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Microsoft Disses Windows to Sell More Windows 407

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?"
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Microsoft Disses Windows to Sell More Windows

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  • by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @10:48AM (#21641653)
    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?
    • by Slashidiot ( 1179447 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @10:59AM (#21641823) Journal
      I think you left it on OS X Leopard...
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Wiseman1024 ( 993899 )
      I hope we get to see the day where they'll diss Vista. I'm sure it'll be a much easier job than dissing XP was.

      I wish they were as sincere from the start, though.
    • by Grampaw Willie ( 631616 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @11:23AM (#21642155) Homepage
      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
  • by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn&gmail,com> on Monday December 10, 2007 @10:52AM (#21641719) Journal

    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.
    • by ultranova ( 717540 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @11:09AM (#21641965)

      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.

      • by randomaxe ( 673239 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @01:47PM (#21644531)
        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: (Score:3, Funny)

      Please turn in your Slashdot ID and nerd card. Also, please unholster and return your pitch fork.
    • As individuals, yes I agree 100%. Especially as a sysadmin, no one bats 1000. It's all about setting things up so the failures are graceful rather than total flame-outs.

      But we're talking about a company with proprietary operating system and total market control that spent man-years developing kernel-level DRM for practically all I/O instead of developing a sane security model. "Allow/Deny?" is not a security model. Neither is UAC. It allows privilege escalation. Mark Russinovich, MS's own man said so m
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by plague3106 ( 71849 )
        Allow/Deny?" is not a security model. Neither is UAC. It allows privilege escalation.

        Right, because *nix OSes don't allow privledge escalation either. Do an experiment. Take your Vista machine and remove your account from the Administrators group. Notice how Allow / Deny becomes "Enter administrator password."

        Then, logon to your Linux machine and run any UI tool for administering the system. Notice the same "Enter administrator password" prompt.
      • What is it exactly you dont like about UAC and the allow/deny thing? I hear people rant against it all the time but I still dont know why it is inferior to other models. Not trying to flame you, I am genuinely curious what you think is wrong with it.
        • I hear people rant against it all the time but I still dont know why it is inferior to other models.

          it's a fine idea, but it's too prompt-happy IMO. it prompts for things it shouldn't need permission for. with KiCAD (a PCB design program), it randomly prompts when you open the program, and i can't think of anything that it would need permission for. another friend of mine has it prompting him for permission everytime he compiles a program (using code::blocks (forget what build) and gcc. though i haven't
        • Linux/BSD and OSX have a totally sane security model. Anything that comes in is read only. Anything. Download a file? Read only. Email? Read only. I can't execute anything without specifically jumping through some hoops to get there.

          Most importantly, I'm not interrupted and I don't need antivirus software. I work/waste time/whatever safely. Most importantly the people who come to me for IT advice who don't care to know IT have nothing to worry about.

          From an enterprise perspective, the whole ACL sys
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Lagged2Death ( 31596 )
          I don't understand how it offers anyone any useful protection from anything.

          Suppose you download an installation package for some really neato whizbang gotta-have-it program. Like SuperDuperCutesyChat Deluxe, v9.0. Unbeknown to you, SuperDuperCutesyChat is a Trojan horse, laden with mal-ware of one kind or another.

          When you run the installer, one way or another, you have to give the installer admin-level privileges. If your account is an admin account, you see a couple of UAC prompts. If your account is a us
      • Some of the people modding your comment insightful have (probably) fallen into Microsoft's version of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.

        Not all of us have. Microsoft security model sucks. It is even too complex for MSCEs to understand. And how many used "Policies" in the NT and XP models? I mean really used them?

        The model needs to be simplified. Linux is my answer. Ubuntu has it down nicely and so does Fedora.

      • by Tom ( 822 )

        But we're talking about a company with proprietary operating system and total market control that spent man-years developing kernel-level DRM for practically all I/O instead of developing a sane security model.

        Mod parent up. That, really, is the point.

