Microsoft Disses Windows to Sell More Windows

mjasay writes "I stumbled across this fascinating Microsoft tutorial entitled "How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade." It's an attempt to coach IT professionals on how to sell Windows desktop upgrades internally. Apparently the value of Vista is not readily apparent, requiring detailed instructions on how to connive and cajole into an upgrade from XP. The most intriguing thing about the tutorial is its implicit rejection of Microsoft's older technology. Just a few years ago Microsoft was pitching the world on how secure and cool XP was. Now it's telling us largely the opposite, implying that XP is a security threat, costs too much to run, and so on. With Microsoft marketing against itself, perhaps the Mac and Linux camps can simply wait for Microsoft to self-destruct?"

Re:Value of Vista

[CastrTroy]

However, apart from the fact that my Mandriva Laptop (which came pre-installed with Vista) doesn't run a lot of windows programs, it does a lot of stuff that win 2k, win 98 didn't do, and it doesn't take up any extra resources. It can run Compiz Fusion just fine on 512 MB of RAM, and an integrated Intel Video card. Why can't Vista run it's cool 3D desktop on the same? KDE4 touts a lot of new features, and it's going to be faster than the old KDE3. Just because they added new features, doesn't mean it has to run slower, or consume more resources. I shouldn't have to buy a $1000 machine every time I want to upgrade my OS. The OS should be at least as efficient, if not more efficient than the previous version. There is no reason why Vista cannot do what it does on a machine with only 512 MB of RAM. It's just badly coded. If they created a quality product, you wouldn't need a monster machine to run it.

Re:In principal, you are right. Practice? Wrong

[plague3106]

Allow/Deny?" is not a security model. Neither is UAC. It allows privilege escalation.

Right, because *nix OSes don't allow privledge escalation either. Do an experiment. Take your Vista machine and remove your account from the Administrators group. Notice how Allow / Deny becomes "Enter administrator password."

Then, logon to your Linux machine and run any UI tool for administering the system. Notice the same "Enter administrator password" prompt.

Lead slashdot post is a lie

[computerchimp]

The heading "troll" on this slashdot article is correct and appears to be a fabrication that misrepresents the article
"How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade." Why is garbage like this allowed to stay up?

1) The MS tutorial mentions older operating systems as a generic, it does not diss XP, it does not even mention XP!

2) "newer operating system, such as Windows Vista". Vista is the example, put "XP" or other OS in there if you want.

3) The article is a template to help frustrated IT admins/managers show reason and overcome objection to a proposal of migrating to a newer OS. Any admin in any environment could use this template.

I am not commenting on the PCWorld article here, just the misrepresentation in the first part of the article. Let me know if the poster is talking about a differnt version of "How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade" because from what I see the posting is a lie, plain and simple.

CC

Re:That's the point

[iG34RH34D]

The difference is that Linux isn't charging anyone a hefty sum for the upgrade, or telling them they need to upgrade their hardware to exotic levels. Linux also has a much longer support lifecycle, therefore it's a suggestion rather than a mandate or worse, a veiled threat.

Re:That's the point

[Eddy Luten]

I'd love to see any “threats” made by Microsoft that mandate you to update your Operating System. Also, Vista doesn't require you to upgrade your machine to “exotic levels,” look at this:

• 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 512 MB of system memory
• 20 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
• Support for DirectX 9 graphics and 32 MB of graphics memory
• DVD-ROM drive
• Audio Output
• Internet access (fees may apply)

I can hardly call this exotic, minimal at best. If you require an Operating System to run on a 386SX, you might want to consider Minix instead. These specs are those of a regular $350 Wal-Mart machine; The type you might find in your grand mother's home.

The link mentioned in the opening post is a sales pitch, hardly a “mandate” or a taxation. It was constructed to educate resellers and consultants on how to sell the Windows operating system to their clients.

Re:Is an old version of Linux better than the late

[Blakey Rat]

Microsoft wasn't late to this party; Windows NT 4 worked just fine when logged in as a non-admin. Microsoft's army of software developers, however, never got the hint. Now that Vista basically forces them to follow the user-separation rules, they're actually starting to fix all the bugs their software had all along. Anybody who tried to run Windows 2000 or Windows XP as a regular user can vouch for that-- all (or almost all) Microsoft software worked fine, but very little third party software did.

Nothing like reading between the lines

[Tony]

What, is reading between the lines a lost art these days?

What the articles *states*, and what it *says*, are two different things. It states several things, but *says* a very specific thing.

The /. summary is damned close to what the article implies. You can almost see the thought process: "How do we get people to upgrade to Vista without coming out and saying XP is crap?"

It's kind of disingenuous of you to give a strictly-literal interpretation of the article to claim the /. summary is a troll.

Re:In principal, you are right. Practice? Wrong

[Lagged2Death]

I don't understand how it offers anyone any useful protection from anything.

Suppose you download an installation package for some really neato whizbang gotta-have-it program. Like SuperDuperCutesyChat Deluxe, v9.0. Unbeknown to you, SuperDuperCutesyChat is a Trojan horse, laden with mal-ware of one kind or another.

When you run the installer, one way or another, you have to give the installer admin-level privileges. If your account is an admin account, you see a couple of UAC prompts. If your account is a user account, you get a privilege-escalation prompt and you have to enter the admin password.

Either way, the installer program runs with admin privileges, and can do anything to your system. It can install spy-ware, key-loggers, spam-bots -- anything and everything. If the bait program is something that plausibly requires network access (like SuperDuperCutesyChat) it's quite likely the user will obligingly open up the firewall for it, too.

Perhaps it's wrong to think of UAC as a security feature. It's really a convenience feature. It gives a user the chance to do something administrative without logging out, logging in as Administrator, etc. Even so, I don't care for it. When I install a program, I often want to re-arrange where the icons are in the Start menu or change the working directories, etc. If I do this sort of fiddling by logging in to the Administrator account with UAC off, I can do everything I need pretty smoothly. If I do the fiddling through a user account with UAC on, I have to type the password maybe a dozen times before I'm done. Creating and naming a folder in Program Files involves four dialog boxes and two password entries, for Pete's sake. That's not convenient.

Unfortunately, in some versions of Vista, UAC is tied to file and registry virtualization, which is a useful, convenient backwards-compatibility feature. Turn off super-annoying UAC, and super-useful file/registry virtualization goes with it.

I can understand why Microsoft made some of the choices they did. But the end results are not inspiring.

Re:Default Administrators

[Foolhardy]

To be fair, Windows NT had granular, integrated and standardized security, networking, virtual memory (even in kernel mode), a unified page cache, SMP, and other advanced features right from its first release in 1993. Dave Cutler and the rest of the VMS team MS acquired definitely knew what they were doing.

The exploits that Windows has had have very rarely been kernel or core design issues. Windows has a secure design, but it's rarely configured to be secure and has suffered numerous implementation faults. In particular: usermode components, notably the shell, LSA and RPC. Microsoft is also guilty of putting compatible defaults ahead of secure ones, e.g. making Admin accounts default in XP. OEMs are also partially to blame here because they decide how the computer comes loaded from the factory (i.e. with one auto-logon admin account), network admins for allowing it to stay that way (in a corp environment), and ISVs for making tons of software that requires admin privileges when it shouldn't.

With Vista, Microsoft is trying to keep around as much old code as possible in certain components, maintain compatibility with old software, change the default privilege level for programs to non-admin, and implement some kind of TCPAesque DRM. In short, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too, via technical means. It's not pretty. Time will tell how effective it is.