I was always surprised that MS wasn't also slammed for Office. It is, after all, the sole reason they are a monopoly in the other 2 spaces.
Exchange exists as it does not because it's the best email/calendaring server, because it's not, but because it offered a better environment than Notes and met the X.500 requirements the government set out, well, sort of, they're actually not compliant, but that's a different story, something to do with case sensitivity....
There's far better email servers out there, and far better clients than Outlook, and far better calendaring servers. There's just not a client that ties them together as well yet, and that's a shame.
And just to bring it back on topic - the states are right - nothing has yet changed in the desktop space - MS is still the dominant by far player, the OS has yet to be replaced. (Hints of what might come after Vista are presaged by the wonders of the likes of cio.com, if you believe them. IE, by sole virtue of being "part" of the OS, is the dominant browser, but its market share appears to be rapidly falling over the past year or so, and may (hopefully) show the future trend of the OS. If you've tried the latest release of OOo, then you'll know that OOo is a viable replacement for Office, and a welcome one considering the pain that O2007 is causing some of us at least that are forced to use it.
I will predict that in the next 3-4 years, the landscape will change radically. MS will still be a powerhouse, but will just be the 400 pound gorilla, being much chastised and otherwise reduced from its former 800 pound size. ODF will probably become the standard, whether MS wants it to or not, and Office will fall rather rapidly from its perch. Look for this to happen within 12 months of 02003 being EOL'd and unsupported. Look for Apple to make further inroads in market share, as more and more people buy their laptops. Watch Dell implode as it loses the top spot. Watch Linux, probably in the form of Ubuntu, finally make inroads in marketshare, and possibly even into the business workspace. All this by the end of 2010.
Rather than mod me down - care to make your own predictions?
However, there's the other side of that coin. Almost every forum I know of has text like the following, from our own wonderful/. TOS:
With respect to text or data entered into and stored...such as forums, comments..., the submitting user retains ownership of such SourceForge Public Content;... In each such case, the submitting user grants SourceForge the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license. (emphasis mine) It would appear that the submitter retains ownership for purposes of slander/libel, but for everything else SourceForge//. can do whatever they please, including making it available for others to use freely.
I think it would be very difficult to bring a copyright case against someone using code snippets published on such a site, as a reader is technically part of the site's organization, and therefore part of the site (yes, the standard disclaimer applies, but I'm sure this could be a pretty successful tact to use) or the site could just permit snippets to be used in such ways.
There's another reason to run JRuby - the ability to dynamically change a code snippet by users inside a larger application for custom rule engines, as an example.
Java allows it as well, but it's much harder to sandbox dynamically uploaded java code than a scriplet.
Actually, the first link is all about DRM, although they merely state it as the audio layer was redesigned. Why? DRM.
On HDCP, you're incorrect. HDCP is required for specific HD-DVD/Blu-ray protected playback, not for HD video content I myself produce and is unprotected or even for OTA HD signal playback. Face it, MS royally fucked the pooch on this one, period.
You're still being an apologist. Vista is a train wreck, even if it sort of works for you. I personally expect more out of a $200 upgrade than a sort of works but worse than my almost 8 year old OS (Win2K) or 6 year old OS, or much worse than Linux, Solaris, or OS X. Heck, I'm wondering whether this isn't worse than OS/2, but I haven't installed OS/2 in about 7 years now, so I'm only going on old old memories. Perhaps I should load it in a VM on my mac and review how well OS/2 actually stacks up against the "modern" systems.
You can continue to look for ways that Vista betters XP in ways other than these - there's plenty of statements out there about it, some are even from blogs!
Don't be an apologist. Vista blows so hard I don't know a single person that prefers it over XP, and only know 1 that still runs it, but only because the process of putting XP on his Vista laptop runs into issues with the OEM not providing XP drivers. Not only that, but Linux and Macs are now being actively considered at my workplace, and I'm sure mine's not the only one considering what we're now reading in places like cio.com.
I do know that if you don't carefully read what the supported file system versions are, you can get into trouble. There were a number of "improvements" made to NTFS that caused PM to barf if you didn't have the correct version. I'm sure the landscape's changed since then, though. I've not done this in 3 years, opting to just drop in another HD at the $50 or $60 price point.
well then, there's the perfect Linux box - old desktop.
As for partitioning HD space, I've had a lot of luck with Partition Magic, but running an older version that isn't Windows based before Norton bought it. It can still be run in a non-windows mode from PM 8, I believe. I've had bad luck trying it with other live re-partitioning applications.
Vista is more than a percentage point or two slower, depending upon what you're doing.
That aside, the next version of Windows, Windows 7, is merely a regurgitated Vista with some (bloatware) icing on top, from all descripitions. I'm not sure that corps will be upgrading to it either, at least not without looking at alternative good and hard. They'll have 3-6 years, after all, to investigate alternatives.
You'd have to go back and see the first three. The jump quite obviously happened in ep 6. Those stupid ewoks almost made me puke back in 83. I couldn't even make the argument that it went downhill from there, all that happened was that the people that could almost act were removed from the story, and you were left with... Episodes 1-3.
As for 3 being a redemption? Don't make me laugh. Just because it was by far the best of the second 3 doesn't mean it was better than ep 4 or 5, probably the best of the lot. One day I'll go back and maybe watch them all in short order, except I'll edit Eps 1 and 2 down to the 20m intro it was meant to be for the 60m ep 3, which should result in 1 watchable 80m movie. I don't know that you can fix ep 6 without reshooting large portions of it, or maybe the whole thing, since the entire premise is a large stinking pile.
What a stupid thing to say. Did you know you still need to load the data from the hard drives to main memory in order to access the information from the filesystem? Any extra calculation is negligible after the initial performance hits of actually getting the data off a spinning iron disk are overcome. If you honestly think any newish processor would have ANY problems handling one or more raid setups I want to know what you are smoking. Proof that it's better to remain quiet than remove all doubt.
My servers tend to run 80-100% CPU utilization during peak times. Disk I/O is minimized via coding trade-offs, but still happens. In this scenario, any additional overhead for software RAID directly impacts how many transactions per second my servers can handle. In short, a bad use case for some forms of software RAID. Another bad use case is a set of servers that have high data transfers. In this scenario, having two write requests for mirror sets can overload a bus that would otherwise be adequate for a single write request.
Yes, both bad use cases are examples of perhaps using inapropriate solutions for the problem at hand, but there may very well be reasons for the drive configuration, and the software solution fails to deliver what's needed.
And if you think these are contrived examples, they're not. They are the configurations of servers I'm currently running, one's an applications server that does tons of processing, and the other's an OLTP DB server.
I'm not sure you read my link, but they show that RAID5 is also faster on software vs hardware.
I will not dispute the degraded array performance statements, as that's heavily dependent upon your hardware and as an FYI, even hardware based RAID 5 systems will have noticeable degredation in performance when a drive is being rebuilt. Unless things have changed in the past 2-3 years, that will still hold true.
Software RAID is certainly not slower, and has in several instances been shown to outperform all but the best of dedicated RAID controllers.
There is a CPU hit, that's true. There's also the issue of scalability, with hardware obviously scaling far beyond what software can do, depending upon what interesting RAID hardware you stock up on. Then there's the additional features of some hardware, which is just plain cool if you ever get to play with them.
Of course it's a better interface. Usenet was shit. Complete anonymity, no accountability, no images, no formatting, no decent threading, no subforums or categories,... I can see lots of arguments about this. USENET itself offered no interfaces, only content. Major difference there. Much like RSS today, and in essence, an RSS feed is virtually identical to a USENET feed. Now the readers... I'm certain that readers have gotten better over time. There's some that look almost like, gasp... forums out on the web. DejaNews was a pretty decent web interface.
Complete anonymity: no more than exists in any forum from an end user perspective. I would argue that anonymity is good in many cases.
accountability: see previous - if you think there's some now, you need to share.
images: you never discovered alt.binaries, I guess.
formatting: USENET is content, it's the job of the reader to format it, much like HTML except much much simpler.
threading: this is a job of the reader - you obviously needed a better one.
subforums: alt.binaries.
categories: I'm not following you here - the hierarchal structure of USENET deals with categories and sub-forums in a pretty nice way.
...nothing but spam and endless flamewars lasting literally years. Having to download a huge list of newsgroups, then 'subscribe', then sit there and wait for every message to download, only to see 4000 posts arguing the same shit over and over again, with posts quoted 50 deep so you have to scroll down five pages just to get to the actual post.
Face it, newsgroups were a fucking wasteground. Stripping out all your complaints about content, which is no better on any forum/newsgroup/etc unless it's moderated, your complaints boil down to "having to download a huge list of newsgroups" and having to "sit there and wait for every message to download" which are both client issues, not USENET issues.
USENET is a nice alternate entity to websites. It's decentralized, which makes for some nice features over websites which can be controlled by various entities, including those that don't even own the websites (Chinese government or groups like the RIAA).
Envisioning the internet as it is today back in 89 would most likely have predicted today's internet in about another 10 years. It's only the speed, not the internet itself, that would have been hard to predict. Most of the things done on the internet today already existed in some form back in 89, some far before then. Email (and IM,SMS), the Web (a combination of FTP repositories, WAIS, Archie, Gopher, and USENET with a better interface), streaming media/video conferencing. And as for P2P, the internet started with people sharing things off of their systems available to all, became somewhat centralized due to the explosion of end users, and now is moving back to a decentralized format again.
The major surprise was the speed of cabling and price drops in hardware, making internet access ubiquitous.
For the Exchange/Outlook attractiveness: there was nothing else out there that combined the two. Wanted to schedule a meeting, email an invite. Wanted to move a meeting, do so and it automatically sent notifications. Wanted to see someone's schedule - easy. That last one pretty much disappeared around 2000 with Office XP, btw. Oh, and let's not forget the get an email about some information, want to schedule a meeting, drag it to the calendar and voila - instant meeting request. That integration is what made Exchange. If the Outlook client hadn't had it, Exchange might very well have been a foot note, as despite what MS claims, under the covers it violates several aspects of X.500 directories and in doing so should have been invalidated as a candidate for government systems way back in 97. That's another story.
Actually, MS wants you to "buy" another copy of their OS, retiring your old copy. Depending upon when you obtained your copy of XP, you may or may not have the right to use it on a new computer, and you may have that right despite what MS wants you to think. The only ones that are tied to hardware are the last couple of years of OEM shipments. Before that, you're free to do what you want, and actually, you're almost free to do what you want even with the OEM versions, if you're smart about it and didn't install WGA or SP2. But we're not talking about the average person that can accomplish either of those feats, so your point mostly stands, even though its through ignorance and not legal ability.
The choice of XP over Vista is definitely an indicator. It means MS won't be able to create their usual OS churn, because no one will upgrade, those machines bought in the last 4 years will in many cases continue to serve their owners instead of their owners being forced to upgrade because they got a docx document that they can't read and need an upgrade for (the thing that happened starting with Office 95). Also, it's not so much what "people" choose to do, but what businesses choose to do. If people start seeing other systems at work and go wow, this is easy or neat or not so different, then the door's been kicked wide open. That is MS's nightmare, and I'm sure it keeps Ballmer up at night. I think he's already realized he's lost the developers, despite his rant. They're all working in Java, Ruby, PHP, and other non-MS technologies. I'm sure he's got heartburn. He's getting a lot of pushback on DX10. XBox is a failure by all measures except some skewed metric involving only installed base. (Ok, I've got 20 million units sold!!! But I lost $100 per unit, and I only make $50/unit average back on licensing fees...Oh and warranty work costs me another $100/unit. Yep, sounds like a success to me.)
MS could fix itself, but it requires a step similar to Apples move with OSX, and given the glimpses of their culture posted throughout the web, it's doubtful they'll be able to pull it off. They're so big that it's going to take a while to bleed it to the point people will realize that the behemoth is half dead, but they'll see it happen soon enough. And only then do I think there will be enough shake ups in the company to make a difference. It will be interesting times indeed for those inside MS.
Businesses own 'X' number of licenses, that they've already paid for. Those licenses are exclusive of systems. (That is provided they paid for the support/update subscription thing.) That's all they have to show. They certainly don't show a series of computer holograms (unless they're very small businesses)
So here's the kicker: MS doesn't want XP installed anymore. Businesses don't want Vista. MS has already been forced to extend the XP EOL term twice, and says they won't do it again. But wait, you can buy more expensive support options to keep XP beyond this current EOL. Businesses still don't want Vista. (See the push developing?)
That's why CIO.com's survey's went from <1% looking at alternative OSes to >45% considering them in less than 12 months. Vista's that bad, and Windows 7's roadmap is not going to make their core concerns go away and is actually a further enticement to look at alternatives.
