The point of developers getting it first (through MSDN) is to make sure that any compatibility problems get resolved before your customers, who could very well be volume buyers, upgrade their systems.
There is no story too trivial or misleading about Microsoft and Vista that won't make it to the front page of Slashdot.
Last Friday, the company released Vista SP1 for download by both individuals and companies who previously beta tested the service pack. This week, the company went further. "At the end of this week we will be making the English version of Windows Vista SP1 available to volume licensing customers... Other languages will follow soon... [and] later this month, SP1 will be available to MSDN and TechNet Plus subscribers," Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows product management, said in a posting on the Windows Vista Team Blog today. The primary hold up for broadly releasing SP1 has been minor glitches involving device driver installation, basically requiring that some device drivers will need to be reinstalled after installing SP1.Volume Buyers to Get Vista SP1 Early [February 11]
I'm asking purely out of curiosity, of course...
But how many times do you think that the average user of Windows XP or Vista sees an activation prompt after he first boots up the system?
MS sees the handwriting on the wall.
Desperation is driving MS to use everything they can to continue the profit line I have this gut feel that says MS is going to have a REAL HARD time expanding its yearly sales and profits.
67 cents of every new retail dollar spent on PC software goes to MS Office.
Through end of November, U.S. retail PC software sales are up 10.3 percent year over year as measured in dollar volume, according to NPD. By comparison, Office sales are up 50.7 percent, by the same measure and in the same time frame. Office sales are so big, they make calculating broader PC software retail sales difficult. The "magnitude of Office sales relative to the rest of the PC software market is phenomenal. It's the massively huge tail wagging the dog." Retail Black Friday sales of Mac Office were up 215.8 percent year over year. While Mac Office generated blowout sales on Black Friday, Office 2007 sales growth was exceptionally good, too. Year-over-year U.S. retail Black Friday sales of Office were up 65.8 percent, as measured in dollars.The Year of Office 2007
Microsoft's profits are up 79%:
For the quarter that ended Dec. 31, profit rose to $4.71 billion, or 50 cents per share, from $2.63 billion, or 26 cents per share the previous year. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had forecast a profit of 46 cents per share. Revenue rose 31 percent to $16.37 billion from $12.5 billion in the year-ago quarter, ahead of the analysts' prediction of $15.95 billion in sales.
{and, in what must be the understatement of the year]
I was sorely tempted to give my response a flamebait title like "The Geek Turns Delusional."
I won't disguise my opinion here that the Geek's increasingly frantic retreat from reality has been the Slashdot story since the posting of Microsoft's second quarter results.
The CDW poll points to a softening of enterprise IT negative attitudes toward Vista. Familiarity, it seems, has bred content: IT departments are happier with Vista's features, particularly in the area of security, and less concerned about the hardware costs of Vista than they were a year ago.
Another year will bring further declines in the relative cost of PC hardware -- and make a lot of corporate desktop hardware look even more antique. Only a major economic downturn would be likely to derail current estimates of another strong year for PC sales, so even if Vista remains tied to hardware sales it would do well, and corporate upgrades could finally kick in as old hardware is upgraded. This has been a year when Vista has had its rough edges knocked off, and the marketplace has adjusted its expectations. By Vista's next birthday it should be more differentiated and acceptable for both its consumer and business marketplaces. Assessing Windows Vista On Its First Anniversary
That could happen much sooner than you expect. it's not so hard to post record gains, for a while. Until you need to start borrowing.
The offer to Yahoo! represents 2 years and some months profit for Microsoft. Microsoft has been paying dividends and buying back stock, which is why its cash reserves are down.
Most of Yahoo's value spawns from how *completely* different their company attitude comes across from stuck-up, self-important, dying companies such as microsoft.
Allow me to humbly suggest a moratorium on "Microsoft is dying" posts - at least - until the company stops posting record gains and growth each quarter.
UNIX has about 40 years of providing development tools for UNIX. And they've done a very good job.
Is it really easier and cheaper to develop for the platform with a 0.8% share of the desktop?
Yup.
Try asking these questions another way:
Microsoft has thirty years experience in development tools for the stand-alone PC or PC client. In developing applications for the non-technical end user.
