Microsoft Disses Windows to Sell More Windows

mjasay writes "I stumbled across this fascinating Microsoft tutorial entitled "How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade." It's an attempt to coach IT professionals on how to sell Windows desktop upgrades internally. Apparently the value of Vista is not readily apparent, requiring detailed instructions on how to connive and cajole into an upgrade from XP. The most intriguing thing about the tutorial is its implicit rejection of Microsoft's older technology. Just a few years ago Microsoft was pitching the world on how secure and cool XP was. Now it's telling us largely the opposite, implying that XP is a security threat, costs too much to run, and so on. With Microsoft marketing against itself, perhaps the Mac and Linux camps can simply wait for Microsoft to self-destruct?"

a few years late

Now it's telling us largely the opposite, implying that XP is a security threat, costs too much to run, and so on.

Hah! Now I have the evidence I need to convince my boss not to make that XP transition. Now where did I put that time machine?

Re:a few years late

I think you left it on OS X Leopard...

op ed on Ms Windows "security" or rather the lack

OP ED

Microsoft will *never* produce a secure system: the user is *not* the customer: the advertising industry is. just as in television, *we* are *not* the customer: *we* are what is for sale, advertising is the customer, tv industry is selling *us* as *audience* to the advertisers

and Windows is not any different in this respect but is rather a transitional product taking us from the television screen to the selectivision screen which is what the WWW+television will morph into

the initial work is already done: the www has injected so much graphics into computer presentaions that hi-speed broad band is now necessary for "surfing".

now that that's been done the next step is to combine the web with digital TV and you have the advertising marketing dream come true: television with instantaneous feed-back on what everyone is watching and how everyone is responding to it

the ability to adjust your windows programming all along a little here and there is critical to the development and maintenance of this scheme and that is why Microsoft can *never* produce a secure system. Their system provides access to customer computer for paying customers and that includes the ability to modify the client programming ( your computer ). all of this is hidden from everyone except the hackers of course

why do you think we patch and patch and patch and patch and for every patch a new vulnerability shows up? because the patch only moves the remote access capability from one hiding place to another it doesn't remove it. and never will.

"IMHO", -- FWIW

Re:a few years late

You have stumbled onto something interesting. The key to selling Linux as a replacement for Windows is to calculate the savings in terms of something the PHBs understand -- BMWs. A 2008 528i is about $50k, so if you can save $150k, that's 3 BMWs. Smaller companies can calculate using the 328i, larger companies can use the M5 or 745li.

Re:Wow... more rabid MS hate? On Slashdot?

I take it these changes under the hood involved putting in a lot of 'wait' commands. I've refused to let anyone get Vista on a company machine so far, but our CEO went ahead and got himself a VAIO with a flippin 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, and it runs slower than other machines we have that are several years old. It's pathetic. Utterly pathetic. Also if you think that the other OSes haven't changed at all, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.. for one thing you shouldn't just talk about 'OS X', you should be thinking back to Mac OS in the 80s and considering the development on it since then. Also Linux has undergone an insane amount of development. Maybe the security practices haven't changed that much, but that's because they're actually sensible, and work, unlike one other OS that I can think of (which you appear to want to mate with..)

Re:Wow... more rabid MS hate? On Slashdot?

Er, I am a software developer who has to work on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows (XP and Vista). And believe me, Linux and Mac OS X have both changed drastically under the hood since their initial releases. Look at Linux kernel version 0.9 versus the kernel 2.6 series; device access methods are vastly improved, memory management is a whole ton better, and outside of the kernel, the libraries in userland have moved forward quite frequently. As for OS X, Mac OS X 10.0 was damn near unusable for anything except legacy NeXTStep software, but 10.5 is actually the least-painful OS to develop for of any I deal with. (Not trying to show bias, just that Leopard's system APIs are very polished even compared to Tiger, and I personally find the developer documentation less painful to wade through than Vista's.)