        It's not that security is hard - it is, but it isn't as hard as the jokers who don't even have the easy parts try to make you believe.
        We have lots and lots and lots of security methods and systems that would put 99% of today's trojan and exploit writers out of business because they'd have to get a degree in CS first just to understand even the theoretical exploits.
        But that stuff is hard to implement, and even harder to implement right. MS is one of the few entities

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by kilgortrout ( 674919 )

          It's priorities, and MS has its priorities very seriously fucked up.
          No they don't. MS is a for profit, publicly held company whose number one priority is to return value to their shareholders, i.e. make money. Everything they do is readily understandable if you keep this in mind. And Apple and Red Hat will do the same; they're just in a much different position than MS at the moment.
    • " If you don't allow that, then how can anyone improve?"

      That assumes I want them to improve rather than damage themselves. Even if their operating system suddenly became wonderful the company would still be a problem.

      I don't want them to get better, I want them to screw up visibly and often.
    • I think a huge design flaw in Windows was denying access to the settings instead of just sandboxing (caging) the registry and emulating those settings so the program can't really distinguish between the current user settings and the global settings.

      Had this been implemented, people could install any programs and they wouldn't affect other accounts - which meant that, if you got a virus, the virus would only be for your current user. It would be a lot easier for an admin to then scan the registry for viruses
    • by SL Baur ( 19540 ) <steve@xemacs.org> on Monday December 10, 2007 @12:37PM (#21643353) Homepage Journal

      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.
      • by Foolhardy ( 664051 ) <csmith32.gmail@com> on Monday December 10, 2007 @06:37PM (#21648705)
        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: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Machtyn ( 759119 )

      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.

      Excellent point, those with mod points are correct in modding you up. I also want to add that I hope MS sees the errors in their ways concerning HDD partitioning. Why do they make it so hard to define the Program Files directory on a different partition?

      I realize that you can force the user space to a different partition, but it is kludgy and you can't define it during install (so you will still have a ghost "C:\Documents and Settings" in XP or "C:\Users" in Vista).

      The main benefit of defining at

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Locutus ( 9039 )
      Yes, it's 2007( almost 2008 ) and it was ONLY the mid 80's when I first experienced what could be called as an Operating Systems 101 class and in that scenario, it was discussed how userspace and kernel space are highly separate spaces and managed by access ID's throughout the operating system design. So wow, only 20+ years and Microsoft still attempting to get its half-baked version of this built into its OS? And they are thinking making this information public is a good thing?

      Microsoft only "sells well"
  • 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.
    • 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.
      Maybe. But I'd take a 2.2 kernel any day over any version of Windows.
    • Us unix/linux fanboys have been saying for years that the biggest hole in the many versions of windows was the lack of password protection of the operating system files (install as root, run as user - otherwise a simple batch file can be used as a virus..)

      This simple idea has been around for at least 25 years, so there is no technical reason that Microsoft are so late to this party.

      Comparing this gaping security hole (from DOS to WinXP) to minor linux kernel enhancements from 2.2 to 2.6 is not terribly rele
      • by Blakey Rat ( 99501 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @12:55PM (#21643687)
        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.
    • 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.

      I don't see any real issue with MS for making progress. The difference between Linux and Windows is that Linux has been open about its faults whereas MS has not been as open. Because Linux isn't a product by single company, it does not have as much to lo

  • Hmmm (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wattrlz ( 1162603 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @10:55AM (#21641753)
    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.
    • Well, Microsoft could continue selling and maintaining XP, and acknowledge that not everybody needs Vista, and keep XP as the cheap OS and Vista as the expensive one. But truth is this will never happen...
    • How about saying the older product was already good, but here, we have new features that you want and need.

      Umm... Ok, that would require actually having any features the user needs or at least wants.

      How about saying the older product was less stable and prone to sudden crashes?

      Umm... Ok, that would require that the new product is at least as stable.

      How about saying the older product offers great compatibility, but the new one is more compatible with products from other manufacturers, so you can more easily
    • There is, assuming you have created something new and innovative. I.e: "Our last product was great, since then we have taken advantage of this awesome new tech to make it even better!".

      Instead we have: "Our new and expensive product implements what the competition did 10 years ago ( for free ), you should spend a lot of money buying new hardware to run it since the last thing we sold you was a broken piece of shit."
  • Things change (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pr0xY ( 526811 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @10:55AM (#21641763)
    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.
    • 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

  • Nothing New... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EastCoastSurfer ( 310758 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @10:58AM (#21641809)
    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.
    • 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.

