First hints of Microsoft's $300 mill “fight back” ads appear
blogs.zdnet.com
blogs.zdnet.com
How is that usable? These days we're accustomed to running 2-3 copies of virtualized OSes. An operating system in 2008 mustn't assume more than 128MB of RAM available for just sitting and doing nothing, let alone demand 4 times as much.
XP was released when 128MB of RAM was more or less the norm. If you had 512MB, XP was screaming. With Vista, these two numbers (for "barely works" and "screaming") are 1GB and 3GB, i.e. Vista effectively increased its predecessor's hardware requirements by more than 400%
That's just insane.
Well, not Vista, right? I thought you had to own Windows Vista Incredible to have permission to run virtualized copies. Or was it Windows Vista Ultimate Smackdown? I can never remember.
Of course, we in the Mac world have a much easier time remembering which versions of the Mac OS can be easily and legally run in virtual machines: None of them.
Not true. You can run Leopard server virtualized. I haven't tried it but I know people who offer VPS's with it. And yes, it's completely legal. Both Parallels and VMWare support it.
I can legally run (some versions of) Windows on any of our Linux machines, loading it over the network, provided we don't exceed the license limit. This is _exceptionally_ useful as it allows access to (office|windows only apps) for the 1% of the time it is useful, without paying for the 99% of the time it isn't.
To do the same for Macs would require us to buy an entire set of Apple hardware. Rather pointless in a shop where most people use Linux out of choice, and most work is done inside a web browser or Eclipse.
So it makes sense that you can't run MacOS X on non-Apple hardware since it was never meant to do that. On the other hand, Apple supports Windows XP and Vista on its hardware and have written a ton of drivers to do just that. Linux folks have done the same and they have written drivers for Mac hardware. Sure, there are such things as Hackintoshes but they have a ton of issues (sometimes fans don't work. graphics doesn't work, drivers missing etc).
For Apple to do what you want, they'd have to license VMWare and other VM vendors internal Mac specs so that VMWare can emulate those on a machine that doesn't have them. And this is not beneficial to Apple at all.
It's perfectly reasonable for them not to want some people as customers, but virtualisation on Apple only hardware covers nothing like as many people's needs as virtualisation on any hardware and any underlying OS.
Vista makes a bad first impression. It gets faster the more you use it, rather than being fastest out-of-the-box.
This may sound crazy, but here's what I did last time I set up a Vista box. I booted, logged in, then walked away and let the thing sit idle overnight.
All the scheduled disk cleanup, disk defragmentation, spyware scanning, indexing, etc., ran overnight and the machine was quite a bit snappier the next day.
I then proceeded to reduce the frequency of some of those tasks and turn others off completely. You don't have to mess around with services for most of those things, though, because they have real GUIs.
In the end, I was able to get pretty usable performance on the PC, which at the start had appeared to be unusably slow.
"After that it could barely breathe on its own 1GB of RAM, without any applications running ... The damn thing needs 1GB of RAM only to stay barely alive on its own."
With respect, what makes you believe this? The figure in Task Manager? I know just enough about Windows' memory management to understand what a weak grasp I have on the meaning of the figures in Task Manager. Certainly the figures shown don't change much when I open up a bunch of apps.
It only sounds crazy because this is 2008. 1968 you could have gotten away with running all your tasks overnight...
Thank goodness that Ubuntu, SUSE and Fedora all run great (fast, cool and stable) with less configuration than XP takes to get rigged to work on here. Since I am running Ubuntu, and not running the hog that is 'Vista', I have plenty of machine "left over" to run Virtualized XP at lightning fast speeds...
Paint a turd(Vista) gold(fight back ads) all you want, you just have shiny shit at the end of the day...
On a related note: I think it would be interesting to see how many prior Windows-only users were turned to the world of Linux because of Vista being poorly released at a time when the Linux environment was moving towards its current usability and hardware support.
As far as old computers are concerned, the person who actually bothers to upgrade the OS on their old PC, will probably have a top of the line PC that actually has the RAM to run it.
We don't buy RAM to run operating systems, we buy RAM to run software, and OS must be our "Santa's little helper", not "Santa's rape-me-in-the-ass hairy inmate".
"Seeing Windows Vista for the first time may leave you searching for words. Many people just say "Wow." Here are 100 reasons why. 1. Windows Vista makes using your PC a breeze..."
Am I supposed to actually read through that bullshit?
A person who apologizes is gracious. A person who does nothing but apologize is gracious but impotent: One may accept them as a friend, but one doesn't hire them.
The correct strategic move is to fix the problem, or refund the money, or throw up your hands and declare, believeably, that the problem is unsolveable by anyone.
Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to fix the fact that Vista has no compelling features (they're too busy supporting all the non-compelling features that are in Vista... as someone wise wrote here the other week, once you introduce a feature you're stuck supporting it for life). They certainly don't want to offer refunds. And attempts to pretend that it's impossible to build a better OS than Vista break down as soon as the customer walks past an Apple Store -- or, even worse, as soon as she reboots back into XP.
So, in the absence of a new strategic direction, most of the marketing machine is still coasting along the path of the old one. They're applying lipstick to the pig. Again.
Without getting into specifics, Vista is a much more secure operating system than XP. It also has much better support for detecting and resolving errors. I run Vista (with 2 GB of RAM), and it runs great.
I guess in the eyes of most users, security isn't a "compelling feature" because it's not very visible -- but it's a big improvement over XP. Most people who use Vista with capable hardware (yes, I admit this is a weakness of Vista) are happy with it. When it was released, there were lots of compatibilty issues. But today, it's a much better OS than its reputation might suggest.
You got it.
And there are two other big problems with marketing Vista strictly on security grounds. One is that Microsoft has very little credibility on security. I seem to recall a long, long era when security was an afterthought at Microsoft, and when security issues were downplayed. That, plus the energetic PR efforts of thousands of malware authors around the world, has pretty much tarnished the brand as far as security is concerned. The company does not start from a position of strength.
The other is that Microsoft's market probably doesn't contain a lot of security-sensitive customers anymore. Those that haven't been driven to the Mac or Unix have evolved defenses: They're acclimated to running tons of antivirus software and periodically reinstalling their systems, or they've firewalled and proxied the living death out of everything. Or, you know, their machines have been 0wned and they're living in blissful ignorance.
At this point, trying to convince long-time Microsoft customers that the new OS is safe and secure is like trying to talk grizzled survivalists out of their shelters in the mountains. ("We have no weapons! You can put down the rootkit scanner! You don't need to fear anymore! It's the 21st century out here and we've got a utopia!")
Essentially no one during the the time of Columbus (and even centuries before) believed the world was flat. That's just a myth that people like to believe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_mythology has more on the myth.
And assuming the truth of the citation in the wiki article, having Gould say, "all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology" is, I think, fairly damaging to your position. When one of the biggest critics of religious interactions with science says 'hey, they got it right here', they probably got it right.
The church also accepted that the Earth was round, despite what many have been told by their teachers. Even sailors knew that the earth was round, since they could see the curvature of Earth from daily observations
I found a more detailed article about this on the net: http://www.bede.org.uk/flatearth.htm
I could go on about how the "dark ages" wasn't so "dark", but that would probably be even more off topic :-)
"Microsoft Vista - Now with Service Pack 1!"
Unfortunately, here's how I see it:
- People who are smart enough to know WTF a Service Pack is already are sold one way or another on Vista. Throwing it out there as a selling point is not likely to sway them either way.
- Most people have no idea what it is.
Microsoft has a huge marketing nightmare on their hands - and now they're backed into a corner because they've forcibly killed off the highly successful XP. It makes me wonder if they shouldn't throw a few more patches in and relaunch the product quietly under a new brand. It's a lot more likely to work than the "Now with Service Pack!" crap.
But, come to think of it - XP would work as well. MS is currently rebranding XP as a 'portable' OS ; they're supplying it to companies making mini laptops like OLPC, Asus [eeepc] and Cloudbooks. I think thats as far as they want to go because they're aware they're cannibalizing Vista business by leaving XP in the market. For me, it just means when I install VMWare on my Macs and Linux boxes that that cracked copy of XP is getting a few more years of use ;)
“Vista is now actually better than its reputation. That’s a marketing issue.”
Hilarious, sad, and true, all at the same time. Classic.
I have a hard time believing they are going to gain ground by trying to "logic" their way into position. Nobody cares about logic, they work off emotion.
I can tell you all night long that the software I just wrote is super-compliant with the OZBOG standard and uses 18.3 jigahertz to mitigate the resonance specification, but you just won't care.
But if you see John Mayer and Britney Spears and Steven Spielberg all use Vista and they "love it to bits and pieces" and because you want to be just like them, now I have a tiny wedge I can pound on.
Macs aren't selling because of Apple's cute ads or clever slogans. They are selling because Windows' much larger desktop software range doesn't make as much difference now that users do most of their stuff online - so customers pick the OS which they judge as easier to use and more stable.
On the corporate market, I doubt all the IT managers who refuse to upgrade their company to Vista will change their mind once they see a picture of a ship.
Vista has some neat little visual items that XP didn't, but beyond the visual there's not a whole lot of benefit to upgrading. I mean, most of the boasted visual items can be pulled off inside a browser.
From all my experience with Vista, they somehow messed up badly on the networking layers: everything is bogged down under traffic.