Many changes in Vista are simply immediately apparent to even end-users, because there is a ton of new eye-candy (in addition to the extensive under-the-hood reworkings). Leopard, most of the important changes are under-the-hood modifications (better access to filesystem, such as the FSEvents API, the new 64-bit throughout setup, system self-signing of downloaded applications, etc.), with less new eye-candy, but speaking as a developer, there are some equally sweeping changes under the hood.

Every operating system progresses as time goes on, as long as it is still in active development. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X...

Re:Value of Vista

However, apart from the fact that my Mandriva Laptop (which came pre-installed with Vista) doesn't run a lot of windows programs, it does a lot of stuff that win 2k, win 98 didn't do, and it doesn't take up any extra resources. It can run Compiz Fusion just fine on 512 MB of RAM, and an integrated Intel Video card. Why can't Vista run it's cool 3D desktop on the same? KDE4 touts a lot of new features, and it's going to be faster than the old KDE3. Just because they added new features, doesn't mean it has to run slower, or consume more resources. I shouldn't have to buy a $1000 machine every time I want to upgrade my OS. The OS should be at least as efficient, if not more efficient than the previous version. There is no reason why Vista cannot do what it does on a machine with only 512 MB of RAM. It's just badly coded. If they created a quality product, you wouldn't need a monster machine to run it.

Re:Value of Vista

Of course you can see the security improvements in the UI.

{it looks like your posting to an insecure site. WWW.slashdot.org, would you like to continue? allow/deny}

the problem with UAC is that MSFt went straight to fine grained control of applications without having a general course grain security refined and in place to start with. It will take a while to sort out all the random issues with it. Maybe by SP2 it will be secure and useful.

then again MSFT doesn't think you own your PC or the content that's on it so maybe not.

Default Administrators

Probably the biggest hassle from a security perspective [with past technologies] is that users tended to run as administrators. In Vista, that's not the default anymore.

Ok, yeah, he's probably talking about XP. I mean, when he says [with past technologies] they can't be talking about older operating systems like Unix, Solaris or Linux because root is simply not the default. I don't know a lot about arcane operating systems but I think that in the beginning a careful security scheme was thought out that defined a protected 'kernel space' that the operating system needed to run that the daily user simply could not touch or needed credentials to do so.

Now, this is funny, but I want to caution you that this is something they need to change. If you criticize them for attacking their own vulnerabilities, you're not giving them a chance to change. Microsoft isn't going to self destruct so let's hope they stop giving botnets & trojans a home in this world. Better security is better for the community and the users. Don't attack someone when they recognize their wrong doings and attempt to correct them. If you don't allow that, then how can anyone improve? Personally I examine my mistakes, acknowledge them and fix them. I certainly hope that Microsoft does this because it's evident that they'll still sell well despite them.

Re:Default Administrators

Microsoft isn't going to self destruct so let's hope they stop giving botnets & trojans a home in this world. Better security is better for the community and the users.

Oh, I don't know. I, for one, take great comfort in the thought of Microsoft delivering the DRM products of tomorrow. It's like being locked in the Alcatraz for life and realizing that the walls are made of wet cardboard.

Re:Default Administrators

Except that, if they're dictating the world's DRM schemes, they're also probably going to be responsible for most of the software used to encode and decode the DRMed data, and therefore also responsible for the OS that runs that software, and the hardware that runs that OS, etc., etc.

So to revise your simile:

It's like being locked in the Alcatraz for life and realizing that the walls are made of wet cardboard. But if you break out prison, it doesn't really matter, because every building, vehicle, and flat surface is also made out of that same wet cardboard.

Re:Default Administrators

Ok, yeah, he's probably talking about XP. I mean, when he says [with past technologies] they can't be talking about older operating systems like Unix, Solaris or Linux because root is simply not the default.

He means "past Microsoft technologies". Microsoft is 20 to 30 years behind our current state of the art. Unix was multiuser pretty much from the beginning. Microsoft is also following the same evolutionary path, though their recycled VMS programmers should have known better.

