Posted on 12/01/2006 7:49:10 PM PST by Zakeet
As he took the stage to usher Windows Vista to market, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer last week tried to put the software's laborious birth behind him. The company's 71,000 employees -- and the entire PC industry, for that matter -- could be excused for breathing a sigh of relief, too.
"It's an exciting thing to finally be here, and that's probably all I'll say about the past," Ballmer said at the unveiling from Nasdaq's cylindrical high-tech building in New York's Times Square. Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007 also were introduced, and 30 more products will follow over the next year, all part of the same technology wave. "This is the biggest launch we've ever done," Ballmer said. Microsoft will spend $450 million marketing it all.
Yet for all the design missteps, overly ambitious plans, and personnel changes that led to a five-year lag between versions of Windows, questions about the future of Microsoft's software are top of mind for customers and partners. Ballmer swears to never let as much time elapse between Windows versions; the question now is how the company can keep churning out innovative products on a compressed timetable.
"Vista is the last of the Big Bang operating system releases from Microsoft," Credit Suisse research analyst Jason Maynard wrote in a report last month.
(Excerpt) Read more at informationweek.com ...
Have you ever seen a Jaguar mechanic drive home in his Lexus after a day's work? It's like that. I know a lot of IT people who spend all day supporting Windows, or working as Unix sysadmins, and then go home to their Macs, because they don't want to deal with all that hassle when they're off the clock. I even know quite a few people who are provided with Windows PCs at work, and tote their own Mac laptops to work and home every day -- they use Windows for the stuff they have to, and Mac for the stuff they can.
Microsoft had better be very, very concerned about this trend becoming an avalanche in the business world.
I think the bigger trend, and more threatening to Microsoft, is one that Sun used to use as an ad slogan -- "The network is the computer." More and more business functions are shifting to server-based solutions, with a Web front-end or a relatively simple thin client that can be quickly ported to anywhere (or even written in Java to be portable from get-go). The more common that becomes, the less "Windows-compatible" means anything at all. Thin clients and open standards are the David swinging a stone at the Windows Goliath.
Compatibility has been the narrow road Microsoft has used to lock in users for the last 20 years. IT departments have considered it safer to upgrade from DOS to Windows to 95 to 98 to 2K to XP to Vista rather than start over. When you can do what you need to from Windows, or Mac, or Linux, or Sun, or Palm, or a cell phone or a toaster oven, then there's no reason not to let each user choose the environment he prefers.
More and more folks prefer Mac, once they have a chance to get their hands on it and someone to walk them past the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) Microsoft has so successfully cast over the last two decades.
And now that Macs are on Intel processors, and Windows runs native (or nearly so), I can't imagine buying anything else. I have the environment I prefer 99% of the time, and when I must run Windows, it's a click away. All in a box I can fit in my glove compartment (I'm running a dual-core Mac Mini).
Corporate IT departments will not lead this change, because they make their living fixing screwed-up Windows machines. Macintosh steals bread off their families' tables. I'm convinced this explains their sneering dismissal of all things Apple.
I wholeheartedly agree. I used to work at a place that had a roughly equal number of Macs and Windows boxes. The IT staff was about 10-1 Windows over Mac specialists. That didn't tell the whole story -- a lot of Mac problems were resolved by me and other experienced users helping out peers without a ticket being entered at all.
Moving to Macs means a reduction in headcount and budget, which means a loss of power, and no veteran of corporate politics wants that. The impetus will have to come from the management or financial side, when IT managers are forced to do more with less, and start kicking their MCSEs to the curb.
I can even foresee a scenario ten years or so down the road when OS X (or OS 11, or XII) reigns supreme even in the business world, and Microsoft is an MBA case study in how to drive an 800-pound gorilla of a company into the ground. You read it here first.
I wouldn't go that far. The wind that's blowing now is blowing not toward a new hegemony, but toward a multipolar computing world with no hegemon at all. That bodes well for Apple, which has survived and even thrived as a minority player by simply doing things right.
