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 ...
LOL! