> With many expecting Microsoft's upcoming end-of-support for XP to cause a security nightmare of unsupported Windows devices in the wild, it seems a good time to ask how many users may fall into the category of wanting an upgrade, but being priced out by expensive but necessary third-party software.
How about the users who don't feel the need to buy a new version just because MS crapped one out?
...is it really that they can't afford it or is it that they're just cheap? Maybe I'm suffering from the "all doctors are rich" stereotype but if you needed to spend $10,000 to renew some sort of professional license or qualification in order to continue practicing medicine, you'd find a way to get that $10,000, right? Why is it acceptable to be a cheap bastard when it comes to software? Maybe the "what can be done about it" is that these vendors build in a "end of life" like Quicken does.
There seems to be a profound misunderstanding in her about what operating systems do. The OS is not the application. To non-geeks in the field, it's just a program loader and a set of basic resources that their application uses. Regular non-geeks tend not to see the value in digging up and replanting every time a new version of the OS comes out. Or to put it another way, the cost, work, and risk associated in upgrading the application (which is what they care about) is why they don't bother to upgrade the OS (which they do not care about). It's not a matter of being a cheap bastard, it's a matter of (a) sticking with something that you know works, and (b) not giving a damn what the splash screen looks like.
Quicken is $39.95. A software package that costs $10K to upgrade probably cost around $22K for the full version. Putting something like that on an end of life timer is a good way to watch your customer base switch to your nearest competitor.
Can anything be done about it? Yes. Don't use third-party software that you don't own the source-code in first place. You're asking to be put in such a position. No, you aren't asking, you're begging for it. Buuut people do need to feel it in the hardest way to learn the lesson, don't they? For the ones who already are in such a mess, virtualize it. And do not repeat the same mistake.
Ok, so now, try to buy medical software using that paradigm. And I don't mean someone's genome sequencing project in college, but actual software rated for front line medical use. This is not a question of MS Office vs Open Office. It's a whole 'nother world.
As TFA alluded, the issue is low volume. The NRE cost is spread over hundreds to maybe low thousands, not millions like, say, Microsoft Word. They charge ten grand because that's the number arrived at from (NRE+cost of support+reasonable profit) / (projected copies sold). This is not rocket science. (Although, sometimes it is.) There are also a lot of bureaucratic hoops a manufacturer has to jump through in order to produce any product in the medical field, and that also adds cost.
...but if you're in a technical field, you already know this. It's why SQL Server Developer Edition is $44 in paperback and Kardashian Konfidential is ten bucks in hardcover.
I would suggest a show set in an, um, pizza delivery store with an idiot named Sly, an unrequited love interest called Lisa and a zany, nihilistic, cynical, wise-cracking robot called "Fender"
Too derivative. Make it a zany, nihilistic, cynical, wise-cracking handyman named Iskander and you have a deal.
Maybe folks can petition asking Netflix to pick it up?
Or... we can just let the show die and make room for new ideas and shows. I loved Futurama, but it's OK for shows to end, even good shows. It's better to die out than to see a show that drag on way too long.
No, people who are using fairly shitty software for their work that only runs in an MS Windows environment. The sort of stupidly expensive crap that uses multiple buggy "services" running in the background checking a few times a minute to see if there's a USB dongle plugged in. That sort of obfiscated pile of spaghetti has a million ways to crash or lock up so does mean a few reboots a day for the people using it.
Ok, there are environments where all of that is true. But if Win8 uses suspend/hibernate tricks to make booting seem faster, there's no guarantee that whatever is screwing up will actually be reinitialized on re-"boot". The user may end up having to do an extra step (pulling the battery or something) to initiate a true reboot, and then having to sit through that.
So I still don't see where this (faster "boot" times in Win8) is going to be a big hit with users. It seems more like egoware than a usable feature.
TFA (maybe not this FA, but some FA I read this morning before I saw it on Slashdot) says that Groening is looking for another home for the show as "we still have more stories to tell". I know I know, they always say that, but all I'm saying is, Groening reportedly has not made the decision to irrevocably end the show. So it's not exactly like the browncoat thing, where sad overweight acne-encrusted fans in poorly made costumes plead with... I'm sorry, did I say that out loud?
