Computerworld Australia is running a story with a response from Microsoft to Infoworld’s ‘Save XP‘ petition web site, which has gathered over 75,000 signatures so far. Apparently Microsoft is aware of the petition, but says it is “listening first and foremost to feedback we hear from partners and customers about what makes sense based on their needs, that’s what informed our decision to extend the availability of XP initially, and what will continue to guide us.”
If people still want to give you bucks for XP, then why do not give them a chance ? It will cost you nothing. Or maybe you have too much money ?
Or maybe a strategy which makes sense for a regular player does not for a monopoly? Some people like to argue that it’s unfair to hold a monopolist to more stringent rules than non-monopolist players. They claim that all players should be treated equally. This is an excellent example of *why* monopolists in *any* industry *must* be required to play by rules which insure truly fair competition. Companies which have achieved a monopoly status in their industry have the same aggressive instincts as any successful business, but they wield a deadly bludgeon, and as this situation demonstrates, their best strategy does not involve competing to give the customers what they want and are clearly asking for, as would be the case for a regular competitor, but to give customers what the monopolist feels is in *its own* best interest.
Current Windows users have little real choice other than to take what Microsoft decides to give them… or go through the pain of completely transitioning to a different OS. A major part of Microsoft’s strategy has always been to ensure that doing what Microsoft wants is the path of least resistance, in the short term, for their captive user-base.
Let me give a short and not very accurate introduction of an important aspect in capitalism, because that’s what software manufacturers with monopoly positions like MICROS~1 is about: The most important goal is growth. You get new hardware, you need new OS. New OS needs better hardware. Better hardware needs better OS, and a resonance effect develops that turns customers feelings into money – they are made believing they need to have it under all circumstances. Of course, there are customers that would be happy to be able to purchase “Windows XP”, but will hardware vendors support it with working drivers for their new products? These kind of customers isn’t the majority. The vast majority wants new and shiny products, not products that are several years old, no matter if they are “better” (in certain specific regards). Making money isn’t about serving a minority that makes educated decisions, instead, it’s about manipulating and convincing consumers they’ve made a good choice buying always the newest products.
Once, there way a saying: “I don’t want a product that is declared ‘the best’ and that will fail soon, I want a product that will serve me well for a longer time.”
I’m sure it will cost MICROS~1… not money, but as it has been pointed out, it would look as if they would admit that “Vista” is a failure. Why sell a product they’ve declared to be obsoleted, old, not versatile enough, not entertaining enough etc. when a product, declared to be much better, more entertaining, more versatile etc. is available?
You can’t have enough of it. 🙂
And finally, you will have to compensate today’s computer power with some ressource hungry OS. 🙂
I looked at the site to see what they are doing. There is no way that they can count with accuracy the numbers of true people signing the petition.
You can get as many emails as you want from Yahoo, Hotmail, etc., and go and sign the petition more than once.
This is all a publicity stunt by infoWorld and nothing else. Everyone I know that uses Vista are pretty happy with it. InfoWorld just have a grudge, I believe. Maybe Microsoft is not giving them enough ad money and they are sore!
Your experience is a bit different of mine. I, personally, have downgraded 5 laptops and more than 15 desktop machines to XP because of network incompatibilities and performance related problems. They were new and come with Vista Business preinstalled but the owners could not afford or didn’t want to wait for SP1. I hope this kind of request will stop now that SP1 is close. This is just a distraction, an annoyance and a loss of time to me.
I’m not sure that SP1 will fix Vista. On newer more powerful machines with say 2GB of memory and with a decent video card offloading some of the graphics processing, Vista still somehow manages to be slower than its predecessor running on far less powerful machines.
Vista has to be spending all that computing resource doing something. One suspects that it has support for (but perhaps not yet enabled, waiting for a bigger part of the market to become locked-in to Vista) addressing the problem as discussed in this article:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080207-riaa-boss-spyware-cou…
The only place that such “copyright filtering” could actually hope to work is deeply embedded in the irremoveable heart of a new version of a near-ubiquitous closed-source proprietary desktop OS.
This is pure speculation, but it surely makes you wonder, anyway. If this is turns out to be where your CPU cycles are disappearing when you run Vista, then don’t expect any service packs to improve it.
Edited 2008-02-08 03:56 UTC
interesting…
i don’t think RIAA can pull strings that far, NSA can have code in OSs, the DoD, but im not sure about the riaa,
and actually you KNOW where all the CPU cycles go to… at least in theory… in fact there are tools now to see more effectively where your cycles and memory are going…
indexing, firewall, aero, net stack, everything wants some cpu, anyway, why people don’t see the obvious, soon all of you will be part of the vista world… or some rebels with ubuntu or the most popular “flavor” of linux atm, or maybe with a mac, with the latest OS, which ALSO have flaws, it’s inevitable, progress is like time, it doesnt wait for you, it crushes you, drags you, throws you ahead no matter what…
and yes, in progress some things go back to worst states, and other advance, but in the end the sum of all things give a positive result… or at least i hope… lol
Then it’s admitting Vista is a failure, why use a seven year old OS when we brought you a new one that we think is much better.