Microsoft used DOS to leverage IBM's near-stranglehold on corporate computing, then established its own empire much in the way IBM had during the mainframe era. When they controlled the standards, they controlled the market. Open standards will force them to compete on an equal footing, on the quality of their product. That's a battlefield with which they're unfamiliar, and which Apple calls home.
Want to see how that works? Check out the history of the "Big 3" auto makers. They built empires selling customers what they wanted to sell, and then were shocked to find, beginning in the '70s, that Volkswagen, Honda, Toyota and Datsun (Nissan) were lining up to sell what customers wanted to buy.
Click here to see Spaces...a new feature of Mac OS X in Leopard-Coming in a few months...
But old Win 2K machines are perfect for stand alone kiosks or light duty web surfing machines. There are quite a few later Win 98/ME machines that can easily run Win 2K. And since it is a "professional" operating system, it will be supported much longer than Win 95/98/ME were.
I have an HP DesignJet 815 at the office that comes with its own 800 Mhz touch screen computer running Win 2K. There's no way it's going to be upgraded to Win XP or Vista. The 42" plotter and 42" scanner in that combo should last at least 10 years if not longer. I can foresee running Win 2K on the computer that comes with those devices as long as those devices are serviceable.
Same for me. When I first saw Expose, I thought..."Okay, more 'Eye Candy'..."
But boy, once I started using it...I wished there were something similar on my PC, and I keep feeling like I want to click a button to make it happen...
When working in Photoshop or Illustrator, it is the most timesaving ease of use tool the OS provides.
It's not native now, but virtual desktops -- which Apple has dubbed "spaces" -- are a feature of OS 10.5, aka "Leopard," scheduled for release next spring. I've read a little about third-party tools that allow that function now (OS X is BSD-based, so it's pretty easy to port *ix code), but my general impression is that they're a little twitchy.
I've never seen the appeal of multiple desktops, because the Mac makes it easy enough to choose which apps to show, and hide, and switch between. But if that's the way you prefer to work, cool -- a good, flexible OS ought to provide options.
I believe Apple has been shipping the two-buttton Mighty Mouse with desktop computers for a while. Their portable computers now have scrolling trackpads which emulate a scroll wheel, and the control key allows access to the right-click menu.
I resemble that remark! In what sense is that "not a computer?" I'm typing this on one right now, and it's a sweet little machine. I would have gone for a Mac Pro, but it was more sensible with my current finances to get the $800 computer than the $2500 one. When I'm more flush, I'll get the tower and the Mini will go live in the entertainment center as a music/video server.
With Apple's Boot Camp, one can now run both Mac OSX Leopard and Windows Vista Aero on the SAME machine!
With Parallels desktop, you can run both at the same time without having to reboot. It's 80 bucks well-spent. You can also run multiple instances with different disc images, so you could be running Mac OS, Windows, Linux (in whatever your favorite dog or hat color is), and even OS/2, if you're one of those freaks.
I recommend maxing out the Mini at 2GB of RAM, because running two (or more) OSes at once can get kind of demanding. The stock 512MB is woefully insufficient. A gripe against Apple for at least a decade, which I can't believe they still haven't addressed, is that their stock configurations ship with way too little RAM.
Hasta la vista, Steve Balmer and Bill Gates!
I'm surprised that Apple has never worked in a play on "defenestration" -- a lovely and obscure little word meaning "being tossed out of windows." It used to be the preferred method of regime change in Czechoslovakia. I can't quite wrestle the ad slogan to the ground, but it's in there somewhere.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
I like the Mighty Mouse in principle, but the scroll ball -- while it's a great interface -- is a little fragile. Between finger oils and dust and general schmutz, it seems to gum up a lot. I had mine a few weeks before it stopped scrolling down. Up, left and right worked fine, but down didn't seem to register. I tried daubing it with isprprpyl alcohol, which cleared it for a little while, but then it gummed up again, so I went back to my Microsoft Intellimouse.