UNIX's origins are in the world of the mainframe, the server, and the IT pro.
It is tempting to say that development for the platform with 1% share had better be cheaper and easier, if you want to see any development at all.
Linux wins by being easier and cheaper to develop for.
Microsoft has thirty years experience in providing development tools for the PC.
Is it really easier and cheaper to develop for the platform with a 0.8% share of the desktop?
How much money - including any initial contribution from AOL - has gone into the development of Firefox?
How many of the marquee "cross platform" apps like OpenOffice.org are dependent on massive corporate support - money and manpower - from Sun, IBM, etc?
Looking inside your suitcase without a warrant is also unconstitutional
There has never been a time or place when your baggage couldn't be searched when you crossed an international border. Only diplomats could claim an exemption and only as a courtesy between states.
So if the Supreme Court has agreed to this and the Customs agents are making copies "for security", then the Supreme Court has ruled that making a digital copy is not stealing.
Border guards have - and always will have - very broad discretionary powers. International travelers have lived with that knowledge since the beginning of time. So has the Supreme Court.
I have little patience with a poster who spells Microsoft with a dollar sign and in his next breath claims that this isn't about success in the marketplace.
as long as m$ isn't going to take a more humble attitude, you can bet
that this "increasingly desperate spin" will continue.
The tech sector is not known for humility. But it was the Intel exec, not Microsoft, that estimated Linux's share of the desktop at 0.8%. It is the retail customer who has been giving 67 cents out of every new dollar spent on software to Microsoft Office.
This savexp petition and m$ response to it proves this.
The online petition proves nothing except that the Geek has a taste for lost causes. You can ask Ron Paul about that.
The CDW poll points to a softening of enterprise IT negative attitudes toward Vista. Familiarity, it seems, has bred content: IT departments are happier with Vista's features, particularly in the area of security, and less concerned about the hardware costs of Vista than they were a year ago.
Another year will bring further declines in the relative cost of PC hardware -- and make a lot of corporate desktop hardware look even more antique. Only a major economic downturn would be likely to derail current estimates of another strong year for PC sales, so even if Vista remains tied to hardware sales it would do well, and corporate upgrades could finally kick in as old hardware is upgraded. This has been a year when Vista has had its rough edges knocked off, and the marketplace has adjusted its expectations. By Vista's next birthday it should be more differentiated and acceptable for both its consumer and business marketplaces. Assessing Windows Vista On Its First Anniversary
they wanted to see (ID) when I was accompanying my wife to the federal building where she had to take care of some paperwork. ID necessary to enter what's essentially an office complex, WTF guys ??
What looks like an ordinary office complex to you can have a very different meaning to someone else.
Quite some years back now, I had the interesting experience of being a look-alike for a mental patient expected at a clinic which had found temporary lodgings on the ground floor of our county court house. The staff extremely wary and uncomfortable - and with reason: when my "double" arrived a few minutes later he tore the place apart.
The metal detectors and armed guards - police officers - came in not long after. There had been shootings "next door" but this helped to bring the problem home.
How many of these copies were pre-installed on computers, and then deleted when the user gave up on Vista and installed Linux instead?
Only on Slashdot would this ridiculous notion be modded up as insightful.
Sales have been strongest fot OEM Vista and Ultimate, The laptop with a dual core CPU, 2 GB RAM, the 320 GB hard drive, integrated WiFi, NVIDIA GeForce graphics, etc, etc, etc.
The odds are good that Office 2007 will leave the store in the same cart, along with a multifunction color printer-scanner with a Vista driver.
Your ISP supports the Vista OS.
You haven't a clue where to find support for your DIY Linux install.
DVDs play out of the box.
The USB keychain HDTV tuner is $90. ReadyBoost flash $30.
High performance DX10.1 cards for the gamer's desktop start at $170. The Pioneer Blu-Ray drive for HD media play is $200-250.
Seattle to Tokyo in 3 hours instead of 12? Frickin' awesome...
The death blow to the SST was the airbus.
