Ballmer bitch slaps Vista
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has admitted that Windows Vista is an incomplete product, even though the operating system has been on the market for more than a year. Speaking at the firm's annual Most Valuable Professionals event in Seattle yesterday, Big Steve told the gathered crowd that the unloved OS was "a work in progress". …
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@Vista=ME2
You ask why MS has to go through the same cycle of releasing buggy OSes every time. I'll tell you why. It's not the developers' faults this is happing, it's the management. Developers at MS are under enormous pressure to make deadlines and get arbitrary goals accomplished, often at the expense of ultimate quality. If a product doesn't ship on time (on time=moderately late), SOMEone's head is in the chopper. And if the middle managers don't bow to the upper management and push their "teams" to scoot the code out the door, whether it's ready or not, they lose their cushy high-paying jobs. Everyone lower on the food chain than the head honcho has to answer to this mentality, and it's simpler to just kowtow and cut corners than take a stand and push for quality. Add to that personal agendas, politics, drama, throw in a dash of worthless meetings where nothing is accomplished except time being wasted. Mix well with mis-communication and a healthy dose of CYA, and you have a pretty standard corporate environment, pre-engineered for failure. With the economic and job climate the way it is, and MS jobs being very high-paying and desirable, no one wants to lose their ass/job/benefits over a triviality like doing the right thing. Oh, there are gifted programmers and even managers out there, trying their best, but in the end, too many people just signed their name in blood and can regret later, after they're off the hook.
And that, IMHO, is what's going on at Microsoft. (and most everywhere else)
</cynicism>
Read: "I Sing the Body Electronic" ---don't remember the author, Google it.
UAC @ Brent Gardner
Why should the UAC have to go?
What is it that bothers you about UAC? I'm not trying to pick a fight here, but I'm curious as to your reasons on this.
Linux and OSX uses a similar technology in that when you perform a task, you perform is with the minimum users rights. When it requires greater privilages, you are prompted for action (a password, or those that don't have a password continue/allow).
So if Microsoft should abolish this, you think that Mac OSX and Linux should also?
I've been running Vista at home for some time now... Since the OS came out actually. I really have not noticed a performance difference at all between that and Vista. I admit I have had a couple of moments where copying files across my network has been sluggish, but from a home perspective, this isn't a big deal. It doesn't happen all the time anyway.
To me the biggest problem with Vista is people jumping on the band wagon and cristising it. The media has destroyed this OS, not Microsoft.
There seems to be a lot of sheep in the IT world, and I don't mean the wooly kind! Instead of following the crowd (it's cool to like Mac, it's cool to like Linux). Have a true opinion on this stuff! There is a reason Microsoft produce the most widely used OS.
They give Linux away and they still can't get people to use it!
Ok I'm getting a bit defensive now...
@Jim Booth
Testicles...razor blades...
Good god man, the visual!
"we will be sensitive, and we will listen"
Did we realise before that this is one sweet guy?
Haven't we all been misjudging him?
Err, it's the coat with the razor blades in the pocket. Visuals? I leave those to Jim!
@Ian Davies
>OS X wasn't always the nimble lover of old hardware that it might be now
It was a new OS architecture though. Vista isn't, it's a hacked about version of Windows Server 2003 with GUI tweaks, DRM and an attempt at proper file system security.
XP
Switch eyecandy, restore, index & unwanted services off and XP does run in a PII 233MHz with 256M RAM.
NT4 however will run on it faster with only needing 24M for OS.
NT3.51 will run needing only 8M for OS. Fine on 32M RAM.
A better OS should use LESS ram and go faster and crash less often.
Each new MS OS needs about 2x to 4x RAM and 2x to 5x CPU speed to be slightly slower.
Win 2008 Server "seems" better because newer HW is faster.
Moving GDI into Kernel on NT4.0 was stupidity,
making GUI optimised for a native DirectX/Direct3D (Evil Insane Gamers API for DOS programmers) is ultimate stupidity making non-games / traditional GDI APIs emulated on Vista. This why on real DirectX 10 gpus Aero is faster than tradtional desktop.
