Wrong quote?

There appears to be a mistake in quote on top of Page 2

"Windows 7 is a service pack or a fix for Windows Vista," Blake said. "But they branded it as a new product because if they said SP 3 - even if it has every single fix - they would have had to give it for free instead of being able to charge for it."

There, fixed it for you.

Call me cynical...

It is almost as if MS wanted Vista to fail, lock businesses into a corner, so now all the businesses stuck with XP have got fork out bucket loads on Win7 licenses and they now have no choice but to upgrade! Now it will be such a rush, guess what you need? Yep, conultants with the Win7 know-how to come in and help you, at a huge cost of course, to get your Win7 project in as soon as!

( No ticking timebomb icon, so a "ticking" grenade will have to do! )

KVM switches

I wouldn't recommend W7 for businesses if you use KVM switching (particularly DVI switches), like my company and some call centres I could mention.

The whole KVM area seems to be an unworkable mess, for which Microsoft's solution appears to be "buy new hardware". They seem to be ignoring the problem because it currently only affects home users. Hopefully, that will change when businesses realise that it's unusable for them.

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7hardware/thread/84f41660-1933-4109-9b13-1ea8a1c27be7

Besides, when the switch costs 2 or 3 times what the OS costs, why would you change from a working system to a new OS which doesn't do the job?

Right on one thing

Windows 7 is a Vista Service Pack.... My upgraded Vista Dell Laptop still hangs occasionally, Explorer stops working quite frequently and those annoying requests to allow programs to alter something or other! Especially Outlook... almost wish for Linux or XP.

A great investigative piece ?

The words and phrases " whitewash, smoke & mirrors, snake oil, wool & eyes, muddying the water) come to mind.

Seems basically an advert.

More MS Propaganda

This sounds like more Microsoft marketing bullshit to me.

Sorry, but I've heard this sort of American sales crap too many times already. Surely they must have picked up by now that it isn't the Operating System that people hate, it's the bogus company that sells broken stuff that the consumer has to fix.

As a daily user of the PC, I have to state categoricaly, there is nothing interesting or exciting about having to go looking for the application menus that the egg heads have just moved to somewhere else, or marketing types have had removed altogether.

Mind you, Ubuntu Linux is't a great deal better in this, it simply costs me ONLY the earning curve, which is enough, when you just want to do some work.

There is no new hardware required, no new office software required.

Hey ho, I've saved a packet already.

I still need to provide the cost for maintenance, whatever the OS.

So, if folks really like to be on the leading edge, good, I'll pick up the pieces when their machines fail.

ALF

What a pile of steaming Vista

Vista was hated because it was rubbish.

Slow, and a pain to use. There was no real erason to replace XP as Vista was nothing new really other than changing the entire look and feel of the OS just because.

Just one more thing...

It's still Windoze.

That is all.

But they didn't!

"they did redesign the mother ship from the ground up so that was excusable"

Longhorn was going to be a redesign from the ground up, but what Vista became was just a repackage of Windows Server.

If they really had redesigned you could possibly have excused some of Vista's awfulness. But they didn't. And Win 7 still isn't a ground-up redesign.

If Win7 _is_ just Fista SP3...

...then how come all the drivers are different? <glares at laptop with W7 unsupported nvidia gfx which were fine under Vista>

"overwhelming hatred from users who hadn't used it"

I have used it, yet my hatred of Vista is still overwhelming.

Are they for Real?

"Windows Vista was not a bad platform - it had some bugs sure, but they did redesign the mother ship from the ground up so that was excusable," Blake confessed

A mature software company like Microshaft should be doing proper testing. Its not excusable to have to mess about with two years of bugs and poor performance.

As picked up later in the article. The real issue is that the OS "Just Works" and doesn't get in the way. In that way its now just another white good.

In the real world people just want whatever brand of Washing machine to clean their clothes reliably. In Blakes world it would be acceptable for it to not rinse properly and leak water over the floor.

Seriously! Wake up sonny

Whatever

"Windows Vista was not a bad platform - it had some bugs sure, but they did redesign the mother ship from the ground up so that was excusable," Blake confessed.

How can they redesign something from the ground up and end up with an XP installation with over rated front ends. All the screens behind control panel are the same as XP

And anything that bad isn't excusable at that price.