> Actually wasn't what is being said about Win8 identical to what was said about Vista?
This is a very good point.
Yes, what is being said about Win8 is very similar to what was said about Vista. And that's because Vista truly sucked. And as you know, a lot of businesses stuck with XP until 7 came out.
> And before that XP was a failure until sp1
Yes, there were complaints about XP until SP1 came out. (Also until people learned to turn off that garish Fisher-Price desktop theme.) But here's the difference:
After SP1, businesses adopted XP.
After SP1, businesses still declined to adopt Vista, despite the fact that XP was seven years old at that time. In fact, it isn't until NOW, 2013, twelve years after XP was released, that some businesses are starting to migrate off XP, to Win7. And some businesses are still using XP.
Think about that for a moment. For same length of time in which we've had 95, NT 3.51, NT4, 98, 98SE, 2000, XP, and Vista, for the same amount of time as we've seen all of those versions, a significant number of businesses have been using one single Microsoft OS: Windows XP.
So what kind of business penetration could Win8 possibly be expected to have in its lifetime? I'm thinking single digits.
Like Vista, after a service pack or three, Win8 might become marginally usable. But like Vista, by then, the mindshare damage will have been done. I'd argue that it's already happened.
> As long as Microsoft has the strongest commitment to backwards compatibility, they'll retain their market position.
That's actually a good point. I'd say that where Win8 falls down is that it largely abandons backwards compatibility to common gestures that we used to do to get work done. This is probably not what you meant. Since Win95 we've been led to expect that we'd be manipulating the stuff on our screen a certain way. That's all been abandoned. Microsoft has abandoned it's commitment to GUI backwards compatibility.
Not necessarily desktop. My company provides web services, and there is a huge Linux presence here.
The company started issuing tablets a year ago. Exclusively iPads. We looked at Win8, said no thanks. (Personally, I don't find the iPad that useful as a general computing device, so declined to be issued one.)
People issued laptops here have a choice of a Wintel device or a Macbook. About 40% choose the latter. (I'm not that enamored of Apple, chose a Win7 laptop. But Apple has a huge presence here.)
So, although this will probably not be the decade of linux on the desktop (unless you count iOS, which I don't) it's definitely the decade where Windows diminishes in the enterprise. At least from what I've seen personally.
Side note: I don't understand why this is an issue. Who cares how long a computer takes to boot? Someone who boots a computer several times a day, I guess.
So...... who are those people? Alpha geeks, mostly. And there aren't enough of them to keep Microsoft in the big bucks. Microsoft has done a lot of work in the last several versions to make reboots rare. Because they are (relatively) rare these days, the time they take becomes less important.
There used to be a joke that a Real Programmer is someone who spends hours optimizing a loop that's only run once.
Personally, I only reboot when (a) installs require it, and (b) something really bad happens. It's a credit to Microsoft that B is significantly more rare these days.
> How does replacing a pop-up start menu with a full page start menu, but otherwise make the OS faster in every way (boot, sleep/resume, use) and fully backwards compatible "hamper the hell out of work".
Well, because it doesn't do that at all. Basic things work radically differently, the visual cues that help non-geeks navigate computers are gone, the fullscreen paradigm doesn't fit well on large dense monitors, and touch gestures don't work well with a mouse. And even if all of these things were surmountable, the training issues alone are nightmarish.
When we (just recently) rolled out Win7, we did some pilot programs and app testing as part of due diligence, but we did not have to do user training or amp up the helpdesk because 7 behaved as people have been led to expect. 8.... well, geeks can eventually figure out anything, so I'm sure there are alpha nerds out there that have put in the time necessary to learn to make 8 dance, but regular users don't want a GUI challenge, they want to run their apps and get their work done. It ain't gonna happen. We'll wait until something reasonable becomes available. Because 8 hampers the hell out of getting work done, for regular people.