The frickin' big plane that can carry 500, 1000, 1500 passengers. You need the equivalent of three Mach 5 planes in the air to carry the same number of passengers. I'm betting you can't get that kind of turn-around with less than two 300 seat hypersonic planes for every airbus.
Personally, I'd rather cross the Pacific in a comfortable over-night sleeper than drag a myself around Tokyo stiffened and fog-bound from sitting in a windowless cigar tube for three interminable hours.
You must be an American... what is *with* you people always reaching for the lawyer every time some little conflict with another person comes up. Stop being a pussy and fight your own battles.
You call a lawyer for the same reason you call a doctor.
You are paying for experience. You are paying for specialist skills. You are paying for someone who can look at the problem objectively.
You are paying to avoid the mistakes you make when you are trying to prove your manhood. You are paying to avoid being stripped to your shorts and pounded into mush by a team that knows its job.
That is why libertarians exist; and also why they lose.
The vast majority thinks the government exists to be their mommy, and their political parties have turned this cowardly and un-american outlook into the primary legislative theme of almost every representative.
The majority thinks that a representative government exists to serve their interests and values. That is a decision any organized community is entitled to make. Whether the money goes to erect a traffic light on main street, pay for the health inspector at the local meat packing plant, or or help provide a minimum income for the disabled is simply a matter of choice.
While faster GPUs and better cards mean faster games, with all the DRM that Vista has it makes them more expensive and have poorer performance
You do not have to max out your credit card to get good performance in a DX10 card:
The Radeon 3850 brings us something we've been begging for ever since the DirectX 10 cards were introduced: a sub-$200 card with performance comparable to the high-end products. The Radeon 3850 delivers Geforce 8800 GTS 320mb performance for $100+ less. If you're looking to get the best possible performance for the dollar, this card hits the sweet spot.Best Gaming Graphics Cards: February 2008
Vista can play protected HD content at full HD resolution. The PS3 can do this. OSX can do this. The set top box with an embedded Linux OS can do this. No HD means no mass market sales.
you would think that they would do a better job of obfuscating the fact that they have at least 3 different channels for collecting program crash information!
Online Crash Analysis takes you to the crash analysis site on reboot - and a plain English explanation of the problem and any known fixes. It is one reason why the BSOD jokes on Slashdot have gone stale.
Slashdot Mirror
There were 15,000 beta testers for SP1.
The release candidate became available to anyone in mid-January. Microsoft Opens Vista SP1 Beta to All Testers
If you haven't been working with the beta, tell me why it doesn't make sense to wait a week or two until driver problems are resolved in the RTM?
Last Friday, the company released Vista SP1 for download by both individuals and companies who previously beta tested the service pack. This week, the company went further. "At the end of this week we will be making the English version of Windows Vista SP1 available to volume licensing customers ... Other languages will follow soon ... [and] later this month, SP1 will be available to MSDN and TechNet Plus subscribers," Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows product management, said in a posting on the Windows Vista Team Blog today. The primary hold up for broadly releasing SP1 has been minor glitches involving device driver installation, basically requiring that some device drivers will need to be reinstalled after installing SP1. Volume Buyers to Get Vista SP1 Early [February 11]
I'm asking purely out of curiosity, of course... But how many times do you think that the average user of Windows XP or Vista sees an activation prompt after he first boots up the system?
Desperation is driving MS to use everything they can to continue the profit line
I have this gut feel that says MS is going to have a REAL HARD time expanding its yearly sales and profits.
67 cents of every new retail dollar spent on PC software goes to MS Office.
Through end of November, U.S. retail PC software sales are up 10.3 percent year over year as measured in dollar volume, according to NPD. By comparison, Office sales are up 50.7 percent, by the same measure and in the same time frame. Office sales are so big, they make calculating broader PC software retail sales difficult. The "magnitude of Office sales relative to the rest of the PC software market is phenomenal. It's the massively huge tail wagging the dog." Retail Black Friday sales of Mac Office were up 215.8 percent year over year. While Mac Office generated blowout sales on Black Friday, Office 2007 sales growth was exceptionally good, too. Year-over-year U.S. retail Black Friday sales of Office were up 65.8 percent, as measured in dollars. The Year of Office 2007
Microsoft's profits are up 79%:
For the quarter that ended Dec. 31, profit rose to $4.71 billion, or 50 cents per share, from $2.63 billion, or 26 cents per share the previous year. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had forecast a profit of 46 cents per share. Revenue rose 31 percent to $16.37 billion from $12.5 billion in the year-ago quarter, ahead of the analysts' prediction of $15.95 billion in sales.