      The problem is that New Version is not a forgone conclusion. Reading TFA, Linux is actually a better answer to most of the issues raised. And if you convince your customers that they need to replace the old, they may look at other options for the new. Windows can become Mac or Linux. Pentium can become AMD
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by plague3106 ( 71849 )
        Reading TFA, Linux is actually a better answer to most of the issues raised.

        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?

        Doubtful.
        • Re:Nothing New... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by houstonbofh ( 602064 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @12:20PM (#21643027)
          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?
    • But this is true of almost every electronics, computer, or software company. How can you convince people to pay money for something that already does everything they need it to do, and that has already scaled up without too many perceivable problems? The only companies that aren't competing against themselves are the companies that continue to make money on a particular product, like Sun or Red Hat, because to them, the upgrades aren't the source of revenue (actually, Red Hat provides free upgrades for li
    • The problem is that so far, there was a reason to upgrade. The 286 could handle more ram, the 386 could handle protected mode, the 486 came with a built-in math coproc, the Pentium ... had a bug, then there was MMX and 3DNow and whatnot. Every new generation of a CPU had something new that enhanced the user experience and made the whole thing faster, better, greater.

      Same with Windows. Along came 95 with a completely integrated graphical interface (ok, more or less, don't bash me). 98 was a huge leap forward
  • by redelm ( 54142 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @10:58AM (#21641811) Homepage
    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.

  • by bjourne ( 1034822 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @11:01AM (#21641855) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • I beg to differ.

      It's horrible.
      It tells me that my system administrator has set up policies to stop certain things (I haven't, and neither can I find where it claims these policies are set).
      It refuses to run some programs on startup and has no button for "Just run it, asshole", admin privileges or no.

      It's confusing and restricting. That and the enormous system hoggery have really put me off. I always used Windows for my main system before, the machine that came with Vista finally pushed me to use linux full
      • I beg to differ. It DOES run better than XP did on the same system, I find the new UI easier to use, and haven't had startup programs blocked and not runnable. At worse, I'm notified and its easy to tell Windows to allow the program to run.

        Of course, when XP first came out, it drove me nuts, much like it seems Vista has done for you. So I switched to Mandriva in 2001 or so (my server had been RH for years). I ran it as my desktop (except for games) until about 2005, when the latest Mandriva was pissing
        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          It's great that you've had a good experience with Vista. I happen to be in the "use whatever tool works the best for you" camp, so if you like Vista that's fine with me. I should point out, however, that your points do not apply to most people. Proof: people are indeed downgrading from Vista to XP. That does not match your theory that XP is "good enough" so people don't upgrade because the fact is that people (and lots of them) ARE upgrading to Vista and then turning away. If it was only the complacenc
  • Vista Costs Too (Score:4, Interesting)

    by explosivejared ( 1186049 ) <hagan.jared@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Monday December 10, 2007 @11:05AM (#21641909)
    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.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by bcwright ( 871193 )

      Obviously there are always costs to maintaining any system. However it is not at all unreasonable to say that there are hidden costs in maintaining older systems, and in fact it's very often - even usually - true. Updates are generally slower, new versions of applications that run on them will gradually become unavailable, security issues or system efficiency or human factors or other flaws may slowly drain productivity.

      By contrast there are often costs with new OS versions as well - you often need to upg

  • Really? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Erwos ( 553607 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @11:06AM (#21641923)
    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?
    • by xtracto ( 837672 )
      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.

      Haha, those ones are great in the Open Source world, specially when talking about bugs. Open source developers usually are like "there are no bugs! no no noallaalalalla no bugs in my program no, the bug does not exsist, no memory leak no you are dreaming"... and suddenly, after som
    • TFA article is a talking points memo, like what political parties give to the party loyalists to spew the party line. The difference between M$ and Apple or linux is that no one needs to put out a talking points memo about OS X 10.5 or the 2.6 kernel. These systems are better and it is self-evident from their feature list and after everyone tries them, and they're also more or less backwards compatible to their previous versions. (Except I won't be upgrading to 10.5 because I don't like the sidebar and I
    • by Tony ( 765 )
      Or consider the Linux kernel.

