Business 2.0 Says 'Boycott Vista' 756
amyandjake writes "Business 2.0 has a story about Vista's delays, the amount of time wasted by Microsoft bringing Vista to market, and the fact that it doesn't seem to have any compelling features for upgrading. The last paragraph of the story says 'Boycott Vista. Keep your old Windows XP PC around. Don't buy a new one. That's the only way we have to let Microsoft know Vista is an overhyped, late, and pointless update to XP — a perfectly fine operating system.'" Relatedly, torrensmith writes "Paul Thurrott is at it again with his seemingly never-ending supply of information about Windows Vista. This time, he discusses the things he dislikes about the program, in the article The Dark Side of Windows Vista RC1."
so, is MS okay to bundle now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is the decree of consent over? In Paul Thurrott's article, aside from the refreshing observation Mr. Thurrott is willing to critique as well as fawn, I find it notable he picks one example where MS has been inconsistent and stupid (I agree) with their navigation ergonomics.
From his article [winsupersite.com], it's pretty clear MS is shipping a DVD maker, and from just one screen it appears to be a video/other type of application. Is this now considered de rigeur intrinsic Operating System? I know the definition of OS has blurred and been trickier to pin down, and I would expect an OS to have the appropriate drivers to allow burning of a DVD (it is after all, a component of the OS, or at least drivers for a DVD burner are).
If I were ROXIO or NERO, I'd be pissed, this looks like a de facto and direct competitor product, and if it's bundled as "part of the OS", it would seem close to the line of leveraging again.
And later in Thurrott's article he mentions the builtin virus checking -- something previously discussed on slashdot -- this also seems like another market niche MS is conveniently incorporating as part of their OS.... (how about making an OS much less susceptible to this in the first place?).
Is MS free to do this now?
As for boycotting Vista, I wish the world would consider, but it won't. And, I'll have to have some Vista machine and exposure to continue to pretend to support friends and family. Everything I've read about Vista bolsters the view there is not much new worth the upgrade, and there's enough annoying to induce a ferocious case of buyer's remorse.
Re:Flaimbait this is (Score:3, Insightful)
what features are you looking forward to in vista? i'm not trying to flamebait or troll, i just want to know what you are looking forward to.
Boycot XP a useless update to Windows 2000. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:so, is MS okay to bundle now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bah. (Score:1, Insightful)
How about this aspect? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Flaimbait this is (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista's extreme support for DRM is my concern. I realize that XP also supports DRM in various ways, but Vista has quite a focus on it, and I'm not inclined to support that. That's what made XP my last Windows purchase. I bought an early Mac mini, and I've been nothing less than delighted with the thing. Feels like my linux machines, only prettier and a lot friendlier. Going to buy another Mac soon.
Apple's pushing DRM in a big way too; but Microsoft dominates the market and that's who I think the message needs to go to. In the meantime, buying MP3, staying away from iTunes AAC media, and supporting anyone who posts actual uncompressed, high-quality audio is the way to go. Vote with your wallet. That is the only thing these companies pay attention to. Every time you buy iTunes or any other proprietary DRM'd solution, you're screwing yourself and everyone else. And not in a fun way.
Two comments (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Would good does it do to send MS a message that XP is perfectly fine? Is any business going to stop developing new versions of sucessful products just because people liked the old version?
Re:Ahead of them on that one (Score:5, Insightful)
Buh...what?
Look, I'm no Microsoft fan, but that just seems crazy. Better for what?
The same thing was said about XP (Score:5, Insightful)
But this didn't happen. XP was adopted, just like Vista will be adopted over time. Trying to stop this inevitable progression is really a complete waste of one's political vigor.
Re:so, is MS okay to bundle now? (Score:1, Insightful)
If I were ROXIO or NERO, I'd be pissed, this looks like a de facto and direct competitor product, and if it's bundled as "part of the OS", it would seem close to the line of leveraging again.
Then how come all the Apple fanboys on Slashdot ddidn't cry foul when Apple started shipping iLife with all their Mac's?
lnkbait (Score:3, Insightful)
Paul Thurrott is at it again with his seemingly never-ending supply of linkbait, generating page views for his advertisers by beathlessly stating Vista is great one week and it sucks the next.
Re:Two comments (Score:5, Insightful)
If no one bought Vista, Microsoft would have to consider a different strategy. Perhaps worse, if so few people bought it that (a) they lost money on development and (b) they had to keep losing money on support, that'd really send a message to them. Messages like: We don't like DRM. We don't like bloated code that takes gigs of RAM to run. We don't like code that was written so poorly, or in such retarded languages, that it takes a 2+ GHz PC to get those applications / OS's running in less than sixty seconds. We don't like little "thought bubbles" interrupting us every few minutes to tell us some irrelevant thing like an icon on the desktop is underused. We don't like products that are buggy and are never fixed, but instead we are expected to buy a new product which, perhaps, may fix that bug but has a new set of its own. Don't kid yourself. Microsoft, like everyone else, measures success using currency and nothing else. When you don't buy, you've cast a vote that counts.