It’s funny, Microsoft fixed alot what was broken with XP in SP2, the fix was simple on the security side. Microsoft fixed it that good that people dont want Vista and are happy with XP. Problem is Microsoft can’t make much money off XP, they want all the people who have XP to buy Vista. The proper way to do it is keep XP broken and sell them Vista but they moved out their greed/evil zone and shot themselves in the foot doing it, poor Microsoft, Google and Linux really are making a impact on them.
Edited 2008-02-07 18:07 UTC
MS released XP back in 2001. That makes the operating system nearly 7 years old. Seriously, folks, how long do you expect MS to keep throwing resources at maintaining an aging operating system? To the people who answer “forever” or “a long time” … quite frankly, you need to accept the reality that time marches on. You can either embrace change (and whatever it brings — both the good and the bad) or stick with your XP CDs. The bits aren’t going to rot.
But, like it or not, Vista is a good evolution for Microsoft. It introduced an improved security model (LUA), better defaults, better graphics,and a whole host of features that improve on XP (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista). It will never be perfect or meet everyone’s needs but, if history is any guide, it will get better. Like XP SP2, we can expect Vista service packs to improve basic functionality to meet customer feedback. The old piece of advice about waiting until one or two service packs come out before moving to a new operating system was never more true than today.
Edited 2008-02-07 18:18 UTC
Because Vista brings *ZERO* useful new features while being an unacceptable resource hog and an annoying hell to work with, asking you three dozen times if you are really absolutely sure that you really wanted to move the mouse pointer, even if you are the bloody administrator.
I really don’t get what they where thinking. Drunken monkeys couldn’t have come up with worse decisions.
So why demanding XP Upgrades? Because it gets increasingly difficult and time consuming to install on newer hardware. Yes it rots, and it can even rot away when microsoft decides the authentification should run out.
Plus, here in europe they are charging 330€ for Ultimate, that is more than an office level PC costs and for that hilarious amount of money they even where so impudent not to remove the last embarrassing unbearable remaining Windows 3.11 Dialogs, like the font installation dialog (you just have to see it once running at 2560 x 1600… fun to use).
They can happily stick that piece of garbage up their greedy asses. *My* next machine will under no circumstances even just double boot that dirt.
damn, finally some sense tomcat…
can’t stand against progress people, realize it
its vista or a 7 years old XP which I LOVE, but it’s frankly OUTDATED,
look use vista in a good computer with mainstream hardware, i see no issues, what? you don’t want to put 1gb RAM to your pc? bad luck, cry me a river, go play tetris or buy a NES on ebay :p
people, computing MOVES ON, “if it ain’t broken, why fix it?” XP is broken, so was 98SE, and Me, ha!, and Vista, yes it’s broken but hey it’s software, every sw has bugs…
my point is… get over it, change is a NECESSARY thing in life…
ok?
now go hide in your caves
ps. alleister, mmmm, boy UAC can be disabled, and as fas a resource hog goes, mmmm, do u expect to play Half Life 2 in the same machine as Half Life 1??
do u expect Starcraft 2 to run on the machines that it ran Starcraft in ’98?
nuff said///
No, but Half Life 2 was much better than Half Life 1. I’m not going to buy me an 1000€ PC to run Half Life 3 if it looks like Doom 1.
You could argue that Vista looks better than XP (i don’t think so), but they obviously did a very poor job.
Why does it have such high resource demands, when my Laptop with an 1,6 GHz Pentium M and just 512MB Ram can do all that much more impressive Compiz stuff?
What are the Vista advantages? The broken OpenGL implementation which manages to get my 3D apps running at 10% Speed? That useless sidebar? I just don’t get why i need 2GB and a new graphics card for that.
Yes, i can switch of UAC and i can bath in blood and jump into an fishtank with an rabid shark. Or i could make Linux my only os instead of just my working os and have security that doesn’t bites my ass. And i can get a Mac as my next machine and don’t even have to abandon the Apps i like to use apart from the games of course, but lets face it: Windows and the Biz managed to kill the fun in PC games. The last two games i tried to run just failed because of the nazilevel copy protection, which hurts everyone except the ones who pirated the game. It certainly has become too annoying for me.
First, UAC is no more “intrusive” than a root password prompt. Second, as another poster pointed out, UAC can be turned off very easily. Third, Vista is indeed a memory hog but that can be rectified easily by turning off the Desktop Window Manager; or, if you prefer the graphics quality, consider the fact that RAM prices are at near record lows (4GB is about $100). Each of your criticisms can be addressed in a practical way. Still, I doubt that you’ll stop complaining.