I initially gor the M$ mouse because that's what they gave me at work, and I like consistency. Never underestimate the value of saving a half-second a hundred times a day.
Their portable computers now have scrolling trackpads which emulate a scroll wheel, and the control key allows access to the right-click menu.
I haven't had a chance to play with the scrolling trackpad yet. Control-click isn't a big deal at all, and might even be better than a two-button trackpad, where I might hit the wrong button (I'm not used to clicking with my thumb). And depending on what I'm doing, I likely have my left hand on the corner of the keyboard anyway, because shift-click, command-click and option-click are awfully handy.
In any case it's no big deal, because you can get a two-button USB mouse with a scroll wheel and a retractable cord for less than ten bucks at any corner Walgreen's. Using one on an airplane tray table is a bit cramped, but once you get to the hotel, everything's groovy. And for a few bucks more, you can go wireless.
If the internet didn't exist you'd be right. But in the future people will simply care about their browser, not their OS, anymore than programmers care about the transistors inside or near a CPU (though 50 years ago they *did* care).
I'd rank it second. The best time-saving tool in Adobe apps (and others, but especially Adobe) is multiple monitors. You can put all your palettes on the little screen and have the big one as unbroken workspace. And because color fidelity and brightness don't matter much for palettes, you can make the second monitor a cheap POS 15" LCD, or whatever old monitor you happen to have lying around.
You must not be an older computer user. Checkdisk (CHKDSK) checked the drive, mainly in DOS, for cross-linked files. It can still, I believe, be run from the XP command line. I may be wrong about that. /F parameter converts unknown fragments to files. I used that command a lot, but never knew anything to do with the fragments except delete them.
Just the opposite.
Apple's market share remains
trivial, they lost
Tevanian, now
they're booting Windows, meanwhile
supercomputers
are being replaced
by configurations of
standard Windows things. *
It is nice to dream,
but the knee-jerk, mindless hate
of Microsoft is
wildly misplaced.
Neither Google nor Apple
exists as a threat
except in the minds
of delusional fans and
paid copy writers.
------------------------------------------
*
High-Performance Computing Going Mainstream,
Microsoft Windows could be the environment
for many huge computing problems,
Design News, October 23, 2006
I have lots of computers with M$ O/S mainly through having the apps I wanted and am now used to. Also many of these computers came with M$. However, I have only one with XP (it came with it). None are likely to be upgraded to Vista. After buying used computers or building one with e-bay parts, I'm unlikely to to go out and pay for yet another M$ license.
When I go to 64 bit hardware/software, it'll have to be Linux or a used computer with Vista.
Do you have any more evidence you don't know what you are talking about when it comes to Macs?
Only told the truth.
Have been using and learning since early 80's, did not know how to use on XP, #120 gives the answer very well
Thank you very much.
I see. When was the last time you even TOUCHED a Mac?
I support both Windows and Macs both singly in homogenous and mixed networks... and have NEVER had a printer driver problem on a Mac....
The original OS X release suffered from a lack of printer drivers but that problem was solved years ago and now every printer manufacturer routinely provides printer drivers for their new printers that follow the Apple User Interface guidelines.
So where is the "confusorizing mess" in printer driver interfaces in OS X?
that is your right.
but every computer maker will sell a non OS pc to you. and Linux is free.
I personally have built my own PC since the first IBM clone days. When Tandy was a big PC name. And I work in IT.
My advice would be to wait til the first security patch before buying Vista/vista PC. As for linux, If you know how to run it then fine, but if you dont...stick with windows.
i already have the vista developers edition and micro~1 tools and find vista to be rather nice. (takes a lil getting used to though.) It runs like a pig compaired to XP...Unless you turn off all the pretty effects. Which I do anyways. I am not sold on vista security yet. But by n large its a good OS. It amazes me that any OS can run on thousands of different computers in hundreds of languages, and connect to thousands of different devices and still function. And then watch ppl cry about a small glitch that causes a error in windows.
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