I aint paying for no service Pack.

This one is to be pirated.

Pay to get rid of Vista?

Stung for hundreds of pounds for Vista Ultimate.. now stung for hundreds more to fix it? I don't think so....

As the great comedian George Bush once tried to say:

"Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me"

I aint paying for no more crap from MS. EVER!

Ultimate! the end, no more, never again.

Very confused article

So, which is it? Users don't want Vista because they'd heard it was crap, or users don't want Vista because it's dog slow? Or both? The article seems to flit between both viewpoints without drawing any conclusions.

The fact is, Vista was crap. Mostly because it was dog slow. It brought no benefit to the end user in the enterprise, so why would they embrace it?

Microsoft have now fixed the major issue with Vista (the Windows Display Driver Model -- moving to 1.1 from 1.0, just like Windows has moved from 6.0 to 6.1 -- hey, sounds like a service pack to me!); and tweaked some of the ageing UI paradigms (let's face it, Vista brought nothing new in terms of UI -- just fancier graphics for the same paradigms).

A combination of XP beginning to show its age, lack of mainstream XP support, and an overdue hardware refresh (which causes the inverse to the driver problems that Vista had -- try getting XP drivers for some of the new kit!) means that adoption of the latest Windows is inevitable.

Hell, I wish my firm would ditch the Win laptops entirely and get us some fancy Macs. It's not like we need anything the PC offers on the desktop side.

"overwhelming hatred from users who hadn't used it"

As an owner of Vista Ultimate do I qualify when I say I contain Overwhelming Hatred for the steaming pile of turd and words fail me for the description of the lowlifes who want to seperate my wallet from me again. £30 for win7 Pro (educational Upgrade - available to any .ac.uk email!) but £160 to fix my PC because it had ultimate on it???!?! Pigs in the trough!

Ultimate should have free fixes surely?

Win7 offers nothing...

...and the only reason to upgrade will be the slow demise of any support for XP. Then again, what do you upgrade too? And does Win7 let you do anything better/faster than XP does?

If Linux gets decent printer support (I'm looking at YOU Lexmark/Dell), multi-head support (a few Gnome bug fixes and Intel/ATI given a slap - thank god I'm Nvidia on the big box) and VPN support (hello CheckPoint, this is the 21st century calling) then it could well be a viable alternative. Ooo yeah, and you can get Flash to actually run with out it becoming jumpy-jerk fest.

With the rise of Droid and the whole Googley love-fest, some of those might actually get fixed. Which would be nice.

My Chrimbo project: have another look at MythTV and see if it has got anywhere near MediaCenter (which, apart from notepad, is about the best thing MS has ever written. Hmm, add the calculator to the list; that's pretty good too).

MS still thinks that Vista was just a marketing failure.

"Windows Vista was not a bad platform - it had some bugs sure, but they did redesign the mother ship from the ground up so that was excusable," Blake confessed.

So there was nothing wrong with Vista then...

"It would have worked quite well in our enterprise apart from a few glitches, but the overwhelming hatred from users who hadn't used it wasn't something I wasn't willing to contend with."

The original Microsoft theory that all that was wrong with Vista was marketing related.

"The fact Microsoft just got Windows 7 "right" on stability and performance is more important than the fact Microsoft's introduced new features such as Windows XP Mode."

I'm confused here, if Microsoft got 7 right, does it mean that Vista was not "quite right"? Oh yes! I know, the marketing on vista was bad.

Back in the day I got people who voluntarily embraced vista with a good attitude, those same people came back screaming: take it out! put XP back, take this rubbish out of my computer!!!!

Now I know it was all hatred, Win 7 works because MS removed that hatred, I wonder what they did to remove the hatred... vista was perfect... but 7 is right and stable hmm.

me too "overwhelming hatred from users who hadn't used it"

Another vote for 'tried it, hated it'. If Win7 is just a fix pack for Vista its going to be less painful moving to Linux. Even the brain dead desktop versions pouring out of Ubuntu ;)

You'd think by now the Microsoft fanbois would have accepted it wasn't a whispering campaign of disinformation that killed Vista, the product really is that bad. They've spent so long astroturfing they assume everyone else is just as corrupt.