Wouldn't it actually be the 10 years of profiting from XP while doing absolutely nothing to maintain their dominant position that marked the beginning? Vista was just the oh-crap-we-need-to-release-something-new rushed-out-the-door release...it's quality (or lack thereof) is just a reflection of the circumstances surrounding it's inception and development.
I have to disagree. Longhorn was in development since 2002 (if the wiki can be believed) and Vista was released in 2006. That's quite a long development cycle.
Perhaps you meant, when Microsoft realized Longhorn wasn't going to fly, they suddenly realized oh crap we need to release something and rushed out a subset of what they were working on.
The point is, they weren't necessarily doing "absolutely nothing", they were just not doing particularly successful things.
It's very clear what they need to do with Win8 to make it successful on the desktop -- bringing back the Aero interface, and putting the administration parts back in their accustomed places, would be enough to get over this current hoohaw. As stated, Microsoft still has a lot of brilliant designers. They could fix Win8 with their eyes closed.
The problem is not one of engineering. The problem is one of management. Whether management will *let* the engineers fix it is the great big question. It's a huge ego blow, to say in effect "we really goofed on this one" and then release Win8, the Apology Edition. I don't see the suits, and Ballmer in particular, agreeing to do that. I get the impression that they'd rather go out swinging than change direction at this point.
I just read an article on techniques to avoid a fight, and a couple things that might apply here are (a) your opponent thinks they're the good guy. In all likelihood, the suits really do think this is the wave of the future and they just have to ride out the initial caterwauling. (b) to avoid an all-out tussle, you need to let your opponent save face. This seems to be particularly vital in this case, because it's face, not technical issues, that's fundamentally at issue here.
But that said, I don't have an answer. It's not apparent to me how to spin this so that Win8 gets fixed and the suits feel good about it.
So yeah, they're doomed. (Meaning, I don't know how this can be fixed.)
> Too creepy. I will soon cancel my LinkedIn account, and just make a website bearing my name (I already own the domain), so that people can find me without all of this creepy gray-zone crap.
Serendipity. Back in the early days of the web, I spent a minor fortune on a domain of my real name and a set of fixed IP addresses to the house on a (then) high speed connection so I could have an internet presence under my absolute control. It still exists (using dyndns now) but hasn't been updated in years, due to facebook and linkedin and their ilk. But it's gotten so bad, that just last weekend I was exploring CMS packages with an eye to making my site useful again.
Back then, I created the web site because there weren't any alternatives. I am now considering reviving it because all the alternatives have become intolerable for one reason or another.
It's like the first decade of the 21st century was some kind of brief, golden age for social media, before it abruptly went off the rails.
Back in the day, linkedin used to be a useful way of connecting with people in the industry. I ignore "people you may know" (note to linkedin: if I may know them and I'm not currently connected, there may be a reason) but the real annoyance is the continuous request to link with obvious dummy contacts for marketing groups. That is, linked in requests to spam. And THEN, and then, there are the linked in requests that *are* themselves spam. "Arianna Dateme has requested a link with you. 'Hi, Ron, when I talked to you at that last conference, you expressed interest in our marketing buzzword generation service. Our team of trained weasels are ready to jump to your service in scalable vertical analytic b2c hyperlocal targeted contact enhancement. Call me on my private line for more information!'" It's getting very near the point where I'm dumping my account. The only thing I can think of that would make it worse is if they started charging. Oh wait.
Do you really need an app to tell you who's family?
Funny you mention that. Not to put too fine a point on it, but much of my family belong to a religion that promotes large families and careful genealogical records, and I found out one day entirely by accident that one of my co-workers, a thousand miles from my home town, was a first cousin. It can happen even in the US; I imagine it's a fairly common occurrence in a tiny country like Iceland.
Slashdot Mirror
Q: "How many tree-huggers does it take to change a lightbulb?"
A: "That's not funny!"
> With many expecting Microsoft's upcoming end-of-support for XP to cause a security nightmare of unsupported Windows devices in the wild, it seems a good time to ask how many users may fall into the category of wanting an upgrade, but being priced out by expensive but necessary third-party software.
