Microsoft Mojave 'outs' secret Vista lovers
If you listen very carefully, you'll hear a new beat coming from the drums in Microsoft's marketing department these days. After two years in embarrassed silence, people have come out pumped up and taking no prisoners. The message has come from the top and is beginning to percolate. "Windows Vista is great, just misunderstood …
"where Microsoft tricked ordinary people into liking Windows Vista, caught their reactions on "secret" camera and then posted them online."
What's the bet that the marketing genius at M$ got the idea while searching for 2girls1cup?
Mine is the dirty trench coat with the bottoms cut out of the pockets.
Admittedly I'm not your typical user, but I still wouldn't touch Vista. I was happy with Win2k at home for a few years after XP came out, and even now only run a copy of XP in a virtual machine under Linux. My son has XP Home as a games machine (games for small children, so not even performance-hungry). My wife has a Mac.
Of course these people would like it. They're everyday Joes, who walks around like sheep and care not about DRM. I'm sure it'll fall apart if the people gathered were tech savvy and asked about DRM.
Information Week says that Microsoft doesn't just have a video of the users who doubted Vista using "Mojave",. They are reporting that the "users" were simply shown a demo of what the OS was supposed to be able to do. Any OS can look good as screenshots and canned demos. What's the real deal here?
I started laughing when I reached that part, and didn't stop laughing until I nearly choked to death on my coffee.
When are Microsoft going to finally withdraw Vista and give everyone XP SP3, Apple or Linux vouchers so users can obtain an OS that, well, works?
Think I'll re-read the article just to give myself some more early-morning merriment!
A lot of the people in that hidden video look like they normally sleep in a cardboard box with a bottle of thunderbird.
When do we get the 'I Can't Believe It's Vista' branding ?
So MS went and hand picked some non-Vista users. They then focus on the parts that work, and make an effort to not let them see the annoying, broken or horrendously slow parts.
Did they cover these topics with their test subjects:
* File sharing speeds?
* Unzip speeds using the built in zip tool?
* "Domain" logon screen?
* UAC's wonderful interface?
I doubt it. Those are known bad points about Vista. And 90% of the complaints about Vista *aren't* about the appearance. They are about the experience in certain common situations.
please insert your childish "linux/mac rules..microsoft sux" crap below.
...he would have over 50% of the PC market now if the dumb idiot had opened OS-X to run on any PC a year ago. If you could have bought and installed it on any PC, legally, with Apples blessing, Apple would have totally, and finally, killed Microsoft.
But Jobs is too self-centered and egotistical to have seen that reality. He's still into his microcosm kingdom mentality, and that has bought Microsoft the time it needs to return to business as usual. It only a matter of time now. What an idiot.
For a small moment there, it could finally have been different.
Do you want to let me have s3x with your hard disk, it's nice too. I come from country with people with bad disks, we can fix.
So Microsoft sets up a controlled experiment where Vista doesn't seem to suck too badly. This is from a company that has a history of covertly sponsoring independent "research" that ranks MS products superior using questionable methodology.
Do a real experiment. Put Vista on a box, let them use it for a month, and then put XP back on it. See if they want to switch back to Vista.
As was shown in Microsoft's antitrust trial, they are very good at ermm... working up a video to show what they want 8-). I saw one of these clips -- it's like one of those HP ads where the pages, photos, and videos just FLY into the computer and arrange themselves into a nice slideshow and/or school report. Microsoft managed to edit out all the epic fail of Vista out of the video..good PR I guess but I don't think it'll trick anyone.
And, although you can certainly get 2GB dual-core machines, I think people now are seriously interested in using Moore's law the other way, getting say a single-core with 512MB for almost nothing and saving on electricity to boot. Which obviously Microsoft clearly didn't expect.
Nobody buys Microsoft products because they are good. What counts is how well they run legacy software. Nobody cares about advanced features.
Microsoft could be successfull by providing a small barebones operating system with optional modules to meet dependencies certain applications have.
What Microsoft are missing is a killer feature. Sure Vista looks prettier but all that bad press about cancel/allow and high-end hardware mean people will upgrade when they buy their new system.
Businesses are taking the safe option and using their downgrade rights to keep XP uniform on the desktop.
I have a new shiny Dell machine with Vista Business downgraded to XP, for fun I installed Vista and compared it to XP. No real difference, work is not quicker, pretty doesn't make any difference in Excel (Calc but still!).
Kubuntu however loves it, as you may guess I am using 3.5 and without Compiz and it really flies. Of course there's no antiviurs or spyware scanner.
Overall I am using Kubuntu for everything except games, which XP does nicely. In time I may have to switch to Vista, through strong-arm tactics like DirectX compatibility, but for now Vista is not for me.
