Microsoft Disses Windows to Sell More Windows 407
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?"
Value of Vista (Score:1, Insightful)
Default Administrators (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, this is funny, but I want to caution you that this is something they need to change. If you criticize them for attacking their own vulnerabilities, you're not giving them a chance to change. Microsoft isn't going to self destruct so let's hope they stop giving botnets & trojans a home in this world. Better security is better for the community and the users. Don't attack someone when they recognize their wrong doings and attempt to correct them. If you don't allow that, then how can anyone improve? Personally I examine my mistakes, acknowledge them and fix them. I certainly hope that Microsoft does this because it's evident that they'll still sell well despite them.
Is an old version of Linux better than the latest? (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux may be a great OS, but I'd take a 2.6 kernel over a 2.2 kernel any day for my desktop computing needs. 2.2 is buggy, slow, insecure, and sucks compared to the latest kernel. If you were in charge of upselling users to 2.6, you'd say as much, I hope.
Things change (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it, there was a time when Apple said that the PPC arch was far superior to x86....they may have even been right, there are tons of things that I personally would have designed differently. But here we are today, using x86 Macs. No biggie, it was a big flip flop or anything, they just decided that switching to PPC made more sense on enough levels. In fact, now Apple is advertising that they are great because they can run Windows too (more that Windows is faster on a mac...but still). This implies that the switch to x86 was an improvement!
Bottom line is that they weren't lying when they said XP was better. By the time SP2 came out, this was very much the truth. Now they believe that Vista is an improvement, and antiquates XP. And you know what, in many ways this is the truth. Vista is FAR more secure than XP is, the technologies applied make it simply harder to weaponize vulnerabilities than it was with XP.
Technologies evolve, times change, perspectives get updated. No biggie.
Nothing New... (Score:5, Insightful)
MS greatest competition is themselves (Score:3, Insightful)
They have not been able to add compelling enough features, and customers get very angry at incompatibilities such as MS-Word has seen.
So they have to resort to targetted obsolescence, cajolery and legalistic tactics such as trying to tie the OS the the machine it was first licenced for. I'm not sure if those portions of the EULA violating ":first sale" have been upheld.
Re:Default Administrators (Score:0, Insightful)
Does what I need syndrome? (Score:3, Insightful)
Justify? (Score:1, Insightful)
As opposed to hefty upfront costs upgrading hardware and troubleshooting software-related issues on a poorly supported and performing operating system? What about the extra costs involved in paying staff to wait for your brand new Vista computer to do the same thing an XP machine would do in half the time, like boot?
"The increase in security - the inability for users to just simply install stuff, means that you are decreasing the amount of reactive tasks that an administrator has to perform," said Johnson.
Isn't that what restricting Administrative privileges are for? Grandma's XP Home machine has that feature.
I guess there's no point me pasting any more of the article, it sort of speaks for itself.
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or consider the Linux kernel. Back in the 2.0 days, everyone was telling me about how great Linux was. Now that we've got kernel 2.6, everyone's just dropping support for 2.0 and telling me it sucks compared to the latest version.
It is not unfair for a company to say that the newest version of their software is BETTER than their old version. If it wasn't, why release it?
vista ha (Score:1, Insightful)
bah.... what is the compelling argument to upgrade all my hardware? the aps i need still run perfect on my old athlon 64 xp3200. i mean this box is 6 or 7 years old, and it still works fine. where is my motivation to replace it all? im old enough the next quake doesn't matter anymore.
bah humbug
Re:Is an old version of Linux better than the late (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Default Administrators (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I don't know. I, for one, take great comfort in the thought of Microsoft delivering the DRM products of tomorrow. It's like being locked in the Alcatraz for life and realizing that the walls are made of wet cardboard.
Re:a few years late (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish they were as sincere from the start, though.
In principal, you are right. Practice? Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
But we're talking about a company with proprietary operating system and total market control that spent man-years developing kernel-level DRM for practically all I/O instead of developing a sane security model. "Allow/Deny?" is not a security model. Neither is UAC. It allows privilege escalation. Mark Russinovich, MS's own man said so much to the chagrin of corporate I'm sure.
Some of the people modding your comment insightful have (probably) fallen into Microsoft's version of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.
op ed on Ms Windows "security" or rather the lack (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft will *never* produce a secure system: the user is *not* the customer: the advertising industry is. just as in television, *we* are *not* the customer: *we* are what is for sale, advertising is the customer, tv industry is selling *us* as *audience* to the advertisers
and Windows is not any different in this respect but is rather a transitional product taking us from the television screen to the selectivision screen which is what the WWW+television will morph into
the initial work is already done: the www has injected so much graphics into computer presentaions that hi-speed broad band is now necessary for "surfing".
now that that's been done the next step is to combine the web with digital TV and you have the advertising marketing dream come true: television with instantaneous feed-back on what everyone is watching and how everyone is responding to it
the ability to adjust your windows programming all along a little here and there is critical to the development and maintenance of this scheme and that is why Microsoft can *never* produce a secure system. Their system provides access to customer computer for paying customers and that includes the ability to modify the client programming ( your computer ). all of this is hidden from everyone except the hackers of course
why do you think we patch and patch and patch and patch and for every patch a new vulnerability shows up? because the patch only moves the remote access capability from one hiding place to another it doesn't remove it. and never will.
"IMHO", -- FWIW
Re:Vista Costs Too (Score:2, Insightful)
Obviously there are always costs to maintaining any system. However it is not at all unreasonable to say that there are hidden costs in maintaining older systems, and in fact it's very often - even usually - true. Updates are generally slower, new versions of applications that run on them will gradually become unavailable, security issues or system efficiency or human factors or other flaws may slowly drain productivity.