Vista isn't pointless. That's just hyperbole. It is misguided, which is something else entirely.
Business model built on growth (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft's biggest enemy is not Linux nor Apple but is rather Microsoft itself. Microsoft's entire business model is built on growth and expansion. They have now saturated the desktop and a major portion of the server market. Their quality has improved...and this is actually going to work against them since there is less and less incentive to upgrade. The windows 98 to XP migration was a no-brainer. XP is a lot more stable and capable than 98/95/me. Server 2003 is a lot easier to deal with than Windows 2000 ever was.
If Vista can't provide incentive to get current Microsoft customers to shell out money once again to sustain the financial monster of Microsoft, then Microsoft's place in the software market will shink in a way only remnicent of IBM.
I suspect when this happens, there will be a major but temporary dip it Microsoft's stock. Microsoft is well aware they're dead in the software market and have since poised themselves to emerge as the world's premiere media/content distributor. I'm going to ride this one for all its worth ;-)
Re:You know what really grinds my gears? (Score:4, Insightful)
So basically, based upon a superficial, second-hand interaction with the system, you're boosting it.
Maybe you're speaking a bit too soon?
If Microsoft subscribed to more of an Apple model (at least the recent history model), releasing steady improvements at regular intervals, people would be saying "ooh, look, shiny! Oh look, now the fugly is dockable!". Instead Microsoft still has the terrible habit of trying to reinvent, but they're often running to stand still (or more likely running towards the wrong goalpost). So many times they've rewritten something, in the process ruining what they had.
Vista, for instance, has been promised as a complete overhaul of everything. Geez, I remember 6 years ago reading FUD about how we had to start getting ready for WinFS (I can't even remember what they called it then) because it was going to change everything. Same for XAML (geez, is that even around anymore?) and so on. So for half a decade+ Microsoft has been running on fumes.
Re:OK... (Score:5, Insightful)
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:so, is MS okay to bundle now? (Score:1, Insightful)
wtf are you talking about, anonymous troll.
MS sells the OS Windows. There is no need to include "3rd party" functionality.
Mac sells computers, the complete package, "just works out of the box". They are selling the integrated experience when they sell you a Mac.
When they sell you OS X they are selling an OS, like MS does. That's why you don't get iLife.
Does it scare you to not be able to comprehend very simple concepts like these?
Re:Flaimbait this is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flaimbait this is (Score:3, Insightful)
Widely Credited? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
The number 1 reason for disliking XP and Vista is the DRM and associated crap. Followed by having to prove you ahve a legal copy.
Screw em, I won't be put in a postion to prove my innocence, and neither should yoy.
But you go ahead and take it, I mean who wants to be innocent till proven guilty anymore.
I am sure your information to MS will never get out...
Re:so, is MS okay to bundle now? (Score:1, Insightful)
Microsoft is a monopoly. Monopolies are bad for the consumer. Monopolies work to remove competition. Competition is good for the consumer. Linux is competition. Consumers elect governments. Governments make regulation for electees. Monopoly regulation is designed to enable competition. Ergo:
MONOPOLIES ARE NOT TREATED THE SAME!
What is so hard to understand?
Please Stop These Windows Vistas Posts (Score:5, Insightful)
When it is released and available for purchase, have someone review it like any other product, make one post, and be done with it. We don't need to hear about or debate every single time a developer in the Windows group sneezes or a random blogger decides to write their personal conclusions on a product that isn't even released
Paul Thurrott makes great points. (Score:4, Insightful)
I fear the idea of Windows Mail, a system that makes Outlook Express seem advanced? Sadly the only thing I'm hearing that will cause users to upgrade to vista is DirectX 10 and of course graphics, and I don't see anyone saying they won't support XP in games just yet.
maybe not looking forward too but (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flaimbait this is (Score:3, Insightful)
That's no fault of MacOS X - it is simply a lack of practice. I have been using the Mac for fifteen years and I'm super efficient at using it (keyboard shortcuts you wouldn't even know about probably). I can barely use Windows at all. Is this because Windows has bad keyboard shortcuts - no... it is because I don't have any experience using it.
Re:OK... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flaimbait this is (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, I really don't think we are. We can buy MP3s, we can encourage uncompressed and non-lossy recordings — disk space isn't really an issue any longer, and when there's no compression, there's less work for your CPU to do, so there's a good reason... and no compression inherently rules out lossy compression which audiophiles and anyone with a really good ear will appreciate. Plain encodings also mean that they are easy to process, easy to write loaders and savers for in terms of audio programs, and they're also easier to maintain error correction for (row/column error correction can fix single sample errors with almost trivial ease when the surrounding data doesn't have to be decoded.)