Win 7 meh

I had a machine with Vista Ultimate on iot, never saw any reason that the extra was charged for, and as I got that machine free from MS (not that the WiFi worked from install, when it did on a Live Ubuntu CD).

Din't like it.

New games machine came with Vista Home Premium, with service pack ok enough, but nothing fantastic.

I put Win 7 onto it at the weekend, still not impressed. When the trade press rave about the semi-hidden show desktp button, you know they are finding it hard to justify.

In many ways my Xubuntu Asus 701 is a nicer machine to use, my Rock Pegasus with Xubuntu is a joy from the software side, responsive as anything.

I'll dual boot my Win 7 machine but, if games like LoTRO and Company of Heroes were in Linux form, I'd dump Windows in a heartbeat

I never had

the delights of Vista, mostly due to buying this PC 2 weeks before it came out

However.

a few things puzzle me

Why do people accept a slower and slower OS on faster and faster hardware?

Why does the OS get in the way so much of people who just want to work/play/send rude e.mails?

Why cant they just bring out a business version at 59.99 and a home user version at 39.99 and watch the things fly out the door?

But what do I really care.... Linux for me and for free

I'm gonna be hated for this....

Just bought a new pc with 64-bit Win 7 - It's a replacement for an XP system that finally died last Thursday night. I was planning to upgrade next year once it's had chance to settle, but looking at over £100 for new bits to make this one work again made me think "what the hell" and I splashed out on a complete new box, and have spent the last few days setting it up and playing with it.

I have to say, I like Win7. I skipped Vista at home, but have to use it at work every day, so I'm *very* familiar with just how flaky it is and how much of a PitA it is to use, especially for dev work.

I've obviously had to spend time getting it the way I want it (after 6 years with a system on XP, nothing is where I want it and was used to it being!) but overall, I am impressed with it. I can't refer to it as Vista SP3, because it works, and I enjoy using it - something I can't say about Vista at all.

I eagerly await the abuse...

(PS: even as a Win7 supporter, that article should have read "advertising feature"!)

It's a $%$!@! service pack alright.....

I installed Vista late last spring, after all the horror stories it was stable and I didn't have any of the copying problems or other issues people reported. I did have the Vista-ific issues with an explorer shell that is now completely $@$%!@ed up, and a control panel that is more arcane than helpful. I honestly couldn't find things when I searched, and what happened to the up folder button? Why keep screwing things up? It's like someone in marketing said "25% of the people like to do things this way, 25% like it that way...." and the manager said "Let's put them all in!" And don't get me started on UAC.....

So I install 7.....aside from a a different start screen and menu it looks like the exact same thing, even using the same drivers, or maybe not. You're supposed to use Windows 7 drivers if they work. And now I'm having blue screen crashes after years of never seeing one. The "Windows-Kernel-Power" error looks like the new "General Protection Fault." Anything from your sound card drivers to Ram voltages seems to be able to cause it. Have I fixed it? Heck if I know, just keep using the Windows Experience and see if the night of upgrading drivers and flashing firmware worked.

I still have UAC, I still have an explorer that doesn't work, I still have a messed up control panel....Hey Microsoft, if you think we're all idiots then quit trying to make these things idiot-proof! Just stick on a button saying "Do you know what you're doing? If no, then stay out of it!" Why is the display resolution now "Appearance and Personalization," why is there the #!$%^!# "Anytime Upgrade?" If I wanted it I would have bought it in the first place! Why so many versions? Why not just two, one for home users/gamers and one for business?

So I basically all it feels I got was a new splash screen and a lot more aggravation. Thanks a lot, Microsoft!

Don't gang up on me but.........

........ I love windows 7.

I have been using it a corporate enviroment since the RTM version came out, and it's alot faster than XP was on the same hardware. the legacy app installer helps alot when it comes our rubbish apps like BMC Remedy etc.

i liked i so much so i updated my netbook(advent 4211), desktop and workbook, and the only thing I needed drivers for was the fingerprint scanner on the 8710w.

the big pressing point for us rolling it out to end users is the training it will require, no start button anymore, not a big deal, but going from office 2003 to 2007 caused us some training issues. deployment will be done with WDS and MDT2010, really looking forward to it !