PCWorld Says Firefox is Strong, Vista is Weak

twitter writes "PC World has released their year in review statistics and 2007 was not kind to Microsoft. IE 6 users are equally likely to move to Firefox as they are to IE7 and no one wants Vista. 'How much of an accomplishment is it for a new version of Windows to get to 14 percent usage in 11 months? The logical benchmark is to compare it to the first eleven months of Windows XP, back in 2001 and 2002. In that period, that operating system went from nothing to 36 percent usage on PCWorld.com--more than 250 percent of the usage that Vista has mustered so far.'"

benchmark?

? The logical benchmark is to compare it to the first eleven months of Windows XP, back in 2001 and 2002.

I'd say it's probably better to compare to Windows ME than XP...

Re:benchmark?

At least every time I've installed Vista the disk preparation utilities worked like a charm. ME on the other hand, I had to mess around with a Win 98 boot disk.
Also, the only problems I can find from a user perspective in Vista is that UAC is annoying as hell. With ME, I would have systemic problems right off the bat. That OS was just plain junk right off the bat. Nothing anyone could do could make it work right. The annoyances with Vista can at least be fixed with unchecking a few boxes.

Re:benchmark?

You don't find that Vista is a sluggish piece of crap? With 2GB of RAM, a damn fast Core 2 Duo, and a 256MB G70 video card, I find the interface chugs along after installing a few perfectly normal programs. XP is a dream in comparison.

Re:benchmark?

It's unfreakingbelievable to me that you consider it normal for your CPU to idle at 11% usage, whether it's XP or Vista. I know it's not a direct linear translation, but think of it this way: 330MHz of your 3GHz CPU are being wasted all the time. Why anyone settles for this type of mediocrity or accepts it as normal is beyond me.

Re:benchmark?

Not everyone does experience that. I have a 3.2GHz P4 with 1GB RAM and Vista runs fine with CPU idling at 0%-1% (although the 0% obviously isn't really 0%)

The poster you're replying to either has issues with their PC/setup, Norton, or mistakenly included the spike caused by Task Manager starting.

Re:benchmark?

Defragging doesnt use much cpu at all - it just thrashes the hard drive.
It also does not run when idle. When defragging the disk state cannot change at all so running when idle isnt ideal.

Where did you pull the indexing bit from? Your ass?
The indexing service only indexes the filesystem. It has nothing to do with the speed programs load.
Also its recommended that you disable it because it sucks at what it does. It doesnt help file searches at all.
Although it could account for the 11% idle usage, its certainly not a good thing.

Re:benchmark?

my boss has a dell running with a high-end intel core 2 duo (3ghz, i believe), 4gb ram, and ati x1k. it is a cheetah among computers, and vista makes it run like an oversized snail making its way across fields of molasses.

Re:benchmark?

You know, when Windows XP came out, it was fairly slow and bloated. So was Windows 98. It wasn't the software, it was the available hardware. (Not that I'm defending Vista. I can't stand Vista. I've tried it twice now, the first for a month and just last month for two weeks with a new beta SP1. Nasty.)

I don't know if Vista is redeemable. I'm going to have to wait at least until SP2 before I want to try again.

That should be by late 2009. So, imagine double the processor power, with an 8 core processor, a solid state disk and at least 64 gig of RAM. If Microsoft gets their butts in gear and start listening to their customers, SP2 might be something worthwhile. We shall see how it works out.

Re:benchmark?

"If Microsoft gets their butts in gear and start listening to their customers..."

So, you mean, never?

Re:benchmark?

I wish I had mod points to up your funny score... For years in the late 80's and early 90's, I was dumb enough to call Microsoft customer support on occasion. It was a 100% waste of time, a truly unbelievable record of failed customer support. Then I discovered that the Dell customer support guys knew practically everything about Windows and it's popular applications, and they'd answer just about any technical question you had. I suspect they did more Microsoft support than Dell hardware support. All that ended when Dell fired their US based support staff and off-shored support to India. Now days, I just run Ubuntu. If I need support, I just use Google. I'm sure Windows users are also quite helpful on the web, but I have to say I absolutely love the community support hovering around Ubuntu.

