Forbes Says Vista Not People Ready

Diomedes01 writes "Daniel Lyons has an opinion piece up on Forbes.com about a recent press conference held by Microsoft, and the results are anything but flattering."

Re:Rejection

[Cyphertube]

Of course, if things are half as complex as this article makes it sound, well, I think there will be the issue of training budgets for companies.

If the new Office/Vista interfaces are too different from the current Windows setup, the training budget will be cheaper to go to a Linux desktop (GNOME or KDE) and use OpenOffice.org. Never mind the license fees to upgrade being saved.

This has become typical of Microsoft. While SQL has gotten better, and they're getting better with Visual Studio and the new version of IE, so many other things are broken. I can't speak for BizTalk 2006, but 2004 has struck me as a huge waste of cash.

I've been trying to justify using MS products for quite some time (aside from the fact that .NET programmers are cheap). If the user interface is more complex for most of our users, then there will be little to no reason to stick with it.

Re:My Clinically Inept Siblings

[harrkev]

Huh? Tommy needs discounts from Sewing machine companies, not Microsoft. I must admit to ignorance about the fashion industry, but even if Microsoft GAVE Hillfigger free computers AND applications, how much would he save, $10,000? I doubt that he uses CAD software to design the next T-shirt.

There has got to me more to it than that.

Waddya expect?

[FishandChips]

Vista and MS Office 2007 are the two headline-grabbing cash cows of the business and Microsoft has nothing to show until next year. Folks can scent blood behind the scenes with rumours of massive rewrites, etc. Microsoft is a big business with lots of products, but these are the two everyone focuses on, in the pop press at least. And the press and Wall Street have the whole of the rest of this year to stick it to Microsoft, if they so choose, and get a little payback for all the uppity treatment they've received over the years. And with nothing in the locker except more press announcements that no one really believes, Microsoft will just have to stand there and take it on the chin.

2006 could turn out to be Microsoft's annus horribilis, since the chances must be very high they'll soon have to fess up and say Janaury 2007 is a bad time to launch Vista. And with every day that passes, more folks will get pissed off with the XP malware explosion. Couldn't have happened to nicer guys :):)

Re:My Clinically Inept Siblings

[bonius_rex]

I doubt that he uses CAD software to design the next T-shirt.

I sysadmin for a company that does some fashion design. We do indeed use a specialized CAD type program for this. It's output is bascally a blueprint of the garment to give to the manufacturers.

This software is hella expensive.

Re:Rejection

[SpinyNorman]

But for every one of you using every feature of Microsoft office, there are 10's of thousands of users who don't even use 10% of the features and are only using MS Office because it's what's installed on their computer and/or what they know from work.

Most people don't even know what the features of MS office are, let alone prefer it because of them. They use it out of sheer inertia.

Re:Outsource them here!

[Fred_A]

I wonder who was the first guy to look at semen in a microscope?

Probably Anton van Leeuwenhoek [wikipedia.org].

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Software Assurance and Date Slippage

[javaxman]

My guess is that is exactly why Microsoft is releasing Vista to certain parties still this year. The delay is only for end consumers of Vista, to which Microsoft has no contractual upgrade requirements.

Wow. Just wow.

It's so obvious, we all missed it. Thank you. That's some awesome corporate crap in action right there. I'm not even sure I understand all of the implications fully, it's so mind-numbingly corporate-contract-hardball. Wow.

Did these guys all just pay for support contracts that essentially make them paying beta testers? Can someone pick this up and explain what's going on here a little more? I'm fascinated by this contract date expiration date and what it means... what is Microsoft obligated to provide in terms of OS to these support contract holders?

Is this some sort of underhanded way to penalize folks who don't have these contracts, providing further incentive for them to get similar contracts in the future ? Might that imply that the 2007 ship date was envisioned long ago ? Is that too sneaky even for Microsoft, am I reading too much into this ?

Re:Outsource them here!

[smellsofbikes]

One of the first things they looked at was bodily fluids, with the early microscopes, but there are so many other wiggly, squiggly things to see, that are much larger and easier to see (sperm are *really* small cells compared to rotifers and bacteria with vibrating or rotary cilia/flagella) that by the time they got good enough to see the really small stuff they were probably initially wondering whether those were just more of what they'd already seen.