In Linux when i make changes to the system i login as root, have one single rootprompt and then work undisturbed until i’m finished. UAC on the opposite doesn’t stops to bother me until i switch it off completely and be as secure as with Win2K running on Admin permanent. Yes, that really sounds like a bargain.
And why do i need to switch off features, ending at finally less features i have on XP right now. That makes updating sound even more senseless to me. Why couldn’t they just come up with decent implementations after so many years of development. I have all those features and more running smoothly on my ancient 1.5GHz Pentium M Notebook with just 512MB Ram and an base install that comes with dozens of better apps on less than 5GB with Ubuntu. What is MS stuffing into those hilarious amounts of HD Space?
I just don’t get why i should invest a wheelbarrow full of money on an update that doesn’t has new features, still contains Win 3.11 Dialogs (which are violating their HIG for over a decade now), is comical bloated and actually is a lot worse than what i have right now usability wise. It just doesn’t make sense.
You guys are incredible. On the one hand, you criticize Microsoft for poor security in XP and earlier versions and, on the other, you criticize them for making your machine “too secure” in Vista. I have a feeling that you’d never be satisfied with anything that MS does.
But I’ll throw you a bone. Here’s how to do precisely what you want to do:
http://www.tweak-uac.com/what-is-uac/
It allows you to selectively enable and disable UAC on-the-fly — just as you would by specifying a root password. So you can stop complaining. For a few minutes, at least.
I have been saying that for years. I moved over to windows around the time 98 SE came out, and every subsequent release has gone the same way, people hate it with a fiery passion for a few years, and then not only accept it, but completely forget about their reactions when the next release comes out.
I remember when XP went gold, people were spitting blood for at least a year, and for many of the same reasons as they are now with vista (memory requirements, nothing changed except eye-candy, hardware incompatibility, games not running well, etc)
by the time SP1 came out, there were about an equal number of people who were using it and liked the improve stability and polish to the haters, by the time SP2 came out most people had forgotten their initial reaction. Even now, the truely hardcore are still on 2k, or are using 2k3 on their workstations, and still hate XP for the same reason as all these people hate Vista.
What I have come to learn is that windows guys never want anything to really change. As long as there aren’t big issues that keep them from doing things, they would prefer the os to pretty much stay as it is. I grew up on a mac, and have the exact opposite frame of mind. I like seeing more forward thinking and innovation in software products, and actually enjoy learning new and better ways of doing things.
All that to say, as much as I love the windows developer community, I will never understand the windows enthusiast community.
I dunno it seems to work for UNIX. Microsoft seems to like to through the whole thing out and revolutionize every new OS. Of course I would rather have incremental updates. Hell Solaris has a long history of binary compatability yet they seem to be adding features every release without junking the entire codebase. In all honesty though maybe early UNIX implimentations rewrote mostly everything every release but I somehow doubt it. I use my computer to accomplish a task not to run an OS….The OS should be an extension that same philosiphy. It’s a part of the tool… not the end all be all of the computing environment.
Tomcat,
They could support it for as long as operating systems such as IBM’s MVS, CICS, VM (or what ever they are called these days) and Unix and BSD and Linux and OS-X have been supported. New does not necessarily mean better. Continuous improvement can be much better than new and flashy.
Regards,
Peter
Apples and oranges. The cost of a a typical PC and its software pales next to the cost of IBM mainframe hardware and software. Mainframes are so expensive that many companies lease them, because they can’t afford both the hardware and the support contracts that IBM charges. IBM basically has a captive customer base. With decades of investment in mainframes, seriously where are these companies going to go but to IBM? Run Linux on their mainframe? Puh-lease. Contrast that with Microsoft. MS has serious competition coming on the same hardware from both Linux and Mac OS X. MS has to keep innovating and evolving; otherwise, it’s dead. IBM has no such competition in that space; hence, it can continue shoveling the same crapware year after year.
As for ‘nix, show me a single modern distro that runs all of today’s latest features on all hardware. Answer: You’re not going to find any. Microsoft has supported XP for far longer than Red Hat supports a single distro. Or Apple.
At a corporate level, you might have 50 computers or 50,000 computers that you have to replace. You have to transition slowly, but you don’t want to start with one operating system and be forced in the middle to switch and hope for the best.
When Windows Vista was ready to be introduced, it was said that more than half (a lot more, I believe) corporate computers where unable to run it. So, companies are faced with an all or nothing scenario or to change their tactics and hope to support everything.
If it’s safe for a handful of home users, that’s one thing, but when you can’t reliably run your CRM, accounting, healthcare application, that’s another.
Hopefully, SP1 will go a long way toward compatibility and reliability.