I suspect that Vista may be the result of Microsoft's aging. In the 90's, when the core of XP was built (NT back then - I was a big fan), Microsoft was growing at an insane pace. Much of the best talent (the kind Google gets now days) went to Microsoft. With that kind of success, XP was a natural result. With the web bust, and with the best talent often going elsewhere, and with Bill Gates effectively retired, Vista may be the natural result. I'm not sure I'd hold my breath waiting for Vista to become as good as XP.

Re:benchmark?

The fact that the market forced vendors to begin offering XP as an option after they had shifted support to the new version of Windows is unprecedented.

This would be a pretty strong indicator that the market is not "satisfied that Win XP is good enough for their needs" like the article suggests, but that a significant segment are actively rejecting Vista as a bad product even on a brand new computer.

Which, of course, it is. Microsoft saw the writing on the wall, and they cashed in their chips. Which means, they saw that it was time to sell their install base out to third party interests instead of trying to keep hold of them.

We've all seen situations where the value of a good name is measured in how long it's purchaser can sell substandard goods at high markup before the name isn't good anymore.

That's what this is. The industry decided to back "Trusted Computing" despite it being contrary to the interests of consumers, and no one wants to buy it. That's why the new drivers don't work, why the old software is buggy, etc. The common person doesn't know why, but they know it's not working right, and they don't like it.

Re:benchmark?

I'd love to see statistics showing the number of Vista purchases vs. Vista usage. I started my job about a year ago and we had around 10 machines purchased before I took over purchasing and they had Vista. Once I had time, I replaced them all with Windows XP -- I didn't bother trying to get replacements from our vendor, it was easier/quicker just to buy XP Pro outright from an OEM supplier. I know I'm not the only one that's replaced Vistas with XP.

What percentage of Vista sales aren't permanent users?

Re:benchmark?

I believe that OEM XP is out of production Jan 1, 2008. So if you want any more, you had better go an buy some quick. Have you taken a good look at the new Notebooks on offer ... I just got burnt with a Compaq v6620 - no XP drivers available. You can install XP, and it boots, but kiss the Lan, Wlan, Video, Audio good bye. No XP drivers - only vista and linux. So what does that tell you - Vista will be rammed down your throught whether you like it or not. Eventually, all new kit will be running Vista, because the Manufacturers won't be cutting any XP drivers for them!

Vista a Flop?

Well, I guess posting something brutally obvious is better than posting another dupe.

*shrug*

Re:Don't forget to mention the pre-bundled copies!

Vista is preinstalled on 99.999% of the world's new machinss so... {blah blah you know the rest}.

Close. Vista is preinstalled on less new machines now than when it was first introduced. First there was the big shiny "Vista for All" unveiling, then vendors started trying to get business by offering "Downgrade to WinXP available here!" and being successful at it.

As for the Mac stat...

Wouldn't the number of people using Macs be lower than average, since they were measuring visitors to a PC-centric website?

Naming?

Of course a flaming fox is going to be stronger than a view. MS should have thought up a better name than Vista. Something that could beat foxes and fire - how about: Ice weasel?

Re:Naming?

I always thought it was an acronym - Virus Infections, Spyware, Trojans and Adware

recession

Could the United States being in a state of recession have anything to do with Vista's slow growth? Just kidding, I know Vista is TERRIBLE. My karma is bad and I wish it wasn't. I don't want to have bad karma. I am a good person.

Forecast calls for a 75% chance of hilarity

People can come up with statistics to prove anything, fourty percent of all people know that.

Poor comparison

Assuming the summary is correct...

They're comparing usage based on visits to their website. Not only that, but they're comparing uptake of Vista in 2007 to XP in 2001. As a percentage.

I can't help but feel that a lot has changed over that time to make that method of comparison completely irrelevant, both in terms of MS's operations (like how Vista follows a fairly strong OS that has had years to take root, compared with XP, which followed Windows Me, which sucked in every possible way) and in terms of the overall PC market (like how Macs are much more competitive, and how Linux has matured, but mostly how so many hardware and software has been developed for Windows XP).