How about the users who don't feel the need to buy a new version just because MS crapped one out?
...is it really that they can't afford it or is it that they're just cheap? Maybe I'm suffering from the "all doctors are rich" stereotype but if you needed to spend $10,000 to renew some sort of professional license or qualification in order to continue practicing medicine, you'd find a way to get that $10,000, right? Why is it acceptable to be a cheap bastard when it comes to software? Maybe the "what can be done about it" is that these vendors build in a "end of life" like Quicken does.
There seems to be a profound misunderstanding in her about what operating systems do. The OS is not the application. To non-geeks in the field, it's just a program loader and a set of basic resources that their application uses. Regular non-geeks tend not to see the value in digging up and replanting every time a new version of the OS comes out. Or to put it another way, the cost, work, and risk associated in upgrading the application (which is what they care about) is why they don't bother to upgrade the OS (which they do not care about). It's not a matter of being a cheap bastard, it's a matter of (a) sticking with something that you know works, and (b) not giving a damn what the splash screen looks like.
Quicken is $39.95. A software package that costs $10K to upgrade probably cost around $22K for the full version. Putting something like that on an end of life timer is a good way to watch your customer base switch to your nearest competitor.
Can anything be done about it? Yes. Don't use third-party software that you don't own the source-code in first place. You're asking to be put in such a position. No, you aren't asking, you're begging for it. Buuut people do need to feel it in the hardest way to learn the lesson, don't they?
For the ones who already are in such a mess, virtualize it. And do not repeat the same mistake.
Ok, so now, try to buy medical software using that paradigm. And I don't mean someone's genome sequencing project in college, but actual software rated for front line medical use. This is not a question of MS Office vs Open Office. It's a whole 'nother world.
As TFA alluded, the issue is low volume. The NRE cost is spread over hundreds to maybe low thousands, not millions like, say, Microsoft Word. They charge ten grand because that's the number arrived at from (NRE+cost of support+reasonable profit) / (projected copies sold). This is not rocket science. (Although, sometimes it is.) There are also a lot of bureaucratic hoops a manufacturer has to jump through in order to produce any product in the medical field, and that also adds cost.
I would suggest a show set in an, um, pizza delivery store with an idiot named Sly, an unrequited love interest called Lisa and a zany, nihilistic, cynical, wise-cracking robot called "Fender"
Too derivative. Make it a zany, nihilistic, cynical, wise-cracking handyman named Iskander and you have a deal.
Hollywood can grunt out a live action version. Hey, it worked for the Flintstones!
Um, no, it definitely did not work for the Flintstones.
Maybe folks can petition asking Netflix to pick it up?
Or... we can just let the show die and make room for new ideas and shows. I loved Futurama, but it's OK for shows to end, even good shows. It's better to die out than to see a show that drag on way too long.
It's the "new ideas" part that's the stickler.
No, people who are using fairly shitty software for their work that only runs in an MS Windows environment. The sort of stupidly expensive crap that uses multiple buggy "services" running in the background checking a few times a minute to see if there's a USB dongle plugged in. That sort of obfiscated pile of spaghetti has a million ways to crash or lock up so does mean a few reboots a day for the people using it.
Ok, there are environments where all of that is true. But if Win8 uses suspend/hibernate tricks to make booting seem faster, there's no guarantee that whatever is screwing up will actually be reinitialized on re-"boot". The user may end up having to do an extra step (pulling the battery or something) to initiate a true reboot, and then having to sit through that.
So I still don't see where this (faster "boot" times in Win8) is going to be a big hit with users. It seems more like egoware than a usable feature.
TFA (maybe not this FA, but some FA I read this morning before I saw it on Slashdot) says that Groening is looking for another home for the show as "we still have more stories to tell". I know I know, they always say that, but all I'm saying is, Groening reportedly has not made the decision to irrevocably end the show. So it's not exactly like the browncoat thing, where sad overweight acne-encrusted fans in poorly made costumes plead with... I'm sorry, did I say that out loud?
But we already have sleep and hibernate modes in Windows 7.
95, ME, and Vista were failures.
