine!
Linux is much more radical and from what I read those who tired to upgrade end up downgrading back to Windows because of Office users grabing pitch forks and torches. The city of Munich is one failure. Unless it is terminal work you need a very good reason to upgrade and Office is a great reason to stick with Windows as much as we hate the OS itself.
The issue I have is if I need to buy a new system and have to pay not once, but twice for Windows.
Worse, I pay the $120+, not the $25 the OEM gets as his discount all for the priveldge of using a desktop oriented system if I do not want a tablet. FUCK YOU MS.
No Linux is not an option. It doesn't have PS, SWTOR, Wow, Dreamweaver, nor Office. Sorry the Gimp is not photoshop and I need my documents to look proper on someone elses computer so I do not look incompetent. That requires Offices then. Website development requires testing with IE too so that ties me into WIndows.
I hate ludities and it hurts consumers who buy the latest games and use the cutting edge browsers. XP is keeping old IE making our phones give better browsing experiences with gradients, graphical effects, and other things that webmasters can't include to satisfy IE 8 users. It creates a fear mentality so people keep their P4s with intel graphics so my games can't be optimized to take advantage of my video card fully. Can't leave directx 9 users out... bla bla.
Now I will become this luddite myself with Windows 7 and I hate that. I do not want to be running Win 7 in 2010. If you told me in 2002 that people would still be using XP and systems similiar to the one I had I would laugh at you and then want to shoot myself if I were told I still would be using XP in 10 years.
Well, if the Windows branding and marketing folks are doing their job right, people won't want to switch systems even if all that changes is the name and logo. People are very tribal in nature, and this effect is very strong; especially if the users have seen many versions of Windows and not much of anything else.
Look at the XP loyalists out there? They are so creatures of habit that they actually think Windows 7 is some radical change and refuse to leave because it doesn't mimic it exactly or has the same fisher price blue and green colors (the theme I disabled during the XP era).
Office 2010 I can see people freaking out and sticking with Office 2003. After relearning it and how keyboard friendly it was after a month I could never go back. Every function I can access in seconds with the keyboard. I guess if you are not willing to learn new ways to do things and use the old way with finding programs with the mouse with win 7 like we did in XP and using the mouse in office 2010 then it will appear inferior to XP/Office 2003.
Point is the geeks who advocate Linux should do IT support first. These users will whine and give a bad performance review at any slightest change! THey are the ones fighting to stick with IE 6 because their crapware Seibel app they used for 10 years works FINE THANK YOU VERY MUCH etc. IF they have to learn something new then IT didn't do its job etc.
Re:Desktops were also locked down under
on
Linux 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
the politics of old school Unix hackers. It is the kind of politics that keeps distros from really standardizing on a GUI, and also results in oddities like the Linux Foundation having an SDK for mobile, but none for desktop. Likewise, Android has an SDK but Ubuntu (and all the other desktop distros) do not.
Nothing a Unix could solve. The issue is not technical in nature. It is business. IBM was the defecto standard that decided which platform app makers should use and what software customers should buy. They were a monopoly and business does not mind being locked in unlike consumers.
DOS was the only way to run the software being made and the software being made had to run on DOS to sell. Because that is what everyone else used. Everyone else only used that because everyone else used it!
Steve Jobs himself when he returned told Apple that the Mac is dead and Microsoft won. Time to milk the mac for all its worth and focus on newer things. Fastforward today and he did that pretty well as the next logical conclusion after microcomputers were phones. WinCE didn't have the requirements for compatibility PCs needed so Apple won by making a superior product. Android makes a great product too and is going head to head.
Sorry Linux guys Bill Gates and IBM beat you too it many decades ago and that is the bad news. The good news is like the mainframe tablets and phones are replacing it and this is where a winner has not been standardized yet. Just HTML 5 and the platforms that container the web applets.
Linux and Unix did take over the minicomputer market though. VMS is all but gone except for some legacy systems that are very old.