I'm really tired of being told what I can do with something I purchased. I don't steal or share audio or video I buy (I'm a musician, and I appreciate the idea of intellectual property and support it fully) but by Darwin, if I bought a recording, I think I should have ZERO flipping problem putting it in my PSP, my MP3 player, any computer I own, any editor I want, and so on. Compression mechanisms are, for the most part, patented and otherwise encumbered — and it seems to me that these days, they mostly serve to make things more difficult. So I say the hell with them. It's not like we're using 64k byte machines any more. Plopping a 30 megabyte tune into RAM is no problem for my machine; most current machines are 512 megs or more, so playing an uncompressed tune (typical) is about a 10% RAM load... who cares? Not most people, I suspect. Likewise, most portable players carry LOTS of memory and I bet hardly anyone is using all that space, or if they are, they're not listening to everything they've got stored... and memory continues to get less expensive and denser as time goes on, so what are we doing, really, by insisting on compression? Let's use our memory and encourage the memory manufacturers to give us more of that instead of the damned DRM trolls giving us more grief.
Hmmm... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:so, is MS okay to bundle now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Then how come all the Apple fanboys on Slashdot ddidn't cry foul when Apple started shipping iLife with all their Mac's?
*goes to Mac box, deletes iLife, installs competitors media creation software*
Hmmm, computer doesn't seem to care.
*goes to Windows box, deletes Microsoft media creation tools, installs competitors' stuff*
*OS breaks*
Does uninstalling IE and replacing it with Firefox or Opera still break Windows? Because deleting Safari & doing the same on my Mac doesn't break OS X...
We're not the deciding factor (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the key that I think a lot of the other comments are missing. As individuals, we're not nearly as important to the absorbtion rate of Vista as Dell, HP, Gateway and all the other PC manufactures are. People "in the know" about Vista don't seem to be terribly excited about it, at least not as much as previous versions of Windows. Those not in the know will be presented with the opportunity to pay a couple hundred dollars for an upgrade, at minimum, to get no more functionality then thay have, and likely find out that the experience will suck unless they also purchace new hardware. That doesn't seem exciting to me either.
But from the day Vista is released, every small to large scale PC manufacturer will be preinstalling it instead of XP. Just about every new machine purchased will be a Vista purchase. The number of copies of Windows bought off the shelf pales in comparison to pre-installed distribution. So what if we don't go out and buy a retail upgrade?
And that's where the magic of Microsoft kicks in. Even when delivering a half-baked, late-delivered operating system, they'll still be successful. There's little to no chance that someone like Dell will be convinced to not deal with Vista. Bigger operating systems need bigger hardware means more sales means more markups. An individual boycot is not only unlikely, it's completely ineffective.
Re:Boycot XP a useless update to Windows 2000. (Score:1, Insightful)
mathematics (Score:5, Insightful)
About 200 million pcs are sold annually. And 96% (?) of those will have Vista.
Microsoft is not worried about the 1-2 year upgrade holdouts.
Re:Flaimbait this is (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Boycot XP a useless update to Windows 2000. (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyways. I have been using Windows 2000 for about 5 years on my computer, and I prefer it to XP. The reason being that it's simpler, slightly "lighter" in terms of resources, and does everything I need just fine. None of the features added to XP really "help" me, they only seem to get in the way...
I know Microsoft is eventually going to drop Windows 2000 support, and software will eventually become incompatible, so I'll have to stop using it at some point, but personally, I use my computer for a wide variety of purposes, and I never had any reason to switch to XP. The same goes with Vista. I mean seriously, what's new? They added a 3D GUI? They'll release a better looking version of Microsoft Office to match that? And the whole package will cost $500?
Problem is... (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe this will push a few people to OS X. But my money is on Vista becoming the defacto standard, much as XP is now.
The only thing that may work, is if corporate America doens't standardize on Vista. If large companies only want PC's with XP, im sure the boxmakers will oblige them.
Re:Flaimbait this is (Score:1, Insightful)
It *isn't* just any product (Score:2, Insightful)
Complaining about the lack of substantitive information in articles about Vista is legitimate, but the discussion of Vista does not seem to be misplaced, even before its release, because the consequences of its release for Microsoft users, for other programmers, and for related issues are significant and widespread.
Re:Flaimbait this is (Score:3, Insightful)
CPU load is probably the least of my worries. RAM however, is a big concern. RAM affects the speed of your computer more than CPU. 30 Megs may seem like a drop in the bucket, but what happens if you have all 512 Megs in use? Or even worse, you're using Windows (which for some reason just *adores* its swapfile.) You start using your swapfile or partition, and now your computer goes from hopping to dragging along like a molasses zombie in a vat of liquid oxygen.