- RG>

Re:Poor comparison

They all were great within the time the lived. XP was NEVER a decendant of ME. Learn your OS history, please.

Although you are 'technically' correct that Windows 2000 was released between WinME and XP, what is being missed in this argument is that WindowsXP was the FIRST version of the NT based OS that was focused on and designed to specifically replace the consumer level DOS/Win9x OSes.

You are correct that XP is not descended from Win9x or WinME in any way, it is an NT based OS with NO code used from the Win9x era of OSes. (It is was as much of a jump from Win9X/WinME as System 9 was to OS X).

In regard to the article, this is also why the uptake of WinXP was faster than even Windows 2000, as Windows 2000 was the successor to NT4 and was not pushed to home or mainstream consumer users. XP being the first NT version that was designed for and pushed into the mainstream consumer markets had quite an advantage even though Win2K users ignorantly thumbed their noses at it. In contrast to the generation of consumer OSes it was replacing, it was a massive difference in terms of performance and stability. XP not only ran faster than Win98 (the fastest of the DOS/Win9x generation), but it also was significantly more stable and secure than the previous OSes that had no knowledge of any type of security.

So for consumers and home users, XP was good jump, and even just upgrading Win98 or WinME to XP would not only increase the lifetime of the computer, but would fix technical problems in the installation wihtout having to wipe settings, and gave the users a virtually crash free experience.

Re:Poor comparison

I never used nt 3.51 or 4.0 regularly, but I did w2k and xp.

I NEVER get blue screens, ever, end of story. If you get blue screens with XP, something is wrong and it's not the OS.

2000 is absolutely rock-solid stable, as is w2k.

Re:Poor comparison

I used NT 3.51 and it was rock solid in my experience. So was NT 4, at least until SP2 came around. Windows 2000 was also reasonably stable and has proved to have great longevity... my kids still use it because the machine it runs on blue screens when trying to install XP. XP was better, especially by the time SP2 came around. The NT side of Windows never suffered from huge stability issues, and even when it did 90% of the time it was obviously and directly related to hardware drivers. No, the NT line was never perfect and there were features and bugs that would drive any user insane, but overall they were decent products that were worth the upgrades.

Until Vista came around, each new version offered significant improvements, required significantly more resources, added some quirky problems but was overall an improvement. The problem is that with Windows 2000, MS pretty much solved all their major problems (besides security, but that could be mitigated by a little bit of common sense, despite the horrible track record of security issues). By XP SP2, even security issues were starting to be not so severe. The biggest changes between 2000 and XP were minor UI tweaks (and the ugliest theme ever put on a GUI since Tandy DeskMate, but that could be turned off, and was turned off, by anyone who realized it could be), and support for new hardware, especially wireless, which didn't really become "nice" until SP2 came along. All Vista really needed to do was support the newest hardware, throw a little eye candy in (because you always need a little eye candy in a new release) and fix some of the many problems that will always plague any OS and it would have sold like hotcakes. Instead we got a Frankenstein monster of an OS that looks and feels like it was designed and written by Cold-War Era East German government employees, with more bloat than the U.S. Tax Code and fewer useful new features than the, well, the U.S. Tax Code.

IMO, Microsoft has been growing beyond their capacity to manage themselves since the early 90's and they have finally reached the point where they are so large they literally cannot do anything right. Just like the U.S. government, MS is so huge, bloated, mismanaged and downright corrupt, the only way it can possibly be improved is for 95% of it to simply go away.

I've just upgraded one machine at home ...

... from Win2k to XP, a couple of weeks ago, because the child wanted to run something that didn't work on Win2k. (We have no Win9x or NT boxes left at home now, they've all been upgraded to at least Win2k.)

In the end, that'll be why people upgrade to Vista - difficulty in obtaining applications that still work on XP.

Re:I've just upgraded one machine at home ...

[T]hat'll be why people upgrade to Vista - difficulty in obtaining applications that still work on XP.

That may not happen very quickly: at least one developer I know is under orders to write only things that work under XP, and test them with Vista for compatibility. Anything that's Vista-only is explicitly forbidden, because Vista uptake has been so slow.