I speak to a lot of IT and non-IT people and it's the IT ones who are not upgrading. This in turn effects their users who are convinced that if "Tim the IT guy" says Vista is crap, they'll keep XP at home too.
Bill, 'cause it's all down to him.
The problem with Vista is that the hardware hasn't kept pace. Microsoft fills up the "user experience" and requires more and more CPU power to handle the load. Now that people have done their "upgrade cycle" and bought more hardware (the Y2K "scare" prompted most of the previous cycle), they don't want to do the same thing again.
The hardware vendors (and chip makers) don't want to make "faster" since (rightly) they feel that the "XP-speed" is good enough. If they go faster, the machines just comsume more and more power. Now that laptops are getting to be more prevalent, users don't want bulkier kit to supply the power.
The bottom line is that Microsoft is on the wrong side of the "power curve". They got away with riding the curve while Intel made faster chips, but that doesn't work now. The chips haven't gotten faster recently (to any degree) and now we see how clear the "glass house" is.
When they make Vista developers run on old '486 hardware they might get somewhere. Better yet, ASR33's for debugging. It might humble them, but that is VERY wishful thinking!
Eye candy is like a flashy paint job on a car -- its actually quite nice provided the car itself works. If your car didn't work then no matter how good the paint job is, its useless. Same with a computer -- no matter how nice the interface is its got to work.
So far Microsoft has failed to show any convincing argument about what Vista does better than XP. It may have fewer bugs, it may be more secure, but functionally it doesn't appear to do anything better than the older system. (Especially as the first thing you do to it is strip it of all the garbage that comes packed with it.)
I've added Tux as a warning. Linux hasn't got the Vista eye candy but its stable, fast, easy to use, easy to maintain and quite secure. Which is really all you want from a computer.
I remember the days of fast. Amiga OS running on a 7Mhz Motorola 68020. Why? Because the OS was ultra efficient... Much more so than todays bloated crap. I can't help but wonder what would happen with todays hugely powerful hardware if MS had of gone for a lean, mean Windows and gotten rid of all the processor zapping guff. Software running at quite bonkers speeds. Its not as if they haven't got enough money to hire an entire army of coders to re-do Windows from scratch... however with the focus on efficiency, eeking out the most operations per second (and then finding a way to better it!) and (small) size. Other operating systems have proved you can have eye candy and still leave some processing time spare for the stuff you actually want to do. Jeez, even the Amiga could do that.
However as we all know these days this is nothing more than a pipe dream. MS and the hardware vendors are locked into a mutually beneficial upgrade cycle. One which neither would fancy being broken.Think of the blind panic from hardware vendors if Microsoft released an ultra-efficient OS that made the absolute most of new AND old hardware. It doesn't help when all but the geekiest of people don't realise whats going on and what is actually possible. The kind of Magpie people that are only interested in Shiny things and dont see the benefit of being frugal simply because the have 2Ghz+ processors, 4Gb of RAM and 500Gb-1Tb hard-drives.
Actually I don't wanna think about this because it depresses me slightly... Oh, and don't mention Linux (or its variants). I know what its capable of but I just can't be arsed faffing round with it. Unfortunately Windows works (usually) straight out the box and I don't have to piddle arse around (that much) with it...
Thats it, it has depressed me... I really can't be arsed now. I'm going to reminisce about my old Amiga and its glorious efficient ways.
//Mines the one with "Deathbed Vigil" on the back
I notice "Microsoft" is only mentioned in small text at the bottom of the page. Having said that, while the videos themselves smell strongly of astroturf, the site seems quite representative of Vista - visually fairly polished but slow as hell.
If you have an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft, you pay for a number of licenses in your company.
If you buy PC's there is already a license on it (OEM-license).
So on every PC there's 2 licenses.
Is that taken into account?
I've seen this before at a previous workplace of mine and I've actually conducted a similar experiment myself. We had a number of machines setup and running KDE in Fedora and had the appearance set-up to resemble XP, it was mainly to find out how plausible it would be to move to Fedora instead of XP.
The more tech savvy of the group picked up on it pretty quickly but were quite pleased with how things worked and looked.
It would be interesting to see something similar done by either the Apple or Linux camps and see the results. Theirs would have a more reliable breakdown of numbers and percentages, and should show MS for fools.
'Never let the truth get in the way of a good story'. That's a sexy interface on the Mojave site, and the reactions are well presented (edited?), enough for M$ to produce its own reality distortion field, maybe there's even enough hype-r drive in there to produce a parallel universe in which Vista is truly a great product. Don't stand too close.
This is the reason that vista is useless, it has become a drm system, not an operating system to help people work or play.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
The beginning of the end.