I won’t comment on the validity (or stupidity; whichever is more appropriate) of the petition but in any case there’s no denying that Microsoft is making a lot of money off of Vista’s failure. Think about it: OEM’s pay a certain amount for the Vista OEM license (which is passes on to the consumer of course) and then the consumer turns around and pays Microsoft for an XP license. Microsoft is paid twice. They’ll be in no hurry to fix Vista this year and I guarantee you they’ll continue making XP available to OEM partners as well. For Microsoft, this is a win-win situation.
What I would really like to see is Windows XP Lite! Now wouldn’t that be neat. Just a bare-bones Windows XP operating system; no bloat, no browser, no e-mail, no media, in fact no applications at all. Just a lean and mean operating system to which users could add what ever applications they wish. It ought to be quick to start, run and close down.
Microsoft – please can i have one of those!
Regards,
Peter
You need to try ReactOS… it fits your need!
Everyone can get people to sign petitions these days. If there were petitions related to my business, I wouldn’t even bother to learn what they are about.
Looking at all these Vista issues and the way XP support is ending and microsoft strategy to close the XP and forcing end users to use Vista… ReactOS should have shined… if the OS was complete! It was the perfect time for them to shine if they were near their final destination. Cause most of the users dont want Vista and they know buying again XP when they have already paid for Vista is double payment. Apart from that ReactOS provides free solution… BUT It is still in beta stage… and ReactOS developer need to encash on the current situation quickly.
What do you say guys?
Those who have no idea what I’m talking about can visit the following link to know more and think of supporting it cause it needs your support:
http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html
-T
I certainly agree with you TusharG, but, (please, everyone correct me if I’m wrong here), but the basic specs for vista I believe have been overhyped, and aren’t that intense actually (800 MHz processor,512 MB of system memory, 15 GB of available space, Any video card, CD-ROM drive). 800Mhz CPU’s have been out for at least 7 years now, and even Apple has been including 512MB of system ram standard for over 3 years now.
So this means anyone with a 3 year old computer, can probably scrape in.
So yeah, it will cost them to upgrade, but if they were planning on upgrading anyway, they would by computers with Vista preinstalled.
And despite Microsoft no longer selling Windows XP, an end of support for SP2 has not be announced yet, so companies will probably still be safe for another year with their current copies.
So if ReactOS is ready by then, they may be in with a chance.
However, chances are any businesses who cannot run Vista now, probably will be looking for an upgrade (hopefully) soon, which will support vista, or probably aren’t that well organised to the point that they use anything but the basic applications.
Also, we have no idea what level of support ReactOS will offer. Even if it is marked 1.0 RTM, ReactOS may not offer much support anyway, in which case, there might be no difference if they stick around on WinXP a bit longer (despite lack of updates).
And they probably wont be cloning IE for instance, which I know from experience (firefox wouldn’t do it, and not cause of a user-agent issue either), may be required to use old dodgy HTTP sap interfaces. And even if IE can be run on ReactOS, Microsoft wouldn’t release updates to it.
So its target market will certainly be interesting.
I gotta say I love the idea, and it certainly also helps the wine project too, but by the time it is running real world apps, it is hard to question who their target crowd will be. If they offer businesses priority support though in some form, it may persuade some businesses.
So yeah, gotta say, Its hard to say if reactOS is the right way for businesses to move, because ReactOS will never be able to run Microsoft office for instance, as well as Windows can (they can support on a per version basis, but the next version may break).
I guess none of us will know though anyway. Sp3 is still around the corner, so support for XP by microsoft will be strong for a while yet.
Yes I agree to you on all fronts… it is just my wish that if ReactOS would have been ready by now lot of people would have opted for it. But like you pointed out support and main application like Microsoft office is hard to run on the ReactOS. Never the less since ReactOS can run big games smoothly at least gamers will opt for it. I have used ReactOS in its early stage and its 10 times lighter than XP/Vista
All I will say is ReactOS needs support from everyone and if it is groomed properly we may create a good alternative to end MS OS.
I’ll start off by saying that when I upgraded my computer, I was VERY cautious of going to Vista. So much that I made sure to keep XP as a dual boot as I planned on booting into XP regularly. I can honestly say about a month later I havent booted into XP since. Sure, I did have a problem with my networking driver causing crashes. Vista was able to identify the problem (random crashes happened while surfing the net) and a driver updated solved the issue perfectly. Vista for me is fast, responsive, and after turning off the constant nagging (UAC), is a much better experience than XP.
FYI my computer is a home built. Much like everyone I know thats had good experiences with Vista. IMO, the problem with Vista are companies like HP, Dell, Gateway, etc. that unless you buy a real high end system, load their computers up with crap parts that are provided with shoddy drivers. It also doesnt help when they pre install tons of useless software on a computer that by all means shouldnt be running Vista to begin with.
Edited 2008-02-10 19:41 UTC