Possible Delays for Vista in Europe

tttonyyy writes "After Microsoft was hit with fines for anti-competitive behaviour in 2004 and 2006, it seems that the launch of Vista may be delayed in Europe. Microsoft is blaming this delay on a lack of guidelines from the European Commission. The Commission denies causing any delay, declaring that the impetus is not on them but on Microsoft to produce a product that conforms to the EU competition rules." Further, The New York Times reports "Delaying the introduction in Europe, [members of the European Parliament] said in a letter made public by Microsoft on Thursday, 'would put European companies at a competitive disadvantage with every other company around the world who does have access to these new technologies.'"

Delay of Windows is good

[Theovon]

Personally, I think companies that rely exclusively on Windows are shooting themselves in the foot. These days, there are numerous technologies people can use to make portable applications, including Java, C# (yes), Python, Perl, Tcl/Tk, WxWidgets, Qt, GTK, PHP and other web technologies, etc.

Portability isn't everything, but relying on a single, unreliable vendor is lunacy.

It's amazing how many IT people I've met who have "heard" or Linux. All they've ever known is Windows. Perhaps Microsoft's failures will encourage developers to investigate alternative platforms. Windows is important, and you should support that platform, but when Windows fails you, you really need to have a backup plan.

Re:Circuitous logic?

[ceoyoyo]

Microsoft themselves say that Office documents are not appropriate for sharing. Office documents are for printing or saving to PDF for e-mailing. In my experience they're right.

Re:Emphasis?

[DragonWriter]

I actually think that it is neither emphasis nor impetus, but burden, or onus [reference.com], that is intended here.

Re:Fair is as fair does....

[Tim C]

So I say go ahead, Microsoft, take your ball and go home (or at least don't let them play with it a little while) so that these power-tripping politicians can understand the consquences on their actions.

And what exactly would those consequences be, other than MS locking itself out of a huge and growing market? Were this to happen, we'd just keep on using XP. If MS went all the way and refused to sell any copies of any of their software, there's a real chance that affected EU member states would simply (temporarily) revoke MS's copyrights - remember that these are granted by the government for the good of society as a whole. If society is better served by ignoring a particular copyright, then it should be ignored.

Re:Circuitous logic?

[tomstdenis]

"help out other developers" ...

Um, how about doing the customers a service?

And I think you're forgetting how engrained MSFT truly is. Yeah, sure it's nice to say "just stop using it." that's something I bring up often with my fellow co-workers. Doesn't seem to change anything. Even when we sneak a OSS OS on our workstations we still have to scramble to read the latest PPT from our PHBes.

If MSFT were truly about marketting various products you'd see things like Visual Studio or Office for GNU/Linux. I mean can't the Office business unit of MSFT only win by selling to both windows and GNU/Linux audiences?

oh wait, Office exists to sell Windows. That's about it.

Tom

Check out MICROSOFT's wrongdoing

[Anonymous Coward]

It's here: http://malfy.org/ [malfy.org]

Re:Delay of Windows is good

[Skuld-Chan]

Anyone who has had to support applications written in Java would probably disagree with you. I had to support a java based server application. Getting it to run on the app server (jboss, websphere, etc) for clients often meant doing it for them either remotely or onsite and even then it was a huge pain in the arse.

Re:More loudmout advertising from M$.

[ultranova]

I used to have 2 GB of RAM, but am temporarily forced to only use 512 MB, and I've noticed a huge difference in responsiveness. With 2 GB I could run tens of programs, some light games and compile simultaneously with no loss of responsiveness, now with 512 MB I can barely minimize Visual Studio to view my desktop without everything slowing to a crawl while I'm compiling, so I'd say the problem isn't necessarily in the scheduler.

No, it's in the scheduler allright. An XP machine with a gigabyte of RAM rendering a Poser scene in the background, and not swapping (verified by watching the HD light, besides, it's a simple scene) with nothing else significant running takes a lot longer to respond to clicks than the same machine once the scene has finished rendering.

Based on that, and on what I've heard from other sources, I'd say that Windows scheduler doesn't differentiate IO bound programs and CPU bound programs, like modern Linux kernels do. In other words, there are no dynamic priorities; instead, everything in the same static priority gets an equal share of CPU time, propably without pre-empting them if an IO bound program becomes runnable (to reduce latency), since Windows can't tell the two types apart.