Instant search is a wonderful tool. Basically, it is always searching and indexing your hard drive, in order to save you several nanoseconds on the rare occasion that you actually need to search for something.
Instant search, or indexing, is among the first bits of trash that I turn off, if and when I install a Windows operating system.
Would you leave your car idling in the garage all night long, so that when you come out in the morning, you won't need to defrost the windshield?
That was true with Vista. Windows 7 is much much less aggresive. If you are not saving files it does not continually re-index. On a brand new system it may do the search for a few seconds. My laptop which constantly swapped with Vista hardly ever pings the hard drive like mad anymore with indexing. It only does so when it gets low on ram.
I stuck with Vista and held my nose on this machine because I had 90 files school and work related and when taking notes studying on my own I would lose track of things discussed in class and in my own notes from lecture. Instant search was a life saver and the number one feature for business use over XP in my opinion. They are great for accountants and sales people too with lots of files.
Turn it on for a day? After 2 minutes it wont peg your HD that much at all. Vista just did a very crappy job with it.
I've had linux on 4 machines (my workstation, my g/f's workstation, my internally-facing server, my externally-facing server) for the last decade or more. I've not compiled a kernel for them once in that time. What gives you the impression that die-hard linux users are obsessed with compiling their own kernels?
And it's not that I'm incapable of configuring and compiling the linux kernel - I spend the last 3+ years compiling the linux kernel many times a day as part of my $DAYJOB.
However, you are right, grandma probably does have a fairly limited technical capability, so an iPad would probably be preferable for her.
I had to recompile the kernel all the time on my laptop with Ubuntu. Apt-Get update would put a patch that would cause my wifi to go in and out everytime. This is because Linux lacks an ABI. So I would have to apply the patch and manually recompile it to get it to work. Then the patch was incompatible with the newer libc library and I had to put WIndows back on it:-(
I can't recommend this to a grandma for that reason. Linux requires a ton of work unless your hardware is specifically designed for it or you are lucky. A tablet is perfect as it makes it easier to browse the web, take photos, see her grandson, find cookie recipes etc. Linux is great for servers and where it belongs in my opinion.
Grandma: What is an XFCE? Fix my desktop I can't find the blue E! Where are my basket weaving letters on the desktop? Why can't i minimize a Window etc.
I do not mean this as flame-bait at all. Just find it irritating someone mentioned linux and was serious. I switched back to Windows last year as I was tired of Ubuntu breaking something in an upgrade and I hated the new crippled gui's.
Something simple, easy, and wont get infected. A tablet fits the bill and easily enables grandma to do this. PCs do get infected far too easily even if you do not click on stuff. Yes, Linux is much much better in this regard but it does have its issue and I had to recompile the kernel often on my laptop due to my wifi requiring a flag and a patch for it. The lack of an ABI means an apt-get update can hose it.
Hairyfeet refuses to stock Linux on his desktops he sells for this reason as calls went through the roof during updates. Grandma shouldn't have to deal with that. A mac is an option too but is expensive and more complicated than a tablet.
My father was a programmer in the 1970s. He hired the guy who invented the BBS for a project he was working on for an IBM 370 mainframe. He was a rebel and was one of the first IT managers to recommend switching from mainframe to IBM XT PCs with DOS before it was fashionable.
What does he prefer to use today? An IPAD. He knows how to turn on his aging XP machine but he does not know the newest fads and is paranoid about malware but is smart enough to use Firefox after reading about it in the New York Times. He is considered a neophyte today and does not know what HTML 5 is nor cares. He does not know hold old XP is and refused to upgrade. He can barely work Itunes. He doesn't need to learn or know anymore.
An IPAD lets him browse the news and email. That is all he needs and he likes the fact that he can take everywhere and it is much faster and less complicated than a desktop. Easy, simple, secure.