M$ used to laugh at Apple and now they are running scared.
They know far better then the majority of people just about to post drivel below me that the writing is on the wall.
Apple are kicking butt and I will enjoy every moment of the blinkered windoze mediocrity loving masses demise! HAH!
Well I have SP1 installed on '''er inchagre's" PC and did not notice a blind bit of difference.
Still got the horribly slow bootup, still got the mysterious disk thrasing on a theoreticly idle machine, still got the absurdly erratic quick, quick, slow user interface response.
SP1 installed suspiously quickly (nice to no something runs fast eh!).
From all this I conclude that SP1 is just a fatter than usual monthly bug fix which has been relabled a "service pack" for marketing reasons.
I bought a laptop last year - 1GB memory Celeron-M 1.6Ghz processor, Intel integrated graphics. It came with Vista Home Basic on it. Which equated to practically no eye candy, low performance when more than a couple of apps open and very poor performance when accessing external USB2 hard drive. I used it for a while out of curiosity then installed my usual Slackware Linux on it.
Result - now running a full whizz bang eye-candy Compiz-fusion on top of KDE and can have Firefox, Open Office and numerous other apps. open and usable whilst compiling in a terminal window with a Video Running in Xine for good measure without any apparent slowdown, disk transfers are faster and wireless network is more reliable. All the while all the whizz bang of the eye-candy is working away nicely.
My own personal opinion - for the good and bad of vista, I'm not buying a more powerful laptop just to run an operating system that adds no apparent value for me.
HP also offers pre downgraded XP Pro machines with upgrade to Vista options as does Fujitsu Siemens and several other manufacturers. The best bit is that they are no Smell.
I can help but wonder if these people who fell for MS's trick were admins or users. A simple browse of the control panel and any attempt to change anything would of told you the OS was Vista.
Oh and a flame icon as I am sick of positive Dell comments
"...Analysts that criticize Windows Vista are either crazy or unreliable. Who can you trust? Microsoft."
Bawhahahahaha someone pick me up off the floor from laughing my arse off at such delusions!
Not only are users downgrading their installed Vista license to XP, and manufacturers shipping Vista licenses pre-downgraded, but by the magic of deferred revenue recognition, Microsoft treats tens of millions of XP sales from BEFORE the release of Vista as Vista sales (because they came with some sort of right to upgrade).
The danger with the Mojave campaign is that it will make consumers think MS are liars.
If only Microsoft would apply the same level of energy and determination to actually *fixing* the flaws in Vista, instead of just talking, then Vista would indeed be great.
But all Microsoft deliver is yet more verbal diarrhoea!
I know that it will take days to backup my 90 GB of "stuff" and several weeks to sort out the niglets with all the devices on my laptop and the scanner e.t.c. but even then a move to Ubuntu+WINE looks more & more attractive compared to a lifetime of waiting for files to die, disks to defragment, the repetitive search for the craplication that blocks hibernation and for Microsoft to fix Vista!!
Can't you see the Emperor Fester's fine new robes, the scintillating stitching, the rakish cut, such resplendent finery.
Only and idiot would say it looks like a sweaty naked fat man throwing chairs and doing the monkey dance.
;D
"From what we can see in these very edited videos, there's a lot of focus on wowing users with eye candy"
Well, there's one problem. I am a proud Windows XP user. It is a man's operating system, for men. Apple produces a child's operating system aimed at children, and the various different flavours of Linux are basically autism in computer form. If Microsoft had emphasised that Vista was a nuts-and-bolts rewriting of XP, a rugged manly all-weather heavy-duty operating system, I might have gone for it.
Instead, there is all this nonsense with Vista Aero and DRM, which puts me in mind of metrosexual Peter Mandelson types with big LCD televisions, who wear tight t-shirts, you know what I mean. And also screeching middle-class girls who want to have a little animated kitten on their desktop.
I don't want to have anything to do with these grown-up children. I want a man's operating system. For men. XP with all the graphical nonsense turned off, that runs faster and feels like a brick, and that isn't tainted by the hippy free software cult.
I know this is going to look like trolling, but Vista x64 SP1, running on new hardware, with the eye candy and UAC turned off, is actually not a terrible OS. I've only managed to make it blue screen once in six months so far.
There's even (shock horror!) bit's I prefer to XP.
Everyone else I know who uses it hates it though.
Blah blah Vista pish blah Apple Mac fanbois rule etc etc Microsoft gonna fail soon blah aren't Apples great? blah blah blah
Repeat ad infinitum and nauseum/turn in to flame war.
/Story comments generator ends
No doubt running on a supercomputer.
Never seen the speed of performance mentioned here on my machine.