By contrast there are often costs with new OS versions as well - you often need to upgrade hardware, sometimes older versions of applications won't run on the new OS, and there are often bugs that didn't get caught in beta testing. Additionally when an OS version is very new, sometimes an application that's critical for your business isn't available for it yet.
I don't think it's unreasonable for them to point out the hidden costs of maintaining an old system, and many customers may overlook those costs if they're not pointed out. But by the same token, customers need to be aware that they need to look at the whole picture to figure out what makes the best business sense for their particular situation.
Just like markting a used car (Score:1, Insightful)
Schizophrenic marketing is certainly not unique to Microsoft or the software industry!
Re:Nothing New... (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? Linux is better? Considering that you have to throw out all investment in the software you have which runs on Windows? You need to forget everything you learned about Windows, and re-learn for Linux? That's a better idea?
Doubtful.
Re:a few years late (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is an old version of Linux better than the late (Score:3, Insightful)
This simple idea has been around for at least 25 years, so there is no technical reason that Microsoft are so late to this party.
Comparing this gaping security hole (from DOS to WinXP) to minor linux kernel enhancements from 2.2 to 2.6 is not terribly relevant..
Re:Default Administrators (Score:2, Insightful)
While you may wish that Grandma employ a system administrator to take her of her computer, that's quite unrealistic, isn't it?
According to your line of reasoning, the year of the linux desktop was around 2001, as anyone with a competent enough system administrator would have not had any problems using Linux for everything at that time. What? Are you saying you are even nowadays having problems? Ah: I guess you should get a more competent system administrator...
Wishful thinking... (Score:3, Insightful)
While I'd likely be the first in line with gasoline if MS HQ was on fire, I really don't see how the situation described could in any reasonable way be expected to be a sign of Microsoft's impending doom. Even if they never made it into high 6-figure sales of Vista, they'd still have what, about 90% market share for their desktop OS? If Vista completely laid an egg, there still wouldn't be dramatic anti-MS push from the mainstream.
Even as myself a FreeBSD user, I'll say that I just don't see the failure of Vista as panning out in any real way to be a fantastic victory for the Unix-based systems out there. People are still going to want to stay with their familiar OS - which of course is windows.
Re:Nothing New... (Score:4, Insightful)
This shows how little experience you have in this regard. Not surprising, as few people do. None of my customers do, for example, until I come in. Lets start with "Legacy Software." Surprisingly enough, most business legacy software is DOS based! Really! The nasty old crap they can not do without runs very well in dosbox and Wine. And a lot of other Windows stuff works well in Wine. For the one or 2 apps that do not, a VM or terminal server work well. But most of my clients have lots of people that use a web browser, e-mail and Word, and nothing else. Linux can do this.
As to relearning, I suggest you try the latest Ubuntu LiveCD. If you can not figure out how to be productive, I will be surprised. Most people I have dealt with find it easier to adjust to than Vista. You know that they moved things in Vista, right?
Re:Default Administrators (Score:4, Insightful)
Separate I & D space and protected kernel memory came a bit after multiuser in the early to mid 1970s. Virtual memory and paging were added on the late 1970s about the same time as the Berkeley networking stack was first written. The earliest networking code was done without giving much^H^H^H^Hany thought to security. The earliest consumer Unix systems (System V/R2-based) had trivial root exploits out of the box (at least the ones I had at home did). All this stuff got fixed over time, of course and eventually Microsoft might even be able to manage it too.
So with Vista, Microsoft is at last catching up to the level of security and features we had in Unix in the mid to late 1980s.
How is this new? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft has done the "when Windows version n+1 ships, immediately admit that Windows version n was crap" thing since Windows 95 appeared.
Maybe this time they're just being more aggressive about it, since XP is so firmly entrenched and all the compelling features that would have driven Vista upgrades were stripped out so they could actually ship it. They can market it all they like, but it's already got the reputation of being a trouble-plagued, warmed-over version of XP with a GUI that's a bad attempt at copying OS X's.
~Philly
Re:In principal, you are right. Practice? Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Default Administrators (Score:3, Insightful)
I realize that you can force the user space to a different partition, but it is kludgy and you can't define it during install (so you will still have a ghost "C:\Documents and Settings" in XP or "C:\Users" in Vista).
The main benefit of defining at install is that all the environment variables are setup before files start getting dropped onto C:, the registry won't need to be hacked post-install, and new programs will recognize on which drive they need to be placed. Of course, this doesn't excuse the installers that hard code C:\Program Files (instead of using the environment var) during the install process.
Re:Default Administrators (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Things change (Score:3, Insightful)
I never used any anti-malware program on my XP machines. Taking simple precautions like not running the PC as administrator pretty much kills malware. A bit of common sense is all one needs to forgo the use of anti-malware bloatware. Common sense like not clicking on "OMGZ UR PC IS SLOW MEGAHURTZ!!!!111oneone!" flashing banner ads helps too. Of course best thing to do is using virtual machines to test downloads or do "dangerous" browsing.
There are plenty of ways not to get caught in the anti-malware quagmire, all you need is common sense, and you don't even need Vista for it.
Re:Default Administrators (Score:4, Insightful)
So to revise your simile:
It's like being locked in the Alcatraz for life and realizing that the walls are made of wet cardboard. But if you break out prison, it doesn't really matter, because every building, vehicle, and flat surface is also made out of that same wet cardboard.
Re:Default Administrators (Score:2, Insightful)