Your brain wipes that stuff when you no longer use it or have a need to anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
To me that if a failure then of Microsoft. There are always improvements that can be made which were not implemented. Win 3.0 does all the basics too if you run just 2 or 3 apps on a 2002 era computer.
In comparison, MacOSX has improved and gets new features while Windows 7 seems years behind in all but security with Mountain Lion finally gettng full ASLR that win 7 had. For the record I am not a Mac user or an Apple fan boi. In 10 years MacOSX improved security, integrated app store, icloud automatic backup and integration with the virtual file system so you can save files from any app, a much improved browser, much improved battery life and re-engineering to low power devices and laptops, applet integration, xpose and applet previews, document stacking at the bottom bar, voice dictation, GPS finding and integration (icalender gives off a reminder when it senses you are in the office etc), and probably a hundred other things that if I were a Mac user could quote you.
They provide incentive to upgrade. MS in comparison in 10 years has a better security model, much improved browser, cutier gpu graphics and that is about it. No wonder businesses like XP and do not see the hassle to upgrade. There are things that could entice business and consumers to upgrade like the Mac example above. Some are finally coming to light in Windows 8 but with METRO it is a no go.
Windows 7 sales suck as evident in marketshare. g.statcounter.com just finally showed Windows 7 take over 50% after 3 years of RC! That is terrible and is evident something is wrong. MS counts all sales as Windows 7 sales even if they use XP afterwards. Windows 98 was on its way out in 2002 if I remember properly but that was less than a year after XP came out. Not 3 years like now.
Vista really put MS in a pickle as they wasted time to fix it with Windows 7 rather than adding new features. MS needs to catch up as Mountain Lion does look sweet even if I hate Apple they are not sitting down without a fight.
Sharepoint is a success, it locks you into IE, Windows desktop, Windows server, IIS, SQL server, Exchange, Office, and probably a few products I have forgotten about.
That my friend is a failure that is now biting them in the ass. IE 6 is so proprietary it can't be replaced. If you have an intranet system where you have 300 use cases on it, vbscript that does god knows what to a SQL server (obsolete proprietary version that is incompatible with newer one), that also uses some VBA macros for Office 97/2000 that is not compatible with anything newer than 2003 you got a problem!
Worse, Office 2013 requires Exchange 2013. Now your solution also uses Excahnge 2003 which wont work with the newest. Your apis are not compatible with Windows 7 so now what?
The answer is stick with XP, IE 6, Office 2000, and do not pay MS money and sit on it with your thumb up your ass until 2014 then worry. This hurts Microsoft's revenues. ... fyi newer sharepoint is compatible with all browsers, and IE 9 is standards compliant and a decent browser now. Problem is it is so decent it can't follow quirky IE 6 standards. MS did this hoping it would encourage people to upgrade but instead created more lockin and a fear of change to upgrade. WOW.
It is time they reaped what they sowed and yes that is part of the lost decade for MS. Windows 7 is ble in terms of marketshare for an OS that iwll be turning 3 soon. Windows XP, and Windows 95 and 98 grew much more in 3 years and took over the whole Windows market!
XP wasn't Vista either. Why didn't they just push out SP4? Oh, right. Money. The answer to any question that begins with "Why" is "Money".
Of course money. They are a business. It costs money to make service packs and newer versions of Windows offer the features anyway and of course people buying them support the costs for maintance and security.
The fact that you prefer XP in my opinion is a failure of Microsoft. In 10 years of development time they should show you something that makes you look at your ancient XP setup and say WTF its time to move on.
Still Windows 7 is a much more secure and up to date system and strongly encourage you to upgrade. Instant search, speed up on newer machines with quad cores, sata, and ssds alone. However, I do admit compared to MacOSX there is not much more innovation. Mountain Lion has tons of more features than 10.1 if you dig down and use it as a comparison. MS has a problem
About Windows 7 ...
3 years after Windows 7 went RC it should own 80% of the market or more. Not barely hitting 50% according to g.statcounter.com and even less with netappliances statistics!