Lastly, you have to look at what else is available. It turns out that Open Office has finally hit the "good enough" mark for the mass market majority. It's easier to switch to OOo than it is to O2007. That would be 2 strikes against MS. If you think this is not true, you haven't tried OOo. There will be the few for whom scripting in excel is still important, but for the vast majority, it won't matter.
And then there's the last bastion of MS hope: the Exchange/Outlook duo. The latter half, Outlook, certainly has gotten whipped in the past couple of years as a major security hole, and the O2007 "facelift" pretty much killed it too, IMNSHO. And it still suffers from the universal Office single thread I/O lock issue (just try opening a large attachment and doing anything else). Exchange itself is starting to get beat up some. It's a pain in the ass to deal with, backup, or pretty much anything else due to the JET DB underlying the POS. Then there's the issue of the deconstruction of MIME messages for processing and storage, and the inability to reconstruct it properly when needed. There are also the rise of several iCal standards based servers that are actually usable, and much much better email servers, along with the previously stated non MS server base.
Combine all those, and MS may be facing a 3 strikes situation, which would retire it to try again later. With Gates out of the way, and Ballmer most likely getting shown the door, MS might actually have a chance at reinventing itself, since it will have to compete on technical merit instead of contractual savvy, its past bailiwick.
You're still seeing this as people paying the tax. People are starting to get wise to how to return their unwanted copies of Vista, meaning that there won't be a tax paid, and perhaps even a loss, depending upon how the money aspect is handled.
I think MS is very concerned about how many active Vista installations there are, considering the trends they're seeing. Their entire business model premise is that everyone will upgrade sooner or later, thus generating a large amount of churn. If no one upgrades to Vista, but they (businesses) have to get off of XP, then there's only one place for them to move - away from MS.
At this point, given the mindset, MS really only has one option: repackage Vista as a "home" system or dump it altogether, and keep selling XP/XP Pro to both gamers and businesses (see the gamer adoption rates about why XP matters there as well, Vista is less than 14%).
I thought there were far more than 2K developers working on it. From the descriptions of their convoluted build process, it had to be far in excess of 5K developers. They have tiers of branches for main functions of the kernel, for crying out loud! (There was a/. story about that a while ago - my mind boggled at the process they've adopted)
What would be more interesting is to see how many they actually sold, and of those, how many are still on machines.
I know of several people who downgraded Vista either immediately or within a couple of weeks. Even the 2 that still use it after a couple of months, one's got it on a test server, the other is trying to justify spending the 3-5 days to downgrade over just buying a mac and dumping the entire MS line. Since he's going to have to replace hardware if he stays with Vista, the Mac solution is now tenable.
Another interesting fact would be how much Vista cost. Considering that they spent 7 years on it and threw away 3 or 4 years of effort and started over when.NET was proven not up to the task... I just wonder.
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I was always surprised that MS wasn't also slammed for Office. It is, after all, the sole reason they are a monopoly in the other 2 spaces.
Exchange exists as it does not because it's the best email/calendaring server, because it's not, but because it offered a better environment than Notes and met the X.500 requirements the government set out, well, sort of, they're actually not compliant, but that's a different story, something to do with case sensitivity....
There's far better email servers out there, and far better clients than Outlook, and far better calendaring servers. There's just not a client that ties them together as well yet, and that's a shame.
And just to bring it back on topic - the states are right - nothing has yet changed in the desktop space - MS is still the dominant by far player, the OS has yet to be replaced. (Hints of what might come after Vista are presaged by the wonders of the likes of cio.com, if you believe them. IE, by sole virtue of being "part" of the OS, is the dominant browser, but its market share appears to be rapidly falling over the past year or so, and may (hopefully) show the future trend of the OS. If you've tried the latest release of OOo, then you'll know that OOo is a viable replacement for Office, and a welcome one considering the pain that O2007 is causing some of us at least that are forced to use it.
I will predict that in the next 3-4 years, the landscape will change radically. MS will still be a powerhouse, but will just be the 400 pound gorilla, being much chastised and otherwise reduced from its former 800 pound size. ODF will probably become the standard, whether MS wants it to or not, and Office will fall rather rapidly from its perch. Look for this to happen within 12 months of 02003 being EOL'd and unsupported. Look for Apple to make further inroads in market share, as more and more people buy their laptops. Watch Dell implode as it loses the top spot. Watch Linux, probably in the form of Ubuntu, finally make inroads in marketshare, and possibly even into the business workspace. All this by the end of 2010.