98, XP, and 7 have been decent.
> Actually wasn't what is being said about Win8 identical to what was said about Vista?
This is a very good point.
Yes, what is being said about Win8 is very similar to what was said about Vista. And that's because Vista truly sucked. And as you know, a lot of businesses stuck with XP until 7 came out.
> And before that XP was a failure until sp1
Yes, there were complaints about XP until SP1 came out. (Also until people learned to turn off that garish Fisher-Price desktop theme.) But here's the difference:
After SP1, businesses adopted XP.
After SP1, businesses still declined to adopt Vista, despite the fact that XP was seven years old at that time. In fact, it isn't until NOW, 2013, twelve years after XP was released, that some businesses are starting to migrate off XP, to Win7. And some businesses are still using XP.
Think about that for a moment. For same length of time in which we've had 95, NT 3.51, NT4, 98, 98SE, 2000, XP, and Vista, for the same amount of time as we've seen all of those versions, a significant number of businesses have been using one single Microsoft OS: Windows XP.
So what kind of business penetration could Win8 possibly be expected to have in its lifetime? I'm thinking single digits.
Like Vista, after a service pack or three, Win8 might become marginally usable. But like Vista, by then, the mindshare damage will have been done. I'd argue that it's already happened.
ME? It's still reviled to this day.
> As long as Microsoft has the strongest commitment to backwards compatibility, they'll retain their market position.
That's actually a good point. I'd say that where Win8 falls down is that it largely abandons backwards compatibility to common gestures that we used to do to get work done. This is probably not what you meant. Since Win95 we've been led to expect that we'd be manipulating the stuff on our screen a certain way. That's all been abandoned. Microsoft has abandoned it's commitment to GUI backwards compatibility.
Not necessarily desktop. My company provides web services, and there is a huge Linux presence here.
The company started issuing tablets a year ago. Exclusively iPads. We looked at Win8, said no thanks. (Personally, I don't find the iPad that useful as a general computing device, so declined to be issued one.)
People issued laptops here have a choice of a Wintel device or a Macbook. About 40% choose the latter. (I'm not that enamored of Apple, chose a Win7 laptop. But Apple has a huge presence here.)
So, although this will probably not be the decade of linux on the desktop (unless you count iOS, which I don't) it's definitely the decade where Windows diminishes in the enterprise. At least from what I've seen personally.
Side note: I don't understand why this is an issue. Who cares how long a computer takes to boot? Someone who boots a computer several times a day, I guess.
So...... who are those people? Alpha geeks, mostly. And there aren't enough of them to keep Microsoft in the big bucks. Microsoft has done a lot of work in the last several versions to make reboots rare. Because they are (relatively) rare these days, the time they take becomes less important.
There used to be a joke that a Real Programmer is someone who spends hours optimizing a loop that's only run once.
Personally, I only reboot when (a) installs require it, and (b) something really bad happens. It's a credit to Microsoft that B is significantly more rare these days.
> How does replacing a pop-up start menu with a full page start menu, but otherwise make the OS faster in every way (boot, sleep/resume, use) and fully backwards compatible "hamper the hell out of work".
Well, because it doesn't do that at all. Basic things work radically differently, the visual cues that help non-geeks navigate computers are gone, the fullscreen paradigm doesn't fit well on large dense monitors, and touch gestures don't work well with a mouse. And even if all of these things were surmountable, the training issues alone are nightmarish.
When we (just recently) rolled out Win7, we did some pilot programs and app testing as part of due diligence, but we did not have to do user training or amp up the helpdesk because 7 behaved as people have been led to expect. 8 .... well, geeks can eventually figure out anything, so I'm sure there are alpha nerds out there that have put in the time necessary to learn to make 8 dance, but regular users don't want a GUI challenge, they want to run their apps and get their work done. It ain't gonna happen. We'll wait until something reasonable becomes available. Because 8 hampers the hell out of getting work done, for regular people.