Employers still prefer old XP and many are refusing to upgrade.
Slashdotters stuck on Windows may love it but it is not a smashing success either. Windows 7 should have MUCH higher share by now in 2012.
So doubling your revenues and net income is now considered a "lost decade"?
What the numbers show is Asia buying computers for their offices and factories for first time users. What the numbers do not show is people who stopped buying their products because their 10 year old versions are fine and no newer features motivate them enough to change.
Now since the market is saturated the revenue will slow to a trickle as well. Watch
XP was a piece of shit in the hands of everyone but Windows experts. Prone to malware, gradually degrading performance for no particular reason (requiring re-installs every 3-6 months), and an ugly, intrusive GUI. I really don't understand this new-found reverence of XP. It was a pile of poo, and nowhere near as good as any modern operating system.
You got used to it, I guess. But that didn't make it fine.
Human psychology to fear change. When shit hits the fan ... cough VISTA ... people then develop a fear and prefer to stay what is familiar. XP loyalists took our advice and it changed their mindset. Same idiots who said Win 7 = Vista SP1 before using it re-enforced how great XP was.
Now they do not want to leave as they have a learned behavior that you can stay ahead by fearing change and doing what they have been doing for 10 years.
Same principal applies to politics. Bush is looked up in a much more positive light for some who voted for Obama.
Fine lets look at Microsofts bread and butter?
How many people still use XP and refuse to upgrade? How many OFfice 2003 users are out there? 10 years ago during Gates reign how many people still ran 10 year old office and operating systems? My point exactly.
MS is losing existing customers too and the expansion in Asia who are first time computer buyers hid the stagnation. Now since they all have computers revenue will reflect the stagnation as well. MS needs new areas to remain competitive or figure out how to make a new version of Windows sexy with loads of features that MacOSX has?
Windows 7 is years behind. The only thing MS did good at is ASLR security in which Mountain Lion finally caught up in. Apple is ahead in power usage, applet support (Metro is a joke and not integrated like MacOSX), social features, voice dictation, cloud features, and so on. Windows 7 is just well stable and dull and lacking in comparison.
As an XP loyalists on one of the tech forums said. It is XP with 3x the ram requirements with a pretty interface. Why upgrade?
Seems like XP and 7 did quite well.
Really?
Looked at the last place I interviewed ... all XP no plans to upgrade. Last consulting gig they were just finally upgrading to Win 7 almost 3 years after it was released. Before that a huge migration I was contracted for ... for XP SP 2 still and IE 7 upgrade from IE 6.
Time machine back 10 years ...
How many employers still standardized on Windows 2.0/3.0 and DOS 5 still? How many users were Windows 3.0 die hard loyalists who hated XP and refused to upgrade? How many people still thought mice were a fad and offered no business value in 2002?
How many intranet apps optimized for NCSA Mosiac in 2002 that were being developed? How many times did people buy new computers and newer versions of Office back in 2002?
See a problem here?
The only reasons MS apologists can point to sales increases is because of China and India entering the 21st century from the dark ages. That is it and not because people bought new Windows every 3 years because MS was so gosh darn innovative.
The goal of the company is to raise its shareprice. Not make more money
I hear you.
I did the opposite and used Linux in a virtualbox. I like aero and play SWTOR occasionally and need real graphics for photoshop or other graphics work for a site I am designing. Hardware acceleration sucked on Linux the last time I looked. I left it in March 2011 so maybe things improved since then?
Chrome and FF update too often for Linux which is frustrating. If all you need is server power and scripts then you do not need to use it as a host as the desktop with eye candy stuff should be the host while the other is the guest.
I do miss things about Linux. Windows is well kind of like a bla office all boring and corporate with eye piercing flourscent lights compared to Linux. But Mate does not have the resources nor support that Gnome 2 once did. I find that unacceptable as a gui and gnome 3 as well as Firefox 4 pushed me back to Windows.