@Phil
You said:
>>>To be honest I haven't had many problems with Vista. It seems people forgot all those glitches we had with XP and therefore claim it's better, but I seem to remember more problems rolling up to XP than I've had so far with Vista.
Well... I had a slightly different problem, being that I was in development XP posed some new interesting challenges for software I wrote - otherwise, it never stopped me from actually working on a desktop.
But... then you said:
>>>My only personal problem with it is the ridiculous hard drive access. I can leave my desktop on for days and it will still be grinding at the disks, even after turning off indexing etc. What could any OS possibly need to be doing after being left alone for a few days? I can't see any of our Vista laptop drives lasting long that's for sure.
Which is kinda an oxymoron. You have no problems, but it grinds to a halt after just a few days? Whew. I'd hate to see what you call a problem.
@Jeff
The best way to some up my feelings about UAC is to talk about IE7 instead. I love it when you go to paste something into a text box, and it says "this web page is trying to access your clipboard: allow / deny". That kind of prompt is not security. It is the epitome of insecurity! It means, due to some horrendous architectural problem, that IE7 CAN'T FUCKING TELL that I INITIATED the action, as opposed to some malicious java-script or something.
The same thing applies to UAC. If the user said to do something, the OS should do it. No one wants to go around pressing “I really meant to do that” buttons all day long. They will just grow weary of click-fatigue, and click “yes” to everything!
And yes, I know Linux has the ability to elevate to root, but I’ve never used it as I just run as root all the time (queue flames), and it never comes up. And as for OS/X? I’d never run it for all the reasons I hate Vista: you don’t own the computer; you lease it from Steve Jobs.
@ Brent Gardner
Brent, there's no need to explain to someone why to get rid of UAC because if it needs explaining they'll never understand the basic truth:
People want control of their system. They want to be able to enable and disable such unnecessary junk as they see fit on their PC. If someone wants it, ok. If they don't, never ever force it on them.
Blasphemy - "Vista is bigger than Jesus"
Ballmer is on dangerous ground here. He claims "Vista is bigger than XP" and we all know that XP (the Greek letters Chi Ro) is the monogram of Christ. When John Lennon said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, sales soared. People in America's Bible Belt were buying records just to burn them. So this is clearly a sneaky attempt to sell more copies of Vista.
No doubt in future interviews he'll claim his comments were taken out of context.
@Giles Jones
> It was a new OS architecture though.
To Mac users, maybe. It wasn't new per se. Let's face it, in the OS world, UNIX is almost as far from new as you can get. What was new (and where most of the problems came from) was the "new" stuff that Apple added, which wasn't actually new at all, but was simply re-skinned stuff brought over wholesale from NeXT.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's the same, just that there are similarities. There's no reason why a technical exercise such as transitioning a new OS should be beyond the capability of MS or Apple, it's just that Apple had a lot fewer customers to piss off at the time, and as a company, was nothing like the news story that it is now. If Apple released an OS of the same quality as 10.0 now, it would get roasted, just like MS is, and rightly so.
History repeating?
Does this remind anyone of the bad old days?
"You will pry Windows 95 from my cold dead fingers".
If it was all about performance, and eye candy meant nothing, then we would all still be using DOS...
Mac OS
As a dedicated user, I'll admit it has its share of bloat. 10.4 comes with 1.6GB of printer drivers and 1.1GB of translations into 14 languages. However, they can be deselected when installing. Dashboard is a memory hog and Spotlight, like any indexing service, chews up processor time. But again, they can be disabled without adversely affecting the rest of the OS. Runs well on a low-end 2001 system.
With the resources they have, I cannot see why Microsoft makes such irredeemably bloated software. There's this thing called 'code optimization' that they seem to not have heard of.
@Mage:
The correct statement is "A better OS should use less ram and go faster and crash less often PROVIDED it adds no new features." If you want 32-bit color and a built-in TCP/IP stack, you'll need more memory and processor cycles than Windows 3.1 did. How much more is the problem they're having trouble with.