{and, in what must be the understatement of the year]
"It looks like a very nice report," said Sarah Friar, an analyst for Goldman Sachs. Microsoft Corp. earnings leap 79 percent
I was sorely tempted to give my response a flamebait title like "The Geek Turns Delusional."
I won't disguise my opinion here that the Geek's increasingly frantic retreat from reality has been the Slashdot story since the posting of Microsoft's second quarter results.
The CDW poll points to a softening of enterprise IT negative attitudes toward Vista. Familiarity, it seems, has bred content: IT departments are happier with Vista's features, particularly in the area of security, and less concerned about the hardware costs of Vista than they were a year ago. Another year will bring further declines in the relative cost of PC hardware -- and make a lot of corporate desktop hardware look even more antique. Only a major economic downturn would be likely to derail current estimates of another strong year for PC sales, so even if Vista remains tied to hardware sales it would do well, and corporate upgrades could finally kick in as old hardware is upgraded. This has been a year when Vista has had its rough edges knocked off, and the marketplace has adjusted its expectations. By Vista's next birthday it should be more differentiated and acceptable for both its consumer and business marketplaces. Assessing Windows Vista On Its First Anniversary
The offer to Yahoo! represents 2 years and some months profit for Microsoft. Microsoft has been paying dividends and buying back stock, which is why its cash reserves are down.
--- and a good many more who wish the joke could be retired along with the other long-since-gone-stale running gags that pass for humor on Slashdot.
Allow me to humbly suggest a moratorium on "Microsoft is dying" posts - at least - until the company stops posting record gains and growth each quarter.
The first question to ask is whether what you want to do makes any sense for your employer. Who has to maintain this beast once you build it.
Is it really easier and cheaper to develop for the platform with a 0.8% share of the desktop?
Yup.
Try asking these questions another way:
Microsoft has thirty years experience in development tools for the stand-alone PC or PC client. In developing applications for the non-technical end user.
UNIX's origins are in the world of the mainframe, the server, and the IT pro.
It is tempting to say that development for the platform with 1% share had better be cheaper and easier, if you want to see any development at all.
it will always be easier for a user to find a program that speaks his language than to learn yours.
Microsoft has thirty years experience in providing development tools for the PC.
Is it really easier and cheaper to develop for the platform with a 0.8% share of the desktop?
How much money - including any initial contribution from AOL - has gone into the development of Firefox?
How many of the marquee "cross platform" apps like OpenOffice.org are dependent on massive corporate support - money and manpower - from Sun, IBM, etc?
It's a pity you can't filter Slashdot posts by words and phrases. But at least you don't have to read beyond the dollar sign.
There has never been a time or place when your baggage couldn't be searched when you crossed an international border. Only diplomats could claim an exemption and only as a courtesy between states.
Border guards have - and always will have - very broad discretionary powers. International travelers have lived with that knowledge since the beginning of time. So has the Supreme Court.
I have little patience with a poster who spells Microsoft with a dollar sign and in his next breath claims that this isn't about success in the marketplace.
as long as m$ isn't going to take a more humble attitude, you can bet that this "increasingly desperate spin" will continue.
The tech sector is not known for humility. But it was the Intel exec, not Microsoft, that estimated Linux's share of the desktop at 0.8%. It is the retail customer who has been giving 67 cents out of every new dollar spent on software to Microsoft Office.
This savexp petition and m$ response to it proves this.
The online petition proves nothing except that the Geek has a taste for lost causes. You can ask Ron Paul about that.
The CDW poll points to a softening of enterprise IT negative attitudes toward Vista. Familiarity, it seems, has bred content: IT departments are happier with Vista's features, particularly in the area of security, and less concerned about the hardware costs of Vista than they were a year ago.