Rather than mod me down - care to make your own predictions?
I think it would be very difficult to bring a copyright case against someone using code snippets published on such a site, as a reader is technically part of the site's organization, and therefore part of the site (yes, the standard disclaimer applies, but I'm sure this could be a pretty successful tact to use) or the site could just permit snippets to be used in such ways.
So that's why FF updated by 3pm.
There's another reason to run JRuby - the ability to dynamically change a code snippet by users inside a larger application for custom rule engines, as an example.
Java allows it as well, but it's much harder to sandbox dynamically uploaded java code than a scriplet.
Actually, the first link is all about DRM, although they merely state it as the audio layer was redesigned. Why? DRM.
On HDCP, you're incorrect. HDCP is required for specific HD-DVD/Blu-ray protected playback, not for HD video content I myself produce and is unprotected or even for OTA HD signal playback. Face it, MS royally fucked the pooch on this one, period.
You're still being an apologist. Vista is a train wreck, even if it sort of works for you. I personally expect more out of a $200 upgrade than a sort of works but worse than my almost 8 year old OS (Win2K) or 6 year old OS, or much worse than Linux, Solaris, or OS X. Heck, I'm wondering whether this isn't worse than OS/2, but I haven't installed OS/2 in about 7 years now, so I'm only going on old old memories. Perhaps I should load it in a VM on my mac and review how well OS/2 actually stacks up against the "modern" systems.
How about some official real documentation?
That's for starters. Then there's the insignificant issue of playing your own content back in its native resolution.
You can continue to look for ways that Vista betters XP in ways other than these - there's plenty of statements out there about it, some are even from blogs!
Don't be an apologist. Vista blows so hard I don't know a single person that prefers it over XP, and only know 1 that still runs it, but only because the process of putting XP on his Vista laptop runs into issues with the OEM not providing XP drivers. Not only that, but Linux and Macs are now being actively considered at my workplace, and I'm sure mine's not the only one considering what we're now reading in places like cio.com.
I do know that if you don't carefully read what the supported file system versions are, you can get into trouble. There were a number of "improvements" made to NTFS that caused PM to barf if you didn't have the correct version. I'm sure the landscape's changed since then, though. I've not done this in 3 years, opting to just drop in another HD at the $50 or $60 price point.
well then, there's the perfect Linux box - old desktop.
As for partitioning HD space, I've had a lot of luck with Partition Magic, but running an older version that isn't Windows based before Norton bought it. It can still be run in a non-windows mode from PM 8, I believe. I've had bad luck trying it with other live re-partitioning applications.
Vista is more than a percentage point or two slower, depending upon what you're doing.
That aside, the next version of Windows, Windows 7, is merely a regurgitated Vista with some (bloatware) icing on top, from all descripitions. I'm not sure that corps will be upgrading to it either, at least not without looking at alternative good and hard. They'll have 3-6 years, after all, to investigate alternatives.
You'd have to go back and see the first three. The jump quite obviously happened in ep 6. Those stupid ewoks almost made me puke back in 83. I couldn't even make the argument that it went downhill from there, all that happened was that the people that could almost act were removed from the story, and you were left with... Episodes 1-3.
As for 3 being a redemption? Don't make me laugh. Just because it was by far the best of the second 3 doesn't mean it was better than ep 4 or 5, probably the best of the lot. One day I'll go back and maybe watch them all in short order, except I'll edit Eps 1 and 2 down to the 20m intro it was meant to be for the 60m ep 3, which should result in 1 watchable 80m movie. I don't know that you can fix ep 6 without reshooting large portions of it, or maybe the whole thing, since the entire premise is a large stinking pile.
My servers tend to run 80-100% CPU utilization during peak times. Disk I/O is minimized via coding trade-offs, but still happens. In this scenario, any additional overhead for software RAID directly impacts how many transactions per second my servers can handle. In short, a bad use case for some forms of software RAID. Another bad use case is a set of servers that have high data transfers. In this scenario, having two write requests for mirror sets can overload a bus that would otherwise be adequate for a single write request.
Yes, both bad use cases are examples of perhaps using inapropriate solutions for the problem at hand, but there may very well be reasons for the drive configuration, and the software solution fails to deliver what's needed.