Word
I got Vista with a laptop I bought in the Jan sales. Hated it on sight, not so much for its bloat but for the random pauses and the fact that any disk ops just took forever. Also, the constant flood of dialogs between me asking to do something and it doing it were a pain. Update would NOT work, despite several hours on the intertubes tring to fix the problem. Even manually applied updates failed to install, much less auto-updates, giving error numbers neither Microsoft nor anybody else has seemingly ever heard of. So when I finally got hold of the manual SP1, and THAT failed to install correctly, I knew there as no prospect of Vista ever getting any better for me, so I scrubbed it and put on XP. My laptop immediately sprang to life, and my only regret is I didn't do it sooner. Vista is a piece of shit.
The long term availability of XP
Have a google for "Windows XP Professional for Embedded Systems". Microsoft's own web-site is hardly overflowing with references, but this is a full XP-Pro system with Microsoft promising to support the product till the middle of the next decade. To get your paws on this you need to be an OEM, so it's no help to the home user, but it sets a precedent and commits Microsoft to maintaining the XP codebase well into the next decade.
Icon: Saint Steve, because it means I won't have to port my company's industrial product line to Vista. :)
bits and pieces
So did MS settle the "Compatible" vs "Capable" lawsuit already? If not, I'd suspect a number of gleeful lawyers just saw their evidence list grow by one.
---
"Certainly, you never want to let five years go between releases." Rather depends on who "you" is. If you are Microsoft, then I'm sure this is true. If you are Joe User, then I doubt you care at all. Maybe if they'd left it in the oven for a couple three more years it would have been the OS they were aiming for.
---
The Vista as ME2 comparison has always irked me. Mostly because folks gloss over their respective roots. ME and Vista grew out of rather different circumstances as MS's solution to very different problems.
ME was a hasty and slap-dash effort to ensure MS would have a sellable product should the anti-trust lawsuit of the late 90's gone worse than it did. (Google for "powered by the reek of fear" for a bit more detail.)
Vista, on the other hand, was designed to change personal computing in a large, but largely invisible, way (aside from interface eye candy). Vista's goal was to implement Trusted Computing. (See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html for an excellent FAQ on the topic.) .Net and managed code are part and parcel of this same initiative. Further, anyone who thinks MS has given up on Trusted Computing is simply wrong. The only reason they did such a poor job of it is that Vista was forced out the door long before it was ready.
The only real commonality between ME and Vista is that a large percentage of users don't like either one.
---
What MS should have done is bundle the Vista eye candy with XP SP3, and sold it as a paid update. This would have gained them some revenue while leaving the bulk of Vista to finish development. But perhaps this would have seemed to much like Apple's marketing every .1 improvement of OS X as a new product.
@ Giles Jones
built on cough UNIX...perhaps you might wanna look up BSD theres at least 9 sodding versions of it...
I didnt jump on a bandwagon
I used Vista for about 10 hours on a laptop i got when it came out. I refuse to touch it for the time being after that impression. I think Vista has a bunch of good ideas but they need to be streamlined and have the bugs worked out first before they will be beneficial. I have a feeling Vista is a test bed for Windows 7 just like ME was for XP. Course during this time the shit storm will continue to brew until it comes out. Oh well.
As for that visual Mr. Booth im going to go protectively hold my hands in front of the little guy and back away slowly.
/mines the one with the cup in the pocket.
Why XP Succeeded Over Vista
XP has probably been Microsoft's most successful OS. Here are the main reasons:
1. XP (NT5.1) was basically Windows 2000 (NT5.0) with a gaudy Teletubbies user interface with a few minor enhancements.
2. Windows 2000 was released in February 2000 and XP in October 2001. This gave software and hardware developers time to build on a stable operating system.
3. XP had been out for just over 5 years before Vista, giving XP a large user base who were quite happy with it.
4. Windows Vista (NT6.0) is a whole new OS with all the software and hardware problems associated with it.
5. People who already have XP wont want to "upgrade to Vista" because their hardware which could be as much as 5 years old just wont run it (don't believe the Microsoft hardware specs for Vista they are BS and even they know it!)
Overall anyone who has XP will probably be happy with it. Anyone who has bought a PC with Vista on it in the last year or so may be happy or frustrated with it. Its certainly a work in progress. Maybe the finished work will be called Windows 7!
