Microsoft Feared Mac vs. Vista In '05

CWmike writes "Gregg Keizer sifted through many threads of e-mails released under the 'Vista Capable' lawsuit to dig up this jewel...More than a year before Windows Vista's release — and long before Apple started poking fun at the OS — Microsoft officials were already worried about comparisons between Mac OS X and Vista. An e-mail thread from October 2005 showed that an article in the Wall Street Journal by Walt Mossberg grabbed the attention of managers at Microsoft. In a column headlined What PC to Buy If You Are Planning On a Vista Upgrade, Mossberg alarmed one Windows manager who forwarded a a bit from the column.... 'You won't have to worry about Vista if you buy one of Apple Computer's Macintosh computers, which don't run Windows," Mossberg had written. "Every mainstream consumer doing typical tasks should consider the Mac. Its operating system, called Tiger, is better and more secure than Windows XP, and already contains most of the key features promised for Vista." Warrier added a comment of his own: "A premium experience as defined by Walt = Apple. This is why we need to address [the column].""

What Microsoft should really have considered

What Microsoft should really have considered was why, even before they released it, customers were ready to say NO to Vista.

It's been a huge albatross around their neck. It's Windows ME 2.0, has gotten the same response (and even MS eventually had to list Windows ME as "Do Not Use") and yet the consumer is getting fucked by MS's trying to kill off XP and force them to install the Vista Virus instead.

The "Aero" interface is a standing joke; the supposed "security" of Vista is laughable compared to simply keeping XP properly updated and behind a NAT at home; and the performance hit it takes to run is incredible. Vista is half as fast as XP on the same hardware, that's reason enough not to use it even before all the other crap and nonsense.

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And Vista is faster than XP on the proper hardware ie Dual Core, 4GB+ ram

Re:What Microsoft should really have considered

It's not fair to call vista a virus.
Viruses are some of the tiniest and most efficient pieces of code written.

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the supposed "security" of Vista is laughable

Excellent comment. Those of us who work in computer repair or who have porn-addicted friends know that getting malware on Vista is as easy as getting malware on any other version of Windows, the sole difference being that the UAC dialog(if enabled) pops up 5 times a second instead of 5 times a minute.

Vista is an epic fail! They moved everything around and added unnecessary menu options making navigation a nightmare for people familiar with prior versions. Bold moves in changing the layout for Vista and

Why People Said No to Vista

What Microsoft should really have considered was why, even before they released it, customers were ready to say NO to Vista.

Microsoft didn't sell the reason people needed Vista. They polished a dashboard up with some glassy looking graphics and slapped a pricetag on it. That's not relevant to 99% of users. Most people use their computers for the internet, or for writing letters. Could Vista do anything like that better than XP? No. And there's your answer.

If Microsoft wanted to sell Vista, they should have

News???

Uh... this is news? Any good businessman always watches the competition and tries to estimate how many customers might switchover. That's not "fear". That's just good old commonsense.

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It's news because it's not every day that we get to be party to these discussions. We're only finding out because of a law suit. As a linux/mac fanboy, I would be just as interested if not more so if we got the read the same discussions about Steve Jobs and Co. discussing how they were going to beat windows, and I read about the GNU and linux guru discussions about this subject when they make the front page of slashdot. (See, linux is open source, so the discussions are easier to access. :) ) So it's ne

Broken premise

Mossberg says:

Vista, formerly known by its code name of Longhorn, is due out about a year from now, well within the lifetime of any PC you purchase today. I assume most consumers running Windows will want to upgrade to Vista.

Which is just plain wrong. Consumers don't upgrade operating systems. They use the one that came with the box until they need a new box. Techno-nerds and enterprises upgrade operating syatems. In the case of Vista, enterprises have stayed away in droves.

Re:Broken premise

Wow, that's a pretty bold assertion with absolutely no evidence to back it up. I don't have any numbers, but I'll go ahead and base my entire argument on personal opinion like you have. I think you're wrong. I'm sure that less people buy operating systems to upgrade themselves than buy them OEM with a new computer, and I know businesses have avoided Vista, and after the fact, when everyone found out for sure that Vista was garbage they stayed away, but "Consumers don't upgrade operating systems" is just straight up silly. The simple fact that Best Buy has them for sale says you are wrong. People do it, and enough do it that Microsoft markets to them.

And, as an aside, business do upgrade operating systems. But not immediately. They give them time, wait for bug fixes and evidence that the platform is stable. With Vista, that never happened, so they didn't upgrade.

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No, I really don't think that's silly. People (enterprises included) generally upgrade operating systems as part of a new machine purchase. The number of people who buy the latest Windows to upgrade an existing machine are a vanishingly small portion of the total licenses sold.

Microsoft Created Much of the Comparison

I'm sure many will remember the comparisons of the screen shots and betas for Vista vs. OS X. It was remarkable how much Vista looked like OS X. In both feature (bloat) and GUI. Microsoft is as much, if not more, to blame for the feature comparison. Redmond continued to flaunt using Cupertino as their proxy R&D. When Microsoft finally shipped the goods, the comparisons it seems, were only skin deep.

Still true

With a BSD backend, a controlled hardware architecture and the ability to run tools from all platforms via MacPorts or VMWare or Wine, Mac has shown it is not only a better user experience in th long run but a far lower maintenance computer. There are fewer problems due to the maintained hardware architecture by Apple and no viruses to speak of due to sandboxing and BSD's UNIX background.