But hey it works and does that much easier for desktop usage.What a shame
No the banks got in for like $7 - $15 a share depending on how big you were before it went IPO. THe mom and pops are the ones who had to buy at $38 on opening day.
That should be illegal but Morgan Stanley would still make billions if they sold all their shares today even at the lower price.
Zuckerberg did the lying here too. Bankers rip each other off and Zuckerburg did too.
However, because of flash systems and insider information the banks still gain money even if it losses value. THis is because they can short them and sell them microseconds before the value goes down and then actually buys them a few micro seconds later at a much less price and skim the profits etc.
Zuvkerberg might have lost 7 billion today but he does not ever have to work another day in his life if he doesn't want too.
They priced it too high.
How can you possibly say it was priced too high? If all of the shares Facebook was selling were bought by someone at $38, then that was the correct price. If they set it at $25 then the price would still be exactly where it is today but Zuckerberg and his friends would have made a lot less money.
The price the stock started at was set to make the current stakeholders the most money possible, not to help make early investors the most money possible.
So let me get this straight? According to you then the housing market was not overvalued 6 years ago? Pets.com and isellyoucrap.com were also valued fairly and accurately because the IPO for these companies were like $70 a share?
Today the point of the IPO is solely to make the investors rich. Nothing else.
Now if they were required to keep their shares and companies were forced to pay back full dividends at fair market value then I would agree with you.
Worse, they get insider information and get those same shares for 1/4th the price you and I get them and can use supercomputers to flash the value in a highspeed insider trading so you and I can never win. Tell me how they are there to help a company then and not to take other peoples' money?
"I think Zuckerberg was right to stay out of a public offering, and he should have.
There are too many "yes" men and shills in the public offering arena, patting you on the back while drawing a blade.
Stock markets... pppfftttt, more like legalized gambling."
I disagree as he just got a $20 billion dollar paycheck and to top it off Zuckerberg smooched them into letting him keep a majority stake so he is unfirable too!
Ethically it is wrong and I would have trouble doing it and probably would 90% of those reading this. The bankers are not the ones with the blades here but is Zuckerberg.
The whole point of going IPO is to gain funds to expand your business. Those who provide the funds get a piece of the pie in return. Facebook already has its servers, its employees, and is done expanding. Zuckerberg did that himself with a few private partners so he could keep a majority stake and then claimed he needed more money and kept it to himself. Wow
Seems he should have a career in Wall Street as they always try to blade each other there and he did an excellent job. Unless I am missing something of course and he really does plan to use $20 billion to expand and return more back than was spent?
What happens if you switch the Excel users to Linux running LibraOffice?
Your calls would go through the roof asking for some obscure finance and statistics functions in Excel and where did they go in LibraOffice etc. I found these advanced Excel users the hardest to support for that reason as they know more than you with that product.
It is nice if they all ran just emacs, engineering software, or terminals into some custom web app, but your cost savings end with the user apps. The City of Munich switched back to Windows for these reasons. The Office pros had a fit and raised support costs higher than it was on Windows and were relieved to go back to good old trusted XP and Office 2003 because of habbit.
They sound like awful people. Why do you want to do this?
The vast majority hates and fears change. If you want to argue that the vast majority is awful, I can get behind that... But let's just be clear on what we're saying here.
People only tolerate change when their is a reason. People also tend to fear change more if they had bad experiences. Vista for example is what caused XP to be more ingrained. Not because the length of time of XP usage but because it taught people to fear Windows 7.
Now people only replace cars if they want to or need too. If the car works fine people would fight tooth and nail to change. If it keeps having issues then they get excited about a newer car.
Since XP still works and IT works behind the scenes at work to make it appear flawless you are going to get resistance. Like, how much does it cost? What am I going to get out of it? What?! We are only changing because MS wants us too and this is the only version of Windows that works fine!