@James O'Brien
>> I have a feeling Vista is a test bed for Windows 7 just like ME was for XP
With respect to Snert Lee: I am also angry about the ME-Vista comparison. ME was the end of the line of the Windows 95 code base, it was dead anyway. MS didn't clean up their act and (within one year) churn out the miracle that was XP. Windows 2000 Pro *already was XP*. They just added a gay color scheme.
There is no such comparison with Windows 7. Nothing else is in the works. There *is* no other code-base. MS bet it all on Vista, and the philosophy behind Vista is to tell users what they want. I *really really* want Windows 7 to fix things, but it would take an act of god for MS to make a complete 180, and do what the users want.
Firstly they would need to give up on the multi-billion dollar revenue scheme from Hollywood that the Trusted Computing thing has the potential to bring them. I fear the days of Windows "it just works" XP are over, and the dawn of Microsoft "Locked down more than an American cell phone" Vista are upon us. And of course the "rebel aliance" will run Linux.
Everyone just needs a year or two to decide what side they are on :-\
@Jeff and UAC
What is wrong with Vista UAC is its user interface. We know that because we can test two UAC implementations.
Vista says in advance: "Allow this perhaps-hostile action: yes/no". SELinux says after the fact: "I've denied this perhaps-hostile action. Do you want to know more: yes/no".
The Vista approach is necessarily in the user's face. And not surprisingly, that annoys them. So although SELinux's approach seems more complex, it has the better user experience: it can simply blink an icon on a ribbon bar.
The SELinux approach requires a sophisticated set of rules, which Red Hat has been building for about two years now. But these are under the hood. And it's not like Vista wasn't in the pipeline for long enough to develop a good ruleset.
No UAC at all gives the best user experience. But so does running as Administrator or root. UAC is needed on machines using the modern Internet, as its the only method we have of dealing with zero-day exploits, even regular updates of software doesn't cut it anymore.
UAC vs Linux
The way that UAC works is not nearly the same as things do on Linux.
Firstly, Linux is _far_ less likely to demand root access than Windows/UAC. It seems to me that Vista is "warning" me and requiring a click-thru almost every 3 or so things that I click on. Linux only requires root if you install an app or run an admin app that can mess with system settings.
Secondly, when Linux requires root, it asks for a PASSWORD. This is so that some prat can't come up to your PC and fsck with it while you are at a coffee break. All Vista UAC does is say "this requires administrator access" and then asks you to click yes. How does UAC know that the person clicking yes is allowed to do so? It could be anyone really. No, UAC has no clue, it is just there to annoy you, as was recently admitted to by one of the head honchos at MS.
To make things even more annoying, they have even designed UAC so that you have to click yes _a_second_time_ to do whatever it was you were trying to do in the first place. Once to ask you whether you want to allow administrator access and the second time to give you administrator access. WTF is up with that?
UAC does such a good job of annoying ppl that they either;
a) Get click-fatigue and click yes without reading
b) Turn off UAC
c) Switch to Ubuntu
@brent
Always run as root? FFS why?
Paris, cuz she likes root, too.
Last past the post
Some fool couldn't wait to be apologist numero uno:
"He should be applauded. It takes real guts to admit you have cocked up. Lets hope they do learn and get rid of a lot of the bloat.
Further more, let's hope a few more out there can admit their kit isn't perfect....highly unlikely I know."
He had 5 years to get this right using the highest paid coders in history -including the comparative staff bill for Bletchley Park when they were doing something less intensive.
He had all the business acumen of every Microsoft most valued arse snuffer too.
Then there was the history his firm has with backwards compatibility from OS 2 days onwards.
So why cross all the "good"? code with all the bad and make the OS the worst debacle in the history of silly things to do with a monopoly?
If Ballmer needs some help figuring out just how fat his pice of shit is.....
.... he just needs to read this....
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/14/16TC-winoffice-performance_1.html
This is first objective trial that I'm aware of that compares the performance and memory requirements of all of the Windows and Office combinations on comaparable hardware, (using a virtual server to mimick capabilities)...
These tests prove that Vista performs at least 50% WORSE than XP even with TWICE the RAM on the SAME hardware....