So next time you rip a cd kids, just flac --best -o %o --tag=Artist=%{artist} --tag=Album=%{albumtitle} --tag=Date=%{year} --tag=Title=%{title} --tag=Tracknumber=%{number} --tag=Genre=%{genre} %f
Re:I'm jaded and even I actually like Vista (Score:3, Insightful)
And Hondas have way, way better uptime than Windows.
I meant that to be funny, but now that I think about it, it's kind of an interesting point. Cars have wear items like belts and seals. And yet they're often WAY more reliable than Microsoft's software, in terms of how long they can run without a problem.
Re:Flaimbait this is (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because you haven't done more than 30 seconds of research on what's new in Vista doesn't mean there aren't any useful new features.
It means you're being willfully ignorant.
Re:so, is MS okay to bundle now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Any competent power user realizes there's close to no software that works in anything but admin mode. Of course Notepad works both ways, and power users only use this to produce them fangled 3D animations and interweb sites.
Re:Flaimbait this is (Score:4, Insightful)
Vista has nothing to do with 'latest and greatest'. It's the last gasp of the two massive but crumbling monopolies, Microsoft and the entertainment industry, to try and lock down everything you see and hear so they can charge you for it. The future doesn't have these monopolies, content creation is becoming more and more decentralized and their business model is dying and they are well aware of this.
I for one will absolutely be boycotting Vista.
I realy don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:OK... (Score:3, Insightful)
You also need to avoid dodgy hardware. USB network adapters are an excellent example of hardware which tends to be flaky.
Tell me, why does the driver for a USB network adapter need to sit at a point in the OS where it can bing the whole thing crashing to the ground? (Not that Linux is any better in that regard, but if Windows is so much "better"...)
Re:Flaimbait this is (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, the UI changes, IE7, simple network changes, start menu, explorer changes, new dialogs, USB caching, search, WPF, backup utils, audio changes, and speech recognition are next to useless, and are certainly not worth paying for. Some of thing are even a further step backwards over the old W2k way.
The kernel scheduling, file operations, superfetch, DX10, driver changes, and driver API improvements should just have been there already. They are not worth paying for. They are definitely not worth a new OS. These things fix things that Microsoft should have been fixing in service packs.
This leaves the new TCP/IP stack, desktop compositing, and DPI independence (part of the composition engine anyway), and some new security model improvements. Considering how broken people have been saying UAC is, this *really* is leaving the network stack and the composition engine.
As far as the speed recognition FUD, yeah, it might work. It's much more likely that it just doesn't work well enough to be useful. You can't use it while on the phone, or having a conversation. You won't use it in a busy office. It's just a gimmick.
If you want to hype improvements, they *REALLY* need to be both useful and novel. Many of the things on that list we've had for years on other platforms. Many are only niche useful, or not useful at all. Most of the rest of fixes for poorly implemented MS functionality.
Re:Please Stop These Windows Vistas Posts (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, though, knowing what Vista has to offer in advance is important to anyone who has to plan in advance. My employer will be buying fifty or so desktop PCs next Spring. Do we get XP or Vista? Can we get XP? If Vista is inevitable or presents compelling needs, do we wait for pre-installed Vista or do we buy XP machines early and upgrade later? What if we don't have a choice? How long will MS continue to sell XP? To support it? What will be the interoperability issues? Do we need to bite the bullet and upgrade absolutely everything to Vista at once?
We have a lot of knowledge and technology already invested in XP and we have to know what's going to happen with its replacement before we sink, ultimately, hundreds of thousands of dollars into a new generation of technology.
So that's why a lot of people want to know whether this thing is worth a damn.
Re:OK... (Score:4, Insightful)
Statements like this really do suggest the negative effect that Microsoft has had on computing. Users now are "perfectly" satisfied if their OS doesn't routinely crash. What should be a basic assumption has become a lauded feat.
My linux and mac installs don't crash either. Nor do they have a spyware virus problem (or even need for software to prevent such). But that's just what they do to not suck. From usable CLI to functional least-rights users to better software (no Quicksilver, Textmate or iLife for PC) and on ad infinitum, they also do a tons of things that MS just can't offer.
If you're happy with the "accomplishment" of not crashing, good for you. I've experienced more and I've come to expect more.
~p
Re:Flaimbait this is (Score:5, Insightful)
I, for one, don't care if Hollywood movies stop being made. It's not as if they're capable of making anything good with those billion-doller budgets anyway!
If all an OS has to do to be "perfectly fine"... (Score:3, Insightful)
...is not crash, then you should get yourself an old copy of DOS and be happy.
Some of us, on the other hand, have somewhat higher requirements for an OS: decent POSIX support and standard utility programs (e.g. bash), a UI that doesn't mostly freeze when all we're doing is copying a file, the ability to use the machine without having to worry about malware, etc.
Windows wouldn't meet this criteria even if it were perfectly stable!