Separate I & D space and protected kernel memory came a bit after multiuser in the early to mid 1970s. Virtual memory and paging were added on the late 1970s about the same time as the Berkeley networking stack was first written. The earliest networking code was done without giving much^H^H^H^Hany thought to security. The earliest consumer Unix systems (System V/R2-based) had trivial root exploits out of the box (at least the ones I had at home did). All this stuff got fixed over time, of course and eventually Microsoft might even be able to manage it too.

So with Vista, Microsoft is at last catching up to the level of security and features we had in Unix in the mid to late 1980s.

Re:Default Administrators

To be fair, Windows NT had granular, integrated and standardized security, networking, virtual memory (even in kernel mode), a unified page cache, SMP, and other advanced features right from its first release in 1993. Dave Cutler and the rest of the VMS team MS acquired definitely knew what they were doing.

The exploits that Windows has had have very rarely been kernel or core design issues. Windows has a secure design, but it's rarely configured to be secure and has suffered numerous implementation faults. In particular: usermode components, notably the shell, LSA and RPC. Microsoft is also guilty of putting compatible defaults ahead of secure ones, e.g. making Admin accounts default in XP. OEMs are also partially to blame here because they decide how the computer comes loaded from the factory (i.e. with one auto-logon admin account), network admins for allowing it to stay that way (in a corp environment), and ISVs for making tons of software that requires admin privileges when it shouldn't.

With Vista, Microsoft is trying to keep around as much old code as possible in certain components, maintain compatibility with old software, change the default privilege level for programs to non-admin, and implement some kind of TCPAesque DRM. In short, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too, via technical means. It's not pretty. Time will tell how effective it is.

Re:Slackware what?

"*Installs Slackware Hey look guys root is default"

... those of us who cut our teeth on slackware can work all day as root without a problem uphill, both ways, in the winter ... and when there's a power failure, we just throw some more coal into our UPS ... and ram upgrades? We don't need no stinking ram upgrades. 8 meg is more than enough on our pentium^W486^W386 on our green-screen console.

Kids nowadays! Bah!!! Humbug!!!!!

(... and merry xmas/seasons greetings/whatever floats your boat)

Is an old version of Linux better than the latest?

It's kind of silly to blame Microsoft for making the claim that their latest OS is better/more secure/prettier/whatever than previous versions. After all, isn't that the whole point of versions? i.e. To easily identify the progression of features and functionality. If the latest version of Windows weren't the latest and greatest, I'd be very surprised to hear Microsoft say otherwise.

Linux may be a great OS, but I'd take a 2.6 kernel over a 2.2 kernel any day for my desktop computing needs. 2.2 is buggy, slow, insecure, and sucks compared to the latest kernel. If you were in charge of upselling users to 2.6, you'd say as much, I hope.

Re:Is an old version of Linux better than the late

Microsoft wasn't late to this party; Windows NT 4 worked just fine when logged in as a non-admin. Microsoft's army of software developers, however, never got the hint. Now that Vista basically forces them to follow the user-separation rules, they're actually starting to fix all the bugs their software had all along. Anybody who tried to run Windows 2000 or Windows XP as a regular user can vouch for that-- all (or almost all) Microsoft software worked fine, but very little third party software did.

Hmmm

Is there a way to sell upgrades without, "dissing" your previous product? On the other hand, this is a great way to justify not fixing known bugs.

Things change

You know, when Microsoft (or any company) makes a mistake, I'm usually first on the bandwagon trying to point out the stupidity. But times change. What was awesome last year may be crap this year. Especially in the computer world where technology moves very fast.

Think about it, there was a time when Apple said that the PPC arch was far superior to x86....they may have even been right, there are tons of things that I personally would have designed differently. But here we are today, using x86 Macs. No biggie, it was a big flip flop or anything, they just decided that switching to PPC made more sense on enough levels. In fact, now Apple is advertising that they are great because they can run Windows too (more that Windows is faster on a mac...but still). This implies that the switch to x86 was an improvement!