No Fista fanboy will ever be able to tell me again that Fista is anything other than shit... I'l just point them at this and ask them to show me where there is any improvement over XP....
@Brent
people who run as root.... err.. deserve to get rooted?
seriously, mate, what are you running lindows or something? =)
please please please, tell us you're kidding.
Paris... I suspect she probably gets rooted pretty freuquently no matter what privileges she has.
sad ol' gits
That's who we are ... wtf are you doing here reading crap like this?
Anyways I couldn't agree more with Brent's last comment.
Now's the time to look around and see.
GNU/Linux / FreeBSD are likely to remain the only 'free' platforms, but we should wait and see if M$ will give us an OS that sucks less and also see how Mac OS X develops. (leopard sucks way less than vista, agreed?)
I hate DRM personally speaking and I don't like the direction these 2 commercial OS's are heading but I have a nasty feeling I am going to have to work 'with them' and not stand alone in isolation in FOSS land.
Unless linux or BSD really zomgwtfpwnz0rs in the rest in terms of market share.. which I personally wouldn't mind.... but again is a situation that hardly seems hardly likely ....... except perhaps in China.... wait for the dragon lolz...
Re Jeff - UAC @ Brent Gardner
"Linux and OSX uses a similar technology in that when you perform a task, you perform is with the minimum users rights. When it requires greater privilages, you are prompted for action (a password, or those that don't have a password continue/allow)."
I use XP/Vista/Linux/OSX on multiple machines. The problem isn't that UAC asks for extra rights, its the fact that their are so many things that run under vista that end up asking for the extra rights. Linux and OSX don't suffer from this problem. About the only time I'm prompted under these OS's is when I'm installing patches/applications or configuring system settings. Vista on the other hand continuously asks me for the extra rights.
Perhaps Ballmer will do the honourable thing...
...and dive head-first through a plate-glass window, preferably from the 10th floor !! Shouldn't hurt his head one bit considering the density of the material it is constructed from !! I pity the landing zone, though. Not nice being struck by a kinetic weapon !!
(FYI, grey matter is mostly water and not very dense !!)
Don't collect user data...
Once Steve Ballmer's will to collect user data was demonstrated in Vista all my trust in any product created by MS was lost forever. It's a nonstarter. You just don't go there. Period. Not ever!
You must be kidding me
"its unruly little brother, Vista"
Little ? LOL Sorry you had me in fits with that one
You wouldn't install Windows XP on a Pentium 2 233MHz, ORLY?
..."You wouldn't install Windows XP on a Pentium 2 233MHz with 64MB of RAM, would you?"...
Actually, I've installed it on 20 old P2 233 Compaq's some with 64MB and others with 128MB of ram, and XP performs pretty adequately. Hell, even Office 2000 worked was reasonably snappy for most uses.
Vista Is Brilliant!
Well said Jeff. Vista runs faster than XP for me. You see it uses that memory that's empty is XP to speed up the system! Give me Vista over XP any day.
Yes I had problems on my 3GHz Celeron with an ancient graphics card, driver issues. But on my new HP laptop - no problems whatsoever.
Buy a new machine and it will work fine. I use Linux daily, and from a user perspective it's still half finished. Changing the screen resolution requires you to log out for goodness sake (this will change in Ubuntu 8 I believe). Apple have it lucky, they only have about 10 different types of hardware combinations to support - and they can cheekily release upgrades every year that users will be forced to buy if they want browser/java upgrades. I run OS10.3, and I can't get the new Safari and I'm stuck with Java 1.4. Imagine if Microsoft decided not to issue IE /.NET Framework updates to XP users.... outcry.
SO my advise, don't believe the media muppets - buy a new machine with Vista, and as long as you arn't using a 7 year old parallel printer, you;ll be fine.
users are the last to benefit
MS has history of exploiting the trust of its' users. gates was educated as lawyer, balmer is a confirmed money addict. not good for the end user that forks over their actually hard earned money to them! im not surprised it's incomplete, since nothing is EVER complete. its only promoted to extract proft and gain for themselves alone. all those goody goody charities form thier ill-gotten sales?? whatta bunch of PR baloney! never have i seen such pseudo erotic manifest of Billy and whatsernames (his wifey) ethical conscience erupting !!!!!!!