Wouldn't it actually be the 10 years of profiting from XP while doing absolutely nothing to maintain their dominant position that marked the beginning? Vista was just the oh-crap-we-need-to-release-something-new rushed-out-the-door release...it's quality (or lack thereof) is just a reflection of the circumstances surrounding it's inception and development.
I have to disagree. Longhorn was in development since 2002 (if the wiki can be believed) and Vista was released in 2006. That's quite a long development cycle.
Perhaps you meant, when Microsoft realized Longhorn wasn't going to fly, they suddenly realized oh crap we need to release something and rushed out a subset of what they were working on.
The point is, they weren't necessarily doing "absolutely nothing", they were just not doing particularly successful things.
It's very clear what they need to do with Win8 to make it successful on the desktop -- bringing back the Aero interface, and putting the administration parts back in their accustomed places, would be enough to get over this current hoohaw. As stated, Microsoft still has a lot of brilliant designers. They could fix Win8 with their eyes closed.
The problem is not one of engineering. The problem is one of management. Whether management will *let* the engineers fix it is the great big question. It's a huge ego blow, to say in effect "we really goofed on this one" and then release Win8, the Apology Edition. I don't see the suits, and Ballmer in particular, agreeing to do that. I get the impression that they'd rather go out swinging than change direction at this point.
I just read an article on techniques to avoid a fight, and a couple things that might apply here are (a) your opponent thinks they're the good guy. In all likelihood, the suits really do think this is the wave of the future and they just have to ride out the initial caterwauling. (b) to avoid an all-out tussle, you need to let your opponent save face. This seems to be particularly vital in this case, because it's face, not technical issues, that's fundamentally at issue here.
But that said, I don't have an answer. It's not apparent to me how to spin this so that Win8 gets fixed and the suits feel good about it.
So yeah, they're doomed. (Meaning, I don't know how this can be fixed.)
> Too creepy. I will soon cancel my LinkedIn account, and just make a website bearing my name (I already own the domain), so that people can find me without all of this creepy gray-zone crap.
Serendipity. Back in the early days of the web, I spent a minor fortune on a domain of my real name and a set of fixed IP addresses to the house on a (then) high speed connection so I could have an internet presence under my absolute control. It still exists (using dyndns now) but hasn't been updated in years, due to facebook and linkedin and their ilk. But it's gotten so bad, that just last weekend I was exploring CMS packages with an eye to making my site useful again.
Back then, I created the web site because there weren't any alternatives. I am now considering reviving it because all the alternatives have become intolerable for one reason or another.
It's like the first decade of the 21st century was some kind of brief, golden age for social media, before it abruptly went off the rails.
Back in the day, linkedin used to be a useful way of connecting with people in the industry. I ignore "people you may know" (note to linkedin: if I may know them and I'm not currently connected, there may be a reason) but the real annoyance is the continuous request to link with obvious dummy contacts for marketing groups. That is, linked in requests to spam. And THEN, and then, there are the linked in requests that *are* themselves spam. "Arianna Dateme has requested a link with you. 'Hi, Ron, when I talked to you at that last conference, you expressed interest in our marketing buzzword generation service. Our team of trained weasels are ready to jump to your service in scalable vertical analytic b2c hyperlocal targeted contact enhancement. Call me on my private line for more information!'" It's getting very near the point where I'm dumping my account. The only thing I can think of that would make it worse is if they started charging. Oh wait.
Do you really need an app to tell you who's family?
Funny you mention that. Not to put too fine a point on it, but much of my family belong to a religion that promotes large families and careful genealogical records, and I found out one day entirely by accident that one of my co-workers, a thousand miles from my home town, was a first cousin. It can happen even in the US; I imagine it's a fairly common occurrence in a tiny country like Iceland.
Not to be creepy or anything, but from a genetic standpoint, a distant relative would probably have been fine to date.
But I know what you mean. A Playmate from the late sixties is a distant relative of mine, and I was always a little creeped out by that centerfold.
I bought a newspaper last Sunday. The bird cages needed to be cleaned.
Just for old time's sake[...]
Just for old times' sake, I took a shit on the front page and wiped my ass with the sports section
What a coincidence. So did the birds.