Bottom line is that they weren't lying when they said XP was better. By the time SP2 came out, this was very much the truth. Now they believe that Vista is an improvement, and antiquates XP. And you know what, in many ways this is the truth. Vista is FAR more secure than XP is, the technologies applied make it simply harder to weaponize vulnerabilities than it was with XP.

Technologies evolve, times change, perspectives get updated. No biggie.

Nothing New...

MS and Intel have been their own biggest competitor for years. With each new revision they have to go out and convince people that latest one is the best one ever and the old one should be replaced.

Re:Nothing New...

Really? Linux is better? Considering that you have to throw out all investment in the software you have which runs on Windows? You need to forget everything you learned about Windows, and re-learn for Linux? That's a better idea?

This shows how little experience you have in this regard. Not surprising, as few people do. None of my customers do, for example, until I come in. Lets start with "Legacy Software." Surprisingly enough, most business legacy software is DOS based! Really! The nasty old crap they can not do without runs very well in dosbox and Wine. And a lot of other Windows stuff works well in Wine. For the one or 2 apps that do not, a VM or terminal server work well. But most of my clients have lots of people that use a web browser, e-mail and Word, and nothing else. Linux can do this.
As to relearning, I suggest you try the latest Ubuntu LiveCD. If you can not figure out how to be productive, I will be surprised. Most people I have dealt with find it easier to adjust to than Vista. You know that they moved things in Vista, right?

MS greatest competition is themselves

Numerically speaking, MSFT's greatest competition in selling OSes and even Office Suites is themselves, specifically their older versions.

They have not been able to add compelling enough features, and customers get very angry at incompatibilities such as MS-Word has seen.

So they have to resort to targetted obsolescence, cajolery and legalistic tactics such as trying to tie the OS the the machine it was first licenced for. I'm not sure if those portions of the EULA violating ":first sale" have been upheld.

Does what I need syndrome?

While the summary, in typical Slashdot style, is heavily slanted, the article offers some interesting advice. Microsoft apparently has some serious problems trying to convince people to upgrade to Vista. Not because Vista is particularily bad (it isn't), but because XP is good enough already. So what would you do? You either use "evil" techniques like stopping distributing the old OS, shutting down upgrade servers or making your new software exclusive to the new OS. Or you use "good" techniques like publishing articles about how bad your previous OS was. Pick your choice. Also realize that all arguments presented in the article for switching from XP to Vista could equally well be applied to switching from XP to Linux.

Vista Costs Too

What management may not realize, however, is that they are already paying a hefty hidden cost by having outdated systems in place, "because you are paying for an administrator's time to deal with these issues," Johnson said.

So there aren't any costs to maintaining Vista? Yeah right. Marketing FUD if I ever heard. I guess it's no real surprise though. Business x wants you to pay them the most money, so they'll say whatever to get your money, even if it is FUD.

Really?

Because, you know, it was just yesterday that Apple was telling us how 10.4 was the shiznit. Now we've got 10.5, and suddenly, they won't even sell 10.4 anymore!

Or consider the Linux kernel. Back in the 2.0 days, everyone was telling me about how great Linux was. Now that we've got kernel 2.6, everyone's just dropping support for 2.0 and telling me it sucks compared to the latest version.

It is not unfair for a company to say that the newest version of their software is BETTER than their old version. If it wasn't, why release it?

Re:Value?

Apparently the value of Vista is not readily apparent

Neither is the value of used cat litter.

You'll find even more similarities as you dig and sift through everything, too.

That's the point

With Microsoft marketing against itself

I guess you've never read the “Intel Retail Edge” program manual or virtually any software's change-log/release notes.

It's been a long time since I've seen such crap on the frontpage of /. Almost every product out there gets released under these values, including the Linux kernel and MacOS. “It's more secure, upgrade now!”

Just a few years ago Microsoft was pitching the world on how secure and cool XP was. Now it's telling us largely the opposite

That's the point. XP came out years ago, and finally in 2007 a new version of Windows was released after much bitching by the market (us). Now that it's out, we're attacking its release because of the reasons we wanted a new version of Windows?

Excuse me if I don't see the point of this news...