@Ian Davies
"If Apple released an OS of the same quality as 10.0 now, it would get roasted, just like MS is, and rightly so."
Agreed, OS X 10.0 was a half finished buggy OS. But the difference is that Apple released OS X with a mature working version of OS 9 which you could choose to boot into at any time.
Microsoft could have learnt a lesson here and developed a 64 bit version of Vista sans the backward compatibility bloat combined with a version of XP for the legacy apps. Any ideas as to why MS didn't do this?
Why blame Ballmer
It was Gates who was the "chief arhitect" for Lonhorn - Shorthorn - Vista.
xp "gay" theme
luna isn't gay... gay people has good taste! :)
"there is no other code base"
"There is no such comparison with Windows 7. Nothing else is in the works. There *is* no other code-base"
Thats what I have heard as well. MS would have to abandon the deep rooted DRM code in Vista and start over. Vista is a beast pure and simple. I have a highly tweaked vista system which takes about 800 megs of ram to boot. Open up a browser and winamp, and windows mail and I am pushing a gig. If I uninstall a one meg program and leave my system idle for 10 minutes it will start disc thrashing and defrag the drive for the one meg program. I finally caved and left superfetch on since vista runs too slow without it. But then I have to use sleep to avoid the superfetch disc thrashing... but also give up quite a bit of battery life in doing so.. or do a shutdown and have a two minute boot followed by several minutes of disc thrashing with superfetch. Many of the new vista features annoyed me horribly like defender, indexing and uac which I disabled. SP1 helped the network copying but its still slower then XP.
I am sure if MS made a leaner/faster booting OS it would also take less power which is critical these days since so many people are buying laptops. I considered an ibook but they run hot and heat is something I don't want in a notebook. I don't expect much more with windows seven. I just wish MS could give us a lean coded OS that can boot fast and use less resources. Its my belief that no matter how much hardware you throw at a OS it will run slower on bloated code then a lean system with slower hardware.. this is the real reason people are pissed.
Moron's going on about hardware
I find it so funny the moronic people bleating on about people don't upgrade to vista because of their hardware. While this may be the case for some people its not for most.
Im a serious gamer, my pc is running a quad core core 2 duo, running at 3.8 gig per core 4 gig of ram, xfi sound card and a pair of 8800 GTX's in sli. This is the pc I put vista on, and found it ran rubbish, games were slower, nothing looked better because of dx10, crash's happened all the time. The User interface is SO poorly designed (so much wasted space to show something simple). So what did me and my gamer friends do with our legit versions of vista, binned them and went back to XP x64.
Im the kind of person that will spend serious money to have their system's run well, and for gaming Vista = Fail. Hell I recently bought a laptop nice spec to that came with vista pre-installed. I tried it again I played around I then decided hell no and now am running osx on it :) Much nicer much cleaner and much more usable.
MS need to forget about getting a new os out every 5 years, they need to say hey lets make an OS that works properly first time out the box. Sure its never going to be perfect but, take the time to design it from the ground up to be fast, bloat free, secure, involve the major hardware OEM's at early stages so we can have great driver support from day 1. Make it x64 only (I mean come on they don't make 32bit only chips now and haven't for a long time).
Why paris? well because she gets more love and use than vista :P
Game Over - Mac OS X Rules!!!!!!!!!
Even CEO of M$ thinks Vista is rubbish! and he really must know. So stay and suffer in Vista, downgrade to XP SP3 and hope for Windows 7 in 2009 *snigger* but remember it took about 5 years of NeXT development, then 8 years of developing Mac OS X to get to where we are today, you think M$ can do that in a year?
Game over, roll-over and die Windows, Mac OS X RULES!!!!
Anyone need a Mac OS X consultant to help with switching over from hell?
Lets Hope...
That Win ME is to XP as Vista is to .. Win 8?
Windows XP for embedded system
Don't even go there! I would never ever use a single microsoft product in an embedded system: the products are just too unstable.
On spacecraft they use VXWorks as the operating system , why?, because it works!