Economically speaking, if Vista can run XP programs, your market for writing something that runs on both is vastly larger than your market for writing something that only runs on Vista. If you sold software for money, would you write anything Vista-only?

/. effect

The chart occasionally shows Firefox having more hits than IE. Maybe those months had more /. articles pointing to PC World's website?

oh look. twitter spin

The same BLOG linked to also states that ie7 is in use more than firefox. However, the tagline for the slashdot story says "firefox is strong". In the time it has come out, more people have adopted that single version of internet explorer than are using all versions of firefox combined.

Only on slashdot folks.

twitter strikes again

From the original [slashdot.org] journal entry:

Vistit the article to see the pretty graphs and to spike PC World's statistics more toward reality. It's clear that computer enthusiasts are not going for M$'s current offerings, show them what people really like.

twitter also has another journal entry there [slashdot.org], which is hilarious if not for the fact that he spends so much time arguing that Dvorak is an idiot when he says something about Linux twitter doesn't like.

For someone who has already ruined two Slashdot [slashdot.org] accounts [slashdot.org] with his misguided "evangelism" and is down to trolling AC, he sure has a lot of fun trolling [slashdot.org] the site.

twitter, please stop "helping" us. Free software needs people who can make intelligent arguments about why it is superior to closed-source gunk, not trolls who spend all their waking hours making up shit about Microsoft with liberal doses of infantile creative spelling.

fun with stats

How does the install base in 2001 compare to the marketplace in 2007? This is the key to interpreting these statistics fairly. I'm willing to bet the % of new PCs sold compared to existing install base was much larger back then. Let's be honest, a very small % of people actually upgrade their Windows OS, period. Most Windows sales are new PCs.

That said, how's the Vista market share compared to other non-MS operating systems?

Another way to look at Vista's adoption rate

According to this web site (http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62034821,00.htm [zdnetasia.com]), Vista, in less than one year, has many times the desktop penetration as does Linux (all flavors still constitute less than 1%) after 15 years. The article also mentions that many (most?) businesses are waiting for SP1 before even considering adoption. Given that SP1 is due in a month or so, I strongly suspect there will be a dramatic change in Vista's numbers in its second year of existence.

Also along these lines, I know quite a few people who are getting Vista on their new home machines, and have been, for the most part, favorably impressed. This, over time, will also translate into increased adoption in the business world. Like it or not, Vista will become the pervasive desktop in the next 2 years.

Re:Another way to look at Vista's adoption rate

Vista, in less than one year, has many times the desktop penetration as does Linux (all flavors still constitute less than 1%) after 15 years.

You see the much same thing in the w3Schools OS Platform Stats. [w3schools.com]

There are, by some estimates, one billion Windows users.

To claim 14% of a market that size in one year would be pure fantasy in any other context.

MS Vista was the only OS showing significant growth in 2007. Linux has gained absolutely no traction in the w3Schools stats in the better part of five years.

Vista's strength has been in OEM sales of Vista Premium and Ultimate in the consumer market.

That is good news for Dell, HP and the big box retailer.

The el cheapo $200 Linux box - the "network appliance" - makes headlines on Slashdot. But that isn't the only price point that interests Walmart - or the Walmart shopper: HP TouchSmart Desktop PC [walmart.com]

Not only that, but the brand name multifunction color printer-scanner with a Vista driver will set him back less than $50. HP All-In-Printer & HP 21 Ink [walmart.com]

The Geek tries to frame the "Microsoft Tax" as a percentage of the price of the computer. But the ordinary user - the middle class buyer - is looking at the price of the system bundle, the cost of services and consumables.

OEM Vista is a one-time expense.

The ink jet cartridge or the monthly bill for Roadrunner won't come any cheaper if he migrates to Linux.

Reality check

IE 6 users are equally likely to move to Firefox as they are to IE7 ...

Reality check [thecounter.com]:

1. MSIE 6.x (44%)
2. MSIE 7.x (35%)
3. FireFox (14%)
4. Safari (3%)

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the word "equally", but we have 35% vs. 14%. Add the IE6 users, the number becomes 79%.