And if you think these are contrived examples, they're not. They are the configurations of servers I'm currently running, one's an applications server that does tons of processing, and the other's an OLTP DB server.
I'm not sure you read my link, but they show that RAID5 is also faster on software vs hardware.
I will not dispute the degraded array performance statements, as that's heavily dependent upon your hardware and as an FYI, even hardware based RAID 5 systems will have noticeable degredation in performance when a drive is being rebuilt. Unless things have changed in the past 2-3 years, that will still hold true.
Software RAID is certainly not slower, and has in several instances been shown to outperform all but the best of dedicated RAID controllers.
There is a CPU hit, that's true. There's also the issue of scalability, with hardware obviously scaling far beyond what software can do, depending upon what interesting RAID hardware you stock up on. Then there's the additional features of some hardware, which is just plain cool if you ever get to play with them.
...nothing but spam and endless flamewars lasting literally years. Having to download a huge list of newsgroups, then 'subscribe', then sit there and wait for every message to download, only to see 4000 posts arguing the same shit over and over again, with posts quoted 50 deep so you have to scroll down five pages just to get to the actual post.Face it, newsgroups were a fucking wasteground. Stripping out all your complaints about content, which is no better on any forum/newsgroup/etc unless it's moderated, your complaints boil down to "having to download a huge list of newsgroups" and having to "sit there and wait for every message to download" which are both client issues, not USENET issues.
USENET is a nice alternate entity to websites. It's decentralized, which makes for some nice features over websites which can be controlled by various entities, including those that don't even own the websites (Chinese government or groups like the RIAA).
Envisioning the internet as it is today back in 89 would most likely have predicted today's internet in about another 10 years. It's only the speed, not the internet itself, that would have been hard to predict. Most of the things done on the internet today already existed in some form back in 89, some far before then. Email (and IM,SMS), the Web (a combination of FTP repositories, WAIS, Archie, Gopher, and USENET with a better interface), streaming media/video conferencing. And as for P2P, the internet started with people sharing things off of their systems available to all, became somewhat centralized due to the explosion of end users, and now is moving back to a decentralized format again.
The major surprise was the speed of cabling and price drops in hardware, making internet access ubiquitous.
They had me up to "0wn"ing the users box. After that, it really would have made a wonderful early April posting.
for Sony, for one. Yep, can't say enough good things about root-kitting your customers...
You do realize that was through the people's ignorance, not yours, right? The out of context quote made me ask....
But you're right, it is time to call it a night. Have a good one
For the Exchange/Outlook attractiveness: there was nothing else out there that combined the two. Wanted to schedule a meeting, email an invite. Wanted to move a meeting, do so and it automatically sent notifications. Wanted to see someone's schedule - easy. That last one pretty much disappeared around 2000 with Office XP, btw. Oh, and let's not forget the get an email about some information, want to schedule a meeting, drag it to the calendar and voila - instant meeting request. That integration is what made Exchange. If the Outlook client hadn't had it, Exchange might very well have been a foot note, as despite what MS claims, under the covers it violates several aspects of X.500 directories and in doing so should have been invalidated as a candidate for government systems way back in 97. That's another story.
Actually, MS wants you to "buy" another copy of their OS, retiring your old copy. Depending upon when you obtained your copy of XP, you may or may not have the right to use it on a new computer, and you may have that right despite what MS wants you to think. The only ones that are tied to hardware are the last couple of years of OEM shipments. Before that, you're free to do what you want, and actually, you're almost free to do what you want even with the OEM versions, if you're smart about it and didn't install WGA or SP2. But we're not talking about the average person that can accomplish either of those feats, so your point mostly stands, even though its through ignorance and not legal ability.
The choice of XP over Vista is definitely an indicator. It means MS won't be able to create their usual OS churn, because no one will upgrade, those machines bought in the last 4 years will in many cases continue to serve their owners instead of their owners being forced to upgrade because they got a docx document that they can't read and need an upgrade for (the thing that happened starting with Office 95). Also, it's not so much what "people" choose to do, but what businesses choose to do. If people start seeing other systems at work and go wow, this is easy or neat or not so different, then the door's been kicked wide open. That is MS's nightmare, and I'm sure it keeps Ballmer up at night. I think he's already realized he's lost the developers, despite his rant. They're all working in Java, Ruby, PHP, and other non-MS technologies. I'm sure he's got heartburn. He's getting a lot of pushback on DX10. XBox is a failure by all measures except some skewed metric involving only installed base. (Ok, I've got 20 million units sold!!! But I lost $100 per unit, and I only make $50/unit average back on licensing fees...Oh and warranty work costs me another $100/unit. Yep, sounds like a success to me.)