      Yes, lets.

      If you *want* the 2.0 kernel (first released in 1996, and last officially updated in 2004), you can still get it. If there is a known exploit, you can still fix it, or have it fixed. It's no longer off the table.

      Can you get MS-Windows 95? '98 SP2? NT 3.5? Not officially. Nor will you be able to get known bugs fixed.

      In 10 years, you'll *still* be able to get Linux 2.0. You won't be able to get MS-Windows Vista, nor XP, nor especially MS-Windows 98 SP2. Why you'd want MS
  • Every reason given there applies doubly to Linux.

    Now if Only Linux had the desktop apps....

  • From the article: The hidden cost of vulnerability

    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. The trick is to show management this in a way that translates into dollars saved.

    "It's a hard sell, because security is not a line item on their income or expense sheets. There also is not a line item that says they lost, say, $100

  • Is this new or interesting to anyone who has spent anytime watching generation after generation of technology go by?

    This reminds me of a commercial that Best Buy was running a few years ago about a guy who was looking to something for his brother for Christmas. The Best Buy Guy(tm) was asking what kind of person his brother was and there was this cheesy flashback of a guy with a mullet in a Camero who was all stoked about buying "the latest technology" (a VCR with a tethered remote). The Best Buy Guy and t
  • That's the point (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Eddy Luten ( 1166889 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @11:37AM (#21642349)

    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...

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by iG34RH34D ( 1064162 )
      The difference is that Linux isn't charging anyone a hefty sum for the upgrade, or telling them they need to upgrade their hardware to exotic levels. Linux also has a much longer support lifecycle, therefore it's a suggestion rather than a mandate or worse, a veiled threat.
      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Eddy Luten ( 1166889 )

        I'd love to see any “threats” made by Microsoft that mandate you to update your Operating System. Also, Vista doesn't require you to upgrade your machine to “exotic levels,” look at this:

        • 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
        • 512 MB of system memory
        • 20 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
        • Support for DirectX 9 graphics and 32 MB of graphics memory
        • DVD-ROM drive
        • Audio Output
        • Internet access (fees may apply)

        I can hardly call this exotic, minimal at best.

  • by computerchimp ( 994187 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @11:38AM (#21642373)
    The heading "troll" on this slashdot article is correct and appears to be a fabrication that misrepresents the article
    "How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade." Why is garbage like this allowed to stay up?

    1) The MS tutorial mentions older operating systems as a generic, it does not diss XP, it does not even mention XP!

    2) "newer operating system, such as Windows Vista". Vista is the example, put "XP" or other OS in there if you want.

    3) The article is a template to help frustrated IT admins/managers show reason and overcome objection to a proposal of migrating to a newer OS. Any admin in any environment could use this template.

    I am not commenting on the PCWorld article here, just the misrepresentation in the first part of the article. Let me know if the poster is talking about a differnt version of "How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade" because from what I see the posting is a lie, plain and simple.

    CC
    • "1) The MS tutorial mentions older operating systems as a generic, it does not diss XP"

      Do you mean that what they really mean is that Vista is not more secure, has less TCO and doesn't save money than Vista. If so then why the need to write an article on 'How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade'.

      The hidden cost of vulnerability

      '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 t
    • What, is reading between the lines a lost art these days?

      What the articles *states*, and what it *says*, are two different things. It states several things, but *says* a very specific thing.

      The /. summary is damned close to what the article implies. You can almost see the thought process: "How do we get people to upgrade to Vista without coming out and saying XP is crap?"

      It's kind of disingenuous of you to give a strictly-literal interpretation of the article to claim the /. summary is a troll.
  • Nowadays, Microsoft likes to boast that they have always produced the most secure version of Windows yet. Well, whoopdidoo. You will notice how they will never say they have produced a secure version of Windows. This helps them prevent lawsuits.
  • Microsoft's biggest competition is itself.

    They hardly can compare themselves to Apple or Linux, because those aren't really competition ... YET.