Should I also remind anyone that IE8 is under progress, including new UI and engine that passes ACID.

Virtual reality check

Those numbers are as made-up as the numbers you find anywhere else. My company, which hosts surveys and therefore sees a very broad cross-section of the market, collects web statistics. I just analyzed our logs and got these numbers, which I trust far more than thecounter, whatever the fuck that is:

IE6 (all operating systems) 35.22%
FF (all operating systems and versions) 18.35%
IE7 (all OS) 18.15%
Other.. the rest

Should I also remind anyone that IE8 is under progress, including new UI and engine that passes ACID.

You could, if you wanted to hear someone remind you that Firefox 3 is about to come out (far sooner than IE8) and also passes ACID, as if that were relevant.

Note, these are not the opinions of my employer, but they are the data of my employer. :-)

Re:Virtual reality check

IE6 (all operating systems) 35.22%
FF (all operating systems and versions) 18.35%
IE7 (all OS) 18.15%
Other.. the rest

May I ask what "the rest" is, being that it's about 29% of your numbers? I would guess that Safari, IE5, and Opera are probably at about 5% combined, so that leaves a bit to be accounted for.

Thank you

for telling us what we already know.

I just found it funny...

...where one of the Vista advocates, apparently quite sincere in his belief, stated that Vista was so secure it'd never need to be patched. EVAR. I bought a laptop with Vista preinstalled recently. After four days I blew three hundred perfectly good dollars that could have gone towards beer on XP Home. A man should not have to be required to make such a sacrifice.

Take it with a pinch of salt

The nice diagrams show what browsers visit pcworld.com - a site whose visitors usually run Windows pre-installed without much tinkering. I remember other statistics from another IDG website where Firefox was leading. Take these statistics with a grain of salt. They say more about your visitors and not much about the actual market share of a browser. Nevertheless, more than 30 percent is pretty impressive for Firefox, especially on a site like pcworld.com.

If Linux had 14% usage in 11 months

We'd all be decrying the downfall of Microsoft. Does anyone realize how much 14% is? Its huge!

Automatic 'upgrade' to IE7

Since the typical home user will answer 'yes' to a popup by Microsoft. How many of these upgrades are from XP users taking the automatic upgrade from IE6 to IE7? I wonder how many actually thought "hmm, instead of upgrading from IE6 to 7, i'll download firefox instead."

IE initially became popular because users did not need to make a choice.

Therefore, if you want Firefox to take off, you need to get it included/bundled with Windows.

The hating-Vista bandwagon

I feel like a large majority of the people who hate Vista do it because they think they're supposed to. Similar to people who like Titanic because they think they're supposed to, even though it's horribly depressing and all in all not that great of a film, average at best; or MS fanboys who hate Mac because they think they're supposed to--while these feelings might have a legitimate basis somewhere (Vista does have problems, Titanic did receive good reviews, and Mac has only recently started to shine), when multiplied by a few hundred thousand misinformed people they cause mass confusion. I bought a cheap laptop running XP a while back, recently upgraded to a better system that runs Vista. I had heard that I shouldn't like Vista. It was the devil. I've been using it for 6 months now and none of the "huge problems" have surfaced--the "Cancel or Allow?" took some getting used to (and you can disable it), and everything is a trifle different from XP, but all in all I like it. The whole scandal about DRM and Vista is petty at best, the average user really doesn't have to worry about it. And as far as security goes, I was surfing around the internet essentially unprotected by outside sources for quite a while before installing McAfee, and didn't get a single virus, trojan, or piece of malware installed on my system (checked with both McAfee and AVG). I've also used the most recent Mac OS on friends' systems, and I like it, I just wouldn't use it myself. And my old machine still dual-boots Ubuntu--I'm a fan of it as well, but again, I like Vista better. In the end, I think people who hate on Vista need to give it an objective second look and think about whether or not it really is as bad as they've been led to believe. It hasn't been in my case.

Vista!