Another year will bring further declines in the relative cost of PC hardware -- and make a lot of corporate desktop hardware look even more antique. Only a major economic downturn would be likely to derail current estimates of another strong year for PC sales, so even if Vista remains tied to hardware sales it would do well, and corporate upgrades could finally kick in as old hardware is upgraded. This has been a year when Vista has had its rough edges knocked off, and the marketplace has adjusted its expectations. By Vista's next birthday it should be more differentiated and acceptable for both its consumer and business marketplaces. Assessing Windows Vista On Its First Anniversary
What looks like an ordinary office complex to you can have a very different meaning to someone else.
Quite some years back now, I had the interesting experience of being a look-alike for a mental patient expected at a clinic which had found temporary lodgings on the ground floor of our county court house. The staff extremely wary and uncomfortable - and with reason: when my "double" arrived a few minutes later he tore the place apart.
The metal detectors and armed guards - police officers - came in not long after. There had been shootings "next door" but this helped to bring the problem home.
Only on Slashdot would this ridiculous notion be modded up as insightful.
Sales have been strongest fot OEM Vista and Ultimate, The laptop with a dual core CPU, 2 GB RAM, the 320 GB hard drive, integrated WiFi, NVIDIA GeForce graphics, etc, etc, etc.
The odds are good that Office 2007 will leave the store in the same cart, along with a multifunction color printer-scanner with a Vista driver.
Your ISP supports the Vista OS.
You haven't a clue where to find support for your DIY Linux install.
DVDs play out of the box.
The USB keychain HDTV tuner is $90. ReadyBoost flash $30.
High performance DX10.1 cards for the gamer's desktop start at $170. The Pioneer Blu-Ray drive for HD media play is $200-250.
Microsoft posts record performance in its Windows client division.
In office products. In servers. In console gaming...
15-20% growth in the first and second quarters of fiscal 2008. The U.S. economy is weak. The tech sector is down. But Microsoft is on a roll.
The Slashdot response is denial.
In a crapflood of posts that put a increasingly desperate spin on news that - more realistically viewed - would silence a Twitter.
The death blow to the SST was the airbus.
The frickin' big plane that can carry 500, 1000, 1500 passengers. You need the equivalent of three Mach 5 planes in the air to carry the same number of passengers. I'm betting you can't get that kind of turn-around with less than two 300 seat hypersonic planes for every airbus.
Personally, I'd rather cross the Pacific in a comfortable over-night sleeper than drag a myself around Tokyo stiffened and fog-bound from sitting in a windowless cigar tube for three interminable hours.
3 is "close enough" if you are working with primitive hand tools and haven't the need or resources for monumental architecture and engineering.
You call a lawyer for the same reason you call a doctor.
You are paying for experience. You are paying for specialist skills. You are paying for someone who can look at the problem objectively.
You are paying to avoid the mistakes you make when you are trying to prove your manhood. You are paying to avoid being stripped to your shorts and pounded into mush by a team that knows its job.
Take a look at what is still around: Phoneco
The vast majority thinks the government exists to be their mommy, and their political parties have turned this cowardly and un-american outlook into the primary legislative theme of almost every representative.
The majority thinks that a representative government exists to serve their interests and values. That is a decision any organized community is entitled to make. Whether the money goes to erect a traffic light on main street, pay for the health inspector at the local meat packing plant, or or help provide a minimum income for the disabled is simply a matter of choice.
You do not have to max out your credit card to get good performance in a DX10 card:
The Radeon 3850 brings us something we've been begging for ever since the DirectX 10 cards were introduced: a sub-$200 card with performance comparable to the high-end products. The Radeon 3850 delivers Geforce 8800 GTS 320mb performance for $100+ less. If you're looking to get the best possible performance for the dollar, this card hits the sweet spot. Best Gaming Graphics Cards: February 2008
Vista can play protected HD content at full HD resolution. The PS3 can do this. OSX can do this. The set top box with an embedded Linux OS can do this. No HD means no mass market sales.
Online Crash Analysis takes you to the crash analysis site on reboot - and a plain English explanation of the problem and any known fixes. It is one reason why the BSOD jokes on Slashdot have gone stale.