    All the reasons to upgrade to Vista I've seen are in reality nothing. The support costs for Vista in my organization are huge, especially when dealing with re-imaging issues (Ghost, WDS etc). It will take one of us (Analyst level) guys six months to evaluate, test, and prepare for a Vista rollout. That's six months of dedicated planning. Six Months with our small un
  • they have no growth without a major dump of their installed base. and they did a major dump on their OS to make it too base to install.

    Arnold Toynbee wins again.. societies (and large megacorporations) die from within, not from without.

    if SP1 doesn't make Vista more XP-ish, they'd better have something quick and dirty up their sleeve, like MicroWindowsFlash2100+, with the footprint of 3.1 and the speed of DOS 6.2.1
  • by damn_registrars ( 1103043 ) <damn.registrars@gmail.com> on Monday December 10, 2007 @12:17PM (#21642973) Homepage Journal

    "With Microsoft marketing against itself, perhaps the Mac and Linux camps can simply wait for Microsoft to self-destruct?"


    While I'd likely be the first in line with gasoline if MS HQ was on fire, I really don't see how the situation described could in any reasonable way be expected to be a sign of Microsoft's impending doom. Even if they never made it into high 6-figure sales of Vista, they'd still have what, about 90% market share for their desktop OS? If Vista completely laid an egg, there still wouldn't be dramatic anti-MS push from the mainstream.

    Even as myself a FreeBSD user, I'll say that I just don't see the failure of Vista as panning out in any real way to be a fantastic victory for the Unix-based systems out there. People are still going to want to stay with their familiar OS - which of course is windows.
  • Go Vista...

    Because lack of necessity shouldn't stop you.

    Because you need a reason to buy a new computer.

    A better reason to jump to Mac/Linux/etc.

    Because Microsoft needs to make a couple more millionaires.

    Because Windows XP makes baby Jesus cry!

    OR ELSE!
  • How is this new? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by phillymjs ( 234426 ) <slashdot@@@stango...org> on Monday December 10, 2007 @12:45PM (#21643495) Homepage Journal
    This is an old, old tactic.

    Microsoft has done the "when Windows version n+1 ships, immediately admit that Windows version n was crap" thing since Windows 95 appeared.

    Maybe this time they're just being more aggressive about it, since XP is so firmly entrenched and all the compelling features that would have driven Vista upgrades were stripped out so they could actually ship it. They can market it all they like, but it's already got the reputation of being a trouble-plagued, warmed-over version of XP with a GUI that's a bad attempt at copying OS X's.

    ~Philly
  • by talexb ( 223672 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @01:17PM (#21644021) Homepage Journal
    I was in a meeting Thursday with a guy from Microsoft who defended the brilliance of Vista by telling us all that he got Vista on his new box, a quad core machine with 4G RAM, and said "It runs really smoothly -- the working set's only about one or one and half gigs or RAM." He then want on to say that hardware configuration is going to be really common pretty soon. It was all I could do to shake my head and keep my mouth shut.

    It seems that Microsoft thinks that as soon as a new version of Windows comes out, all Windows users must immediately buy a brand new, maxed out system, install Vista and throw out whatever they had before. It's really just mind-bending how the hardware gets faster and faster, and Microsoft continues to come out with point zero versions of their operating system that demands new hardware.

    If Microsoft were as smart as I thought they were, they'd happily continue to sell XP (instead of being forced into it by the marketplace), but focus new development on Vista, and work on getting the bugs out of Vista in the meantime. I am so tired of hearing MS fanatics expostulating that the latest Release Candidate is 'rock solid' for them. It was tiring when Windows 95 was in development, and it still tiring a dozen years later.

    Then again, I must be in the minority -- I have Windows 98 on an old P-450, and Linux on two other systems, but I manage to get a lot done.
  • by stimpleton ( 732392 ) on Monday December 10, 2007 @02:25PM (#21645155)
    Graphics Card Manufacturers take the cake with previous versions.

    Version n-1 does not:

    - Run these demos. They are to weak(Reality is usually a hardcode version check in the demo).
    - Run this new DXn Version.
    - Look as cool.

    Version n-1 is:

    - Embarassingly limited is this or than pipline number/bus width
    - Reflective of your tiny cock size.

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