My wife has Vista on her PC. It's pretty strong to say "everyone hates it", but on the other hand it really doesn't offer a whole lot over XP, and it comes with a raft of new problems. Drivers still commonly don't work. The DRM is an issue, and in an effort to beef up security, it is a little less easy to use. Plus they've moved a bunch of stuff around and for no particular purpose. My wife was almost getting to the point where she could find stuff on XP, and now it's like she's regressed to the third grade. She also has Office 2007, and frankly, I don't see that the fabled ribbon is too great. It's just another, and different, way of organizing the same old stuff, but a little more confusing if you're used to the old office.

I think Microsoft is in a world of hurt, and they just don't realize it because they're still making money. But I suspect in the not too distant future (say, 5 years or so) they will have enormous problems as they market share takes a big (and sudden) dive. And then everyone will act surprised and say they never saw it coming.

Vista and managed software

I'm just wondering how much of a backlash Vista will have on the open source operating environments.

The most different thing about Vista and XP is the off-take of .NET. This means that most of the operating system, and in short time - the applications - will be managed software. This will mean that, in general, software will indeed be safer to run - e.g. no more buffer overruns. I don't see any movements within the Linux environment towards this direction. Somehow, just playing the NX-bit game doesn't really cut it.

On the other hand we have the more fine-grained security model. Yes, this means more popup boxes. But if I'm running Ubuntu, it's much worse. I'll have to type my passport so many times that it isn't even funny anymore. Just clicking a popup box seems more user friendly to me.

Not to nag, but even though Vista is a bit of a pain to work with, are we sure we (yes, we, I'm not a Microsoft fan boy, far from it) should keep discrediting Windows? Lets play the technological game and innovate instead. We can do better than MS, both at security, speed, and UI design. Now let's show what we're made off instead of screaming foul.

I don't see the vista hate

I recently installed vista ultimate 64bit in trial mode on one of my PCs and it's light years ahead of where XP SP0 was, I personally don't find UAC bothersome at all (it asks for permission only for things I like it to ask permissions for) and the PC has been super solid since day 0 playing games (tf2, crysis demo, etc.) and trying things out.

Yeah, my pc is a bit above the minimum requirements (quad core, 4gigs of ram, 8800gt 1gig, etc.) but in dollar terms a PC that could run XP well when it came out was more expensive than what this PC cost me today. If things keep going this way I will surely buy an ultimate license when the trial period ends.

I have to ask

What is the purpose of posting this? Is it news? Is it the intention of the editors to fan a flame war? Will any reader learn anything, or will they just read statistics which either confirm their world view, or dismiss as being flawed in any of a thousand different ways? Is this just to get zealots of one flavor of another to come here and rant for a bit and possibly click an ad by mistake (probably yes to this one.)

You can spot inflamatory and ultimately useless stories like this a mile away. If it weren't for the trolls which require daily feeding, I suspect a good 20 to 30% of Slashdot articles would never appear, and we'd all be a lot better off for it.

Not reasonable comparing XP to Vista

It's not reasonable to compare how many people are upgrading to Vista from XP. XP is a far better OS than say ME was, so not as many people would want or need to upgrade to Vista. It kinda funny listening to all the yahoos whining about Vista (same as when XP first came out, same as when ME first came out, etc, etc). It's also interesting to hear Apple nuts carrying on about Vista security, when it's been proven that Vista is more secure than Apple. It's especially interesting now that Apple is actually managing to get 10% of the market and the morons who write virus/malware are starting to target Apple. If people would start to understand that a more secure, more sophisticated OS needs better hardware to run as fast as an older less secure system, then it makes sense that Vista will run slower. Yes, Vista will bug you to OK changes (just like most add-on firewall programs do if they are really any good), so what do you want, less security or more speed? You aren't going to get everything and speed, unless of couse you use a more powerful computer to run it. I've seen many, many customers runnung Vista with no problems (so long as they didn't buy an underpowered system), and yes, Microsoft needs to have a few years to tweak Vista (read fix stuff), but what system doesn't need fixes in the first year. I've heard about Leopard having problems losing files, security flaws showing up, etc. Firefox said they didn't have any bugs and techies were running around telling everybody they should use it, now they have fixed 300 hundred memory leaks with the new beta. Get real people, nothing is perfect! But I'll bet that in a couple years Microsoft will still be the top selling Desktop operating system and it'll be Vista.