Linux is much more radical and from what I read those who tired to upgrade end up downgrading back to Windows because of Office users grabing pitch forks and torches. The city of Munich is one failure. Unless it is terminal work you need a very good reason to upgrade and Office is a great reason to stick with Windows as much as we hate the OS itself.
Correction my finger slipped 2010=2020 as in I do not want to be running Win 7 in 2020.
The issue I have is if I need to buy a new system and have to pay not once, but twice for Windows.
Worse, I pay the $120+, not the $25 the OEM gets as his discount all for the priveldge of using a desktop oriented system if I do not want a tablet. FUCK YOU MS.
No Linux is not an option. It doesn't have PS, SWTOR, Wow, Dreamweaver, nor Office. Sorry the Gimp is not photoshop and I need my documents to look proper on someone elses computer so I do not look incompetent. That requires Offices then. Website development requires testing with IE too so that ties me into WIndows.
I hate ludities and it hurts consumers who buy the latest games and use the cutting edge browsers. XP is keeping old IE making our phones give better browsing experiences with gradients, graphical effects, and other things that webmasters can't include to satisfy IE 8 users. It creates a fear mentality so people keep their P4s with intel graphics so my games can't be optimized to take advantage of my video card fully. Can't leave directx 9 users out ... bla bla.
Now I will become this luddite myself with Windows 7 and I hate that. I do not want to be running Win 7 in 2010. If you told me in 2002 that people would still be using XP and systems similiar to the one I had I would laugh at you and then want to shoot myself if I were told I still would be using XP in 10 years.
Well, if the Windows branding and marketing folks are doing their job right, people won't want to switch systems even if all that changes is the name and logo. People are very tribal in nature, and this effect is very strong; especially if the users have seen many versions of Windows and not much of anything else.
Look at the XP loyalists out there? They are so creatures of habit that they actually think Windows 7 is some radical change and refuse to leave because it doesn't mimic it exactly or has the same fisher price blue and green colors (the theme I disabled during the XP era).
Office 2010 I can see people freaking out and sticking with Office 2003. After relearning it and how keyboard friendly it was after a month I could never go back. Every function I can access in seconds with the keyboard. I guess if you are not willing to learn new ways to do things and use the old way with finding programs with the mouse with win 7 like we did in XP and using the mouse in office 2010 then it will appear inferior to XP/Office 2003.
Point is the geeks who advocate Linux should do IT support first. These users will whine and give a bad performance review at any slightest change! THey are the ones fighting to stick with IE 6 because their crapware Seibel app they used for 10 years works FINE THANK YOU VERY MUCH etc. IF they have to learn something new then IT didn't do its job etc.
the politics of old school Unix hackers. It is the kind of politics that keeps distros from really standardizing on a GUI, and also results in oddities like the Linux Foundation having an SDK for mobile, but none for desktop. Likewise, Android has an SDK but Ubuntu (and all the other desktop distros) do not.
Nothing a Unix could solve. The issue is not technical in nature. It is business. IBM was the defecto standard that decided which platform app makers should use and what software customers should buy. They were a monopoly and business does not mind being locked in unlike consumers.
DOS was the only way to run the software being made and the software being made had to run on DOS to sell. Because that is what everyone else used. Everyone else only used that because everyone else used it!
Steve Jobs himself when he returned told Apple that the Mac is dead and Microsoft won. Time to milk the mac for all its worth and focus on newer things. Fastforward today and he did that pretty well as the next logical conclusion after microcomputers were phones. WinCE didn't have the requirements for compatibility PCs needed so Apple won by making a superior product. Android makes a great product too and is going head to head.
Sorry Linux guys Bill Gates and IBM beat you too it many decades ago and that is the bad news. The good news is like the mainframe tablets and phones are replacing it and this is where a winner has not been standardized yet. Just HTML 5 and the platforms that container the web applets.
Linux and Unix did take over the minicomputer market though. VMS is all but gone except for some legacy systems that are very old.