Had it not been for Rome Total War.....
Mojave experiment quote on using the 3d Flip
"i like how you can flip through the different windows, cos with me im always minusing"
a perfect example of someone who needs to be shown alt & tab on ANY version of windows.
these poeple would be impressed if someone showed them copy and paste.
Paris... cos shes thick
I'll lay my cards on the table -
I hate Vista.
I like XP.
Fond memories of Windows 2000.
I'm still in the experimenting stage with Linux (so far taking 10 years since RHL 3)
Never tried OS X.
I appreciate it's your paraphrasing, but is Microsoft's brilliant PR strategy really to insult any journalist who has ever criticised Windows Vista?
Poor lass being used as a Mojave Experiment guniea pig ( Row 1 Column 4 ) can't have her say! The gullible jock to her right keeps interjecting. Maybe she said Vista sucks compared to her granny's Mac?
Why don't they show us happy Vista users preferring Vista to XP running on the same 2-year-old hardware, say a 2.8GHz P4 on an i915 MoBo with 1Gb RAM? Perhaps, because they can't, even with the full resources of the MS corporation to tweak and spin things?
Because that's the sort of hardware that many users have purchased and expect to get another two or three years of useful life out of. Which they will, if they don't migrate to Vista. It would be different if Vista offered any wonderful must-have new features that people really wanted to upgrade to and were willing to buy new hardware for ... but it doesn't. Just glossy eye-candy and a totally un-necessary and time-wasting rearrangement of all the basics that we used to know our way around. And a built-in coffee break every time we boot it.
If you think that's unfair, connect electricity meters to the XP system and the Vista system with the same hardware, to show how green Vista is NOT!
the chap sat opposite me was fed a breakfast of Vista SP1 first thing on Monday morning ... by elevenses time he was sat looking at a Blue Screen of Death ... first one I've seen in a good while.
His PC is now healthy again, but only because he was able to remove the SP1 update.
Think I'll stay with XP, for now anyway.
Why do all new PC's come with Windows?
I already have a licence... (I bought it seperatly not an OEM)
And I dont want to buy it forty times!
just like I wont buy music I already have on Record Tape & CD!
..."We've made a big turn around on the application compatibility story, and we're just getting started".
Er, shouldn't you have started BEFORE releasing it to customers?
It fact, shouldn't you have started AND finished, AND gone back to improve it AGAIN before releasing it?
Anyone at Microsoft listening?
No?
Paris, because she doesn't always control her releases either (although she's quick to catch up).
Ok the average windows lover is about as intellegent as a goat specially the ones that can't tell that they are using Vista.
not to mention if they did tweak it enough to through intellegent users off the scent they probably were very impressed as we were with longhorn with an alpha/beta release with lots of promises. Not release software thats missing everything advertised in the development cycle.
Microsoft, just start flinging poo at each other please and leave O/S dicissions to us. What happened to "the customer is always right"
Clueless Joe on Mojave/Vista: "It represents a lot of things that you could only dream of..."
I used to think that dreaming of teaching an ex-girlfriend to make goats-milk cheese was pretty weird, but obviously some people have more serious problems.
Paris, because the best way to combat odd dreams is to keep your brain in standby all the time.
Show any plebian user a modern Linux distro with some fangly-dangly "compiz" wizardy. Then, in front of their eyes, switch is about to look like OS X, Windows, whatever. Just have the tissues handy.
Once Linux becomes usable by the mainstream home user (and it is slowly getting there*), it is going to have Windows for lunch.
I have seen the future - it smells of fish and goes "Awk!"
Hmm....how can I convince the g/f to let me buy another system.....
*Note to the fanboi legions: Linux is good, but still the preserve of the enthusiast for now. It is not as "cuddly" as OX S or Windows just yet. Home users (i.e. non-enthusiasts) want an OS that "just works" and lets them email, surf, watch TV, DVDs etc without any grief. Still too much mucking around with bash scripts etc required IMHO.
"As we all know, most PCs soon begin to slow down in the real world."
Is that because most PCs run windows?
I know of no other OS that needs a periodic wipe and reinstall just to keep it running properly. Whilst some of the blame lies with application vendors who are constantly putting quickloaders, updaters and other such cruft into the startup sequence, a lot of the blame must lie with MS.
""I am very capable of taking midline hardware and making XP screamingly fast on it, out of box. Once I start loading software and Active X objects and web components and spyware and spyware fighters well then everything gets sloowwww," the ex-MVP said."
Yes. It will. Strangely though, other operating systems don't suffer from that, maybe because they don't try and preload world+dog into RAM or just get broken, slow and somehow dirty.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they get angry with you and then you win.
"They" being MS, you can insert your own "you".