Geeks are Not the World

As much as we like to think we're the only ones that matter, why is it that we always look on graphs, data, trends, and feedback from geeks and draw global conclusions from them?

Since when did PCWorld.com become the de facto website that all web users visit?

More interesting to me would be the same analysis from a website such as CNN or MySpace or Amazon.Com which has a much more normalized audience. Did I just call MySpace normalized?

As for all those new Mac visits, my guess is that now that they have Bootcamp/Parallels Mac users are hopping on PCWorld to learn more about Windows and available software.

Smoother transition?

From TFA: We'll show you how the Vista transition will become smoother.

To Vista or From Vista?

No excuses, Vista simply blows.

Vista is the most unutterably awful pig of an OS ever created, and that is a simple fact by any benchmark. I'm not an MS hater, btw. I recently got fed up with a new machine, out of the box, running like an IBM PC300 with Windows 3.x. The folks at HP helped point me to XP-compatable drivers for my ordinary, workaday, mid-price-range Pavilion desktop. XP installed, problem solved. The argument that Vista "just needs better computers" is simply absurd. Consumer commodity software should work properly on consumer commodity computers. Period.

Ahh the internet...

I haven't seen so much penetration take place on so many desktops since Brittany Spears!

rimshot!

How they could fix it....

I briefly mentioned this to one of MS licensing people a while back but we didn't go that much into it. They simply need to repackage the product. This is the same sort of thing that happened with windows ME except there was simply no value in ME what so ever. He seemed to think I was talking about starting from scratch which is the furthest thing from what I was getting at. The operating system itself is fine, the kernel is a superior design over what they had, a redesign. It simply all about features (positive and negative) and price and from both you get value. What's bad about Vista? DRM, it requires much more memory, and price. Step one, do some market research and find out what consumers want and what they are willing to pay for. They can keep the DRM but they have to make it opt in. If you have something raw and unencrypted it should play it and it should be able to rip raw and unencrypted period. The DRM should be modular so that there isn't just one engine, if other companies want to bargain and do a trade of with the consumer over their media then it should be up to the consumer to weigh the benefits and deficits, and then to accept or reject the deal. The new interface is nice, what they should have done is develop and promote an engine for creating third party shells and window managers. Make it easier, provide hooks for all kinds of potential features that they can't quite imagine how to use. Make it similar to DirectX so that upgrading the features of the engine isn't upgrading the operating system so they can have a rapid response to required capabilities. Keep it simple, yes it requires real programming and binaries, no script(third parties will do that). Time for them to do something with MS Works. Revise it and bundle a fully functional version into the operating system so kinds everywhere can do their homework. Include your supposedly open document format. Create a bunch of applets but this time put them under your version of an open source license and watch the interest and creativity. Make a driver emulation subsystem to emulate old operating systems for old drivers and bridge the gap between old drivers and new. And get this, the emulation can be done in kernel mode or user mode. Sure it's slower, but at least it works. Open up the design of at least the user mode portion of the operating system, talk to developers and find out what they want to see, be an operating system vendor, don't make assets feel like your the enemy. Lastly reduce the price to $200 for the premium version and restructure the server features as an upgrade or add on. The premium or "workstation" version is where you are going to make your money. The home, pro, and server monikers, were working so well but you changed them, why? If you concentrate on user land usability features and commit to a clockwork predictable two year release cycle it doesn't matter if the OS is revolutionary. Things don't have to be perfect, release the feature and think of it as a public beta. Users automatically understand the first version of anything is going to be revised anyway. Want to cut the hacker piracy in half? Give your software away legitimately to them ... if they can program or do something else that improves your software. Coupons, discounts, make them feel like they are in your elite. Make friends, not enemies. You really need to focus on improving your PR. PR should be enmeshed with marketing, and the specifically PR people should have a vision. You need something like Google's "Do no evil" motto. If we do this how are people going to perceive us? One of the oldest jokes is... Name a small company that got rich doing business with Microsoft? Everyone really needs to stop feeling like they are in competition with you. You could turn that around in 5 years if you really wanted to. Microsoft needs a fan base like apple, so that when a new product comes out instead of customers asking if they should buy the product they are wondering when it's going to arrive on their doorstep. O

Based on the headline...