Putting XP into an embedded system goes against just about evey design criteria you can come up with: performance wise, footprint size - both run time RAM size and non volatile storage to hold the OS, it's buggy and the concurrency is just crap.
Show me a Windows operating system where the mulgtasking actually works properly! Not on even on dual core processor where the OS supposedly can assign tasks o the different cores does it work properly.
A bit chunky (understatement of the decade).
when I worked at Apple Computer in the late 1990s, operating system 7.6 shift on floppy disks as well as CD-ROM. I realize a lot has changed concerning software development. I mean hey, games take up more hard drive space now than the entire operating system did back then.
But the problem with Microsoft has been either downright crappy product development and or resource hungry operating systems.(Or both)
Vista the takes the cake. Of course I'm not telling you anything and already know. But let's face it we live in a market driven society. The only way they got this big by handcuffing and force-feeding consumers. Starting with I.T. departments and large corporations demanding productivity within budget. The second loophole you find ourselves getting caught in our Microsoft certified programs. They sell the certifications of the cost. The drive up the market and make it necessary through poor product development to ensure employment of these professionals.
The only advice I have quit buying Microsoft. And tell everybody to do the same as well.
vista/xp
> I'll stockpile XP licences before I put vista on my network.
No need, the vista business versions come with rights for XP if you call Microsoft licensing.
@ Goat Jam
You've hit the nail on the head with regard to UAC under Vista.
Drop Viata all toghether.
"Ballmer also accepted yesterday that customers are incredibly reluctant to shake off XP in favour of adopting its unruly little brother, Vista.
"We have a lot of customers that are choosing to stay with Windows XP, and as long as those are both important options, we will be sensitive, and we will listen, and we will hear that."
What customers are really saying is take your vVsta, DRM and invasive code and practices and shove them where the light doesn't shine. It's about time MS learned a lesson, seems to me that haven't learned enough yet or Ballmer would be saying, OK, wh heard you and we're giving you an OS that is nothing more than an OS. No frills, no DRM, no hidden trojans and no forced upgrades. Nope they haven't learned a thing.
@ RotaCyclic
I believe spacecraft use VXWorks more because it's a real-time OS, reliability and timeliness being fairly important when the nearest person who can issue a reboot request is a good few light-minutes away, during which time mission-critical failures can range from incorrect orbital insertions to being smeared all over the Martian countryside
@ Kanhef
"With the resources they have, I cannot see why Microsoft makes such irredeemably bloated software"
It came about when they did "Windows for Warships".
The guy from the Navy made mention of "Floatation device" for some reason or other.
The guy handling the order had just been in a meeting with Steve, so obviously was a wee bit hard of hearing, and he thought they said that they wanted a "bloatation device", so that's what got installed.
And it's been working ever since..
Probably about the only thing in Windows that does work as designed.
Mine's the one lined with asbestos.
DirectX10 and Vista supporters
Now that they have admitted what we all knew already Vista sucks, will they reverse their stupid policy of no DX10 for XP?
As for all those Vista supporters that state your having problems with vista cause your running it on old hardware all I can say.....
2 x quad core 5000 Series Xeon at 2.6Ghz, 4GB of Ram, Raid 0 Raptor (scratch), Raid 0 WD 500 (system), 8800GTX 768MB.
Vista Slow and bloated also downright unstable.
XP 64Bit fast and stable.
It has nothing to do with old hardware why vista sucks and more to do with too much bloat and lack of driver maturity. The later will be solved with time but the bloat seems to be the direction MS is going.
Mines the one with the go faster stripes on it!
It's really my fault...
You know, I'm an idiot. I'm one of those people that actually BUYS software. Yes, I actually own valid licenses for the computers I own.
So I did pay a few hundred for the 'next gen' OS. So now Mr. Ballmer has confirmed I've been had.
So what are they going to do about it ? Exactly...nothing...in a year or two the're going to come out with the next next gen OS, which they can declare a heap after a year or so, but promise they'll fix it next time. Oh, and would I fork over some more filthy lucre...
So what do I do ? Refuse to pay ? Ask for my money back ? Sue them ? Nah...I write a silly comment on this website and just poney up again...
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