MS could fix itself, but it requires a step similar to Apples move with OSX, and given the glimpses of their culture posted throughout the web, it's doubtful they'll be able to pull it off. They're so big that it's going to take a while to bleed it to the point people will realize that the behemoth is half dead, but they'll see it happen soon enough. And only then do I think there will be enough shake ups in the company to make a difference. It will be interesting times indeed for those inside MS.
You can't touch federal programs. The federal government can't be taxed by states.
Businesses own 'X' number of licenses, that they've already paid for. Those licenses are exclusive of systems. (That is provided they paid for the support/update subscription thing.) That's all they have to show. They certainly don't show a series of computer holograms (unless they're very small businesses)
So here's the kicker: MS doesn't want XP installed anymore. Businesses don't want Vista. MS has already been forced to extend the XP EOL term twice, and says they won't do it again. But wait, you can buy more expensive support options to keep XP beyond this current EOL. Businesses still don't want Vista. (See the push developing?)
That's why CIO.com's survey's went from <1% looking at alternative OSes to >45% considering them in less than 12 months. Vista's that bad, and Windows 7's roadmap is not going to make their core concerns go away and is actually a further enticement to look at alternatives.
Lastly, you have to look at what else is available. It turns out that Open Office has finally hit the "good enough" mark for the mass market majority. It's easier to switch to OOo than it is to O2007. That would be 2 strikes against MS. If you think this is not true, you haven't tried OOo. There will be the few for whom scripting in excel is still important, but for the vast majority, it won't matter.
And then there's the last bastion of MS hope: the Exchange/Outlook duo. The latter half, Outlook, certainly has gotten whipped in the past couple of years as a major security hole, and the O2007 "facelift" pretty much killed it too, IMNSHO. And it still suffers from the universal Office single thread I/O lock issue (just try opening a large attachment and doing anything else). Exchange itself is starting to get beat up some. It's a pain in the ass to deal with, backup, or pretty much anything else due to the JET DB underlying the POS. Then there's the issue of the deconstruction of MIME messages for processing and storage, and the inability to reconstruct it properly when needed. There are also the rise of several iCal standards based servers that are actually usable, and much much better email servers, along with the previously stated non MS server base.
Combine all those, and MS may be facing a 3 strikes situation, which would retire it to try again later. With Gates out of the way, and Ballmer most likely getting shown the door, MS might actually have a chance at reinventing itself, since it will have to compete on technical merit instead of contractual savvy, its past bailiwick.
You're still seeing this as people paying the tax. People are starting to get wise to how to return their unwanted copies of Vista, meaning that there won't be a tax paid, and perhaps even a loss, depending upon how the money aspect is handled.
And that'd be different from reading /. @ work how?
I think MS is very concerned about how many active Vista installations there are, considering the trends they're seeing. Their entire business model premise is that everyone will upgrade sooner or later, thus generating a large amount of churn. If no one upgrades to Vista, but they (businesses) have to get off of XP, then there's only one place for them to move - away from MS.
/. story about that a while ago - my mind boggled at the process they've adopted)
At this point, given the mindset, MS really only has one option: repackage Vista as a "home" system or dump it altogether, and keep selling XP/XP Pro to both gamers and businesses (see the gamer adoption rates about why XP matters there as well, Vista is less than 14%).
I thought there were far more than 2K developers working on it. From the descriptions of their convoluted build process, it had to be far in excess of 5K developers. They have tiers of branches for main functions of the kernel, for crying out loud! (There was a
What would be more interesting is to see how many they actually sold, and of those, how many are still on machines.
.NET was proven not up to the task... I just wonder.
I know of several people who downgraded Vista either immediately or within a couple of weeks. Even the 2 that still use it after a couple of months, one's got it on a test server, the other is trying to justify spending the 3-5 days to downgrade over just buying a mac and dumping the entire MS line. Since he's going to have to replace hardware if he stays with Vista, the Mac solution is now tenable.
Another interesting fact would be how much Vista cost. Considering that they spent 7 years on it and threw away 3 or 4 years of effort and started over when