I should wipe Vista and replace it with Firefox!

Only Communist Zonk

Would be stupid enough to post a journal by Twitter the Troll.

misleading title

I simply love the way that the titles of some articles on /. are so vague and misleading from when you read the actual summary or article. I still love IE 7 compared to Firefox (although I do use FF portable sometimes). And with IE 8 on the way (they have a blog somewhere, Google it) looks like Microsoft is going to be heating up the competition (the way it should be. Competition drives innovation)

Slashdot zombie sez:

Hey wow, another post with the same mantra: FF good... Vista bad... Braaaiinnnsss...

Oblig. Seinfield Mash up

Newman MSoftie: I still have armies in Vista

Kozmo Firefox: What Vista? Vista is Week

Steve Ballmer : Vista is not Weak. Vista is Strong

Re:And wait...

I think this is the post which has finally convinced me to abandon Slashdot.

Re:wot a lot of crap

My simple issue with it, the scrolling "all programs" menu. I CAN NOT stand it! There are other issues, but that pisses me off the most.

Of course, someone will say that you can switch it classic style, well, I don't want it to look like windows 95 w/o the quick access to my documents, my computer, network, printers, etc.

Why couldn't they have an option to have a XP like menu. I don't dislike vista because it causes problems (I have it running on one PC and the GF has it on her laptop), I dislike vista because I think the new UI sucks.

Re:wot a lot of crap

That article specifies that the DRM only applies to the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray content pipelines. If either were to actually be implemented on Linux they would have to write it that way as well. Now, the hundreds of gigs of avi, audio, and written material I have on my PC (um, home videos I guess!) play just fine because they're not going through that pipeline. And if your country isn't crippled with the DMCA or alike then you can always get software that frees the content from those crippled formats while keeping the quality.

Re:Vista on more compuers than XP in comparable ti

The number of PCs is an order of magnitude greater than in 2002, and the statistic cited means that Vista has more installed units out there than XP did one year out.

That statement actually proves nothing. Since PCs now are a lot cheaper than they were in 2002, it can be assumed that a lot more people are replacing their machines a lot more than they previously did - therefore, they're getting Vista OEM pre-installed, just like a lot of them were when XP first came out.

But the real difference here is that if you go into any PC store, you will see Vista discounted for the off-the-shelf boxed versions. This can only be because people are not buying it as an upgrade from XP and this, to my knowledge, never happened with boxed Windows XP versions.

You also need to remember that that, for most people, there were tangible benefits to upgrading to XP. Windows ME was another "white elephant", most home users were still running Windows 98 and XP brought along greater stabilility, better memory management, better security and a host of other features.

The benefits of going from XP to Vista are not so obvious to Joe Public. Plus if Microsoft have to "crowbar" people into upgrading by only making DirectX 10 available on Vista, I think it's obvious that Microsoft knows that they need to create an artificial demand for Vista becuase very few people are choosing to run it.

Re:Mac OS/X is the next step after XP

I sold all my PC hardware and switched to Mac.

So how come you didn't potentially save yourself some money, keep your existing PC hardware and try installing Ubuntu on that first?

Also, why did you feel the need to upgrade XP? Apart from a handful of DX10 games (which aren't available on the Mac anyway), I'm not aware of any other software that will only run on Vista.

My view on Mac people is that if the whole world used them, we'd be in deeper doo-doo than we are at the moment with Windows - if only because Mac people want life far too easy and don't want to understand how a computer works and how to maintain it. That's a perfect environment for the spread of malware and viruses...

Re:Fire what

Oh, horseshit. ALL of my friends (except the ones who are barred from using it at their jobs) use Firefox, and they are not tech people. Yes, they know me, and I am tech people, and many of them heard of it through me, but if you're saying "no one uses Firefox except people who know someone who uses it," well, surely that may be true, but it is most certainly a meaningless statement.