Instant search is a wonderful tool. Basically, it is always searching and indexing your hard drive, in order to save you several nanoseconds on the rare occasion that you actually need to search for something.
Instant search, or indexing, is among the first bits of trash that I turn off, if and when I install a Windows operating system.
Would you leave your car idling in the garage all night long, so that when you come out in the morning, you won't need to defrost the windshield?
That was true with Vista. Windows 7 is much much less aggresive. If you are not saving files it does not continually re-index. On a brand new system it may do the search for a few seconds. My laptop which constantly swapped with Vista hardly ever pings the hard drive like mad anymore with indexing. It only does so when it gets low on ram.
I stuck with Vista and held my nose on this machine because I had 90 files school and work related and when taking notes studying on my own I would lose track of things discussed in class and in my own notes from lecture. Instant search was a life saver and the number one feature for business use over XP in my opinion. They are great for accountants and sales people too with lots of files.
Turn it on for a day? After 2 minutes it wont peg your HD that much at all. Vista just did a very crappy job with it.
I've had linux on 4 machines (my workstation, my g/f's workstation, my internally-facing server, my externally-facing server) for the last decade or more. I've not compiled a kernel for them once in that time. What gives you the impression that die-hard linux users are obsessed with compiling their own kernels?
And it's not that I'm incapable of configuring and compiling the linux kernel - I spend the last 3+ years compiling the linux kernel many times a day as part of my $DAYJOB.
However, you are right, grandma probably does have a fairly limited technical capability, so an iPad would probably be preferable for her.
I had to recompile the kernel all the time on my laptop with Ubuntu. Apt-Get update would put a patch that would cause my wifi to go in and out everytime. This is because Linux lacks an ABI. So I would have to apply the patch and manually recompile it to get it to work. Then the patch was incompatible with the newer libc library and I had to put WIndows back on it :-(
I can't recommend this to a grandma for that reason. Linux requires a ton of work unless your hardware is specifically designed for it or you are lucky. A tablet is perfect as it makes it easier to browse the web, take photos, see her grandson, find cookie recipes etc. Linux is great for servers and where it belongs in my opinion.
Grandma: What is an XFCE? Fix my desktop I can't find the blue E! Where are my basket weaving letters on the desktop? Why can't i minimize a Window etc.
I do not mean this as flame-bait at all. Just find it irritating someone mentioned linux and was serious. I switched back to Windows last year as I was tired of Ubuntu breaking something in an upgrade and I hated the new crippled gui's.
Something simple, easy, and wont get infected. A tablet fits the bill and easily enables grandma to do this. PCs do get infected far too easily even if you do not click on stuff. Yes, Linux is much much better in this regard but it does have its issue and I had to recompile the kernel often on my laptop due to my wifi requiring a flag and a patch for it. The lack of an ABI means an apt-get update can hose it.
Hairyfeet refuses to stock Linux on his desktops he sells for this reason as calls went through the roof during updates. Grandma shouldn't have to deal with that. A mac is an option too but is expensive and more complicated than a tablet.
My father was a programmer in the 1970s. He hired the guy who invented the BBS for a project he was working on for an IBM 370 mainframe. He was a rebel and was one of the first IT managers to recommend switching from mainframe to IBM XT PCs with DOS before it was fashionable.
What does he prefer to use today? An IPAD. He knows how to turn on his aging XP machine but he does not know the newest fads and is paranoid about malware but is smart enough to use Firefox after reading about it in the New York Times. He is considered a neophyte today and does not know what HTML 5 is nor cares. He does not know hold old XP is and refused to upgrade. He can barely work Itunes. He doesn't need to learn or know anymore.
An IPAD lets him browse the news and email. That is all he needs and he likes the fact that he can take everywhere and it is much faster and less complicated than a desktop. Easy, simple, secure.
Your brain wipes that stuff when you no longer use it or have a need to anymore.