It does hav bugs like any OS which luckily they are fairly quick to address, and they have a much faster turn around for new versions of the OS (one every year versus every 3-5 years for Windows).

Would I prefer it to be more open like Linux? Oh hell yes especially now that they are adopting HDCP and other DRM related technologies. I suspect however that the Vista fiasco and Netbooks have caused enough people to consider a switch to Linux and with Apple embracing OpenGL for game development on iPhone and iTouch, it will only be a matter of time before it is on equal footing as a game platform and openGL is equally considered thus giving Linux a footup as well; afterall, Blizzard already has admitted to having a Linux Warcraft client internally that they haven't released.

Trailing Edge Technology

Microsoft has a lot to worry about. When it has come to the big technology shifts, DOS and later Windows have always been trailing-edge technology.

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Microsoft knows this and they know all about Tiger, they copied alot of it. What Microsoft was concerned about was rogue press saying things like Mossberg wrote. Anyone who knows technology over the last 20 years knows that Microsoft is a marketing company before they are a tech company and this email just shows that. 'Don't let the public know there is something better' is all this says and that is SOP for Microsoft. IMO

LoB

As desktop support...

So working at a University, I'd like to say that we have a lot of people throwing a lot of money at Mac hardware, only to turn around and install Bootcamp or Parallels so they can run the science software needed to do their work and research. And they use federal grants to do this. I'm thinking there should be an oversight committee to determine if a Mac is a necessary item (it almost never is) or if Linux or Windows will do the job more efficiently (they usually do).

$12,000 dual quad core Mac that we had to spend two months rewriting code to compile that worked fine on an old Linux cluster. The professor could have gotten a lot more parallel processing power if he'd gone with a newer cluster rather than a single, decked out Mac.

OS X is no longer the only problem

Sure MS may have been worried about OS X in 2005, but the problem runs much deeper now. Let's take a look back:

In 2005, Mac OS X was available and rating "better" as a desktop environment in many places, but in order to "upgrade" to OS X, it required purchase of all new hardware.

by 2008, Mac had adopted Intel x86-based processors and expanded support into the realm formerly controlled only by PC. While technically you still need to upgrade to Mac hardware according to the Mac OS X EULA, the validity of that claim is currently being questioned. Additionally Ubuntu and other Linux distros that make setup easy and are very user-friendly have started spawning and are also beginning to take a significant chunk out of MS's market share.

There may have been signs of things to come in 2005, but thinks look even more bleak for MS now unless they can get things together with Vista or at least Windows 7.

Vista the bloated pig

Russell went on to defend Vista, specifically its ability to "run on a very wide-ranging set of systems from the minimally capable to the incredibly capable," he said. "Apple doesn't do that."

Riiiiight. Apple was able to slim down OS X to run on an ARM smartphone, can MS do the same with Vista ? Oh yeah that's right, they had to extend the life of XP just for the netbook market, cause there's no way Vista could run on that hardware, and they were afraid of Linux taking over.
I can't see how this guy could think that, did he not ever use Vista ?

shooting the messenger...

"A premium experience as defined by Walt = Apple. This is why we need to address [the column]."

That suggests that when Microsoft received reports of a competitor offering a superior product that executives regarded the reports themselves as the problem and not Microsoft's deficient offerings; Warrier writes of addressing Mossberg's column, not of addressing the problems with Microsoft's planning and development processes which led them to an inferior market position.

Blaming someone outside the organi

Enough already!

Look, I know this is Slashdot and all, but honestly I'm starting to get microsoft-vista-embarassing-email-story fatigue. Ever since the Vista class-action exposed all of these internal Microsoft emails, people have been cherry-picking emails and making them into full-blown stories for months it seems.

I'm no Microsoft apologist, it's just that it's starting to get old. Yes, we know Vista sucks. We know Microsoft felt the same way. We get it!! Please stop beating us over the head with it already.

Re:I feel like the more people that use MAC...

I would have gotten hooked Linux if it wasn't for OS X. Terminal.app sitting in the Utilities folder is like a drug pusher. First it starts out with a little 'ls' and 'mv'. Then you learn to SSH and X11 forward. Then come the shell scripts and built in gcc.

Oh god, and then you discover screen and it's all over. You're hooked.

I'm now a CLI junkie. I get my fix from my debian rtorrent machine that gives me my movies and now I'm building a home automation center from NSLU2 and 1-Wire. My MacBook Pro starts Terminal.app on start.

Parents keep your kids away from Apple, they could be come CLI Junkies. Vista is the one true path to salvation.

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I think that once Steve Jobs is bored of swimming around in the billions of dollars that Apple has in the bank they'll go change the advertising.

Maybe something like this

"Better ingredients. Better OS. Papa Steve's."

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Here, let me get you some cheese to go with that whine.

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Hahahaha, I'm sorry, I just had to laugh at your portrayal of Microsoft as an innocent victim. Okay, we can debate about the merits of smear campaigns and if the apple ads are a smear campaign, although I find them funny (but I use linux when I have a choice, then macs, and if I have no choice I use windows). But let's forget about all that and think about who you're defending! They're a convicted monopolist. How many times in just the last decade have we sat on slashdot and read about the various e-mai

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I think that's true of the Mac hardware, but I'll take Ubuntu over any recent Mac OS. I'd say the same thing of the iPhone - my T-Mobile G1 hardware sucks in comparison, but the Android OS is a fine competitor.

I think Dell loves to compare their products to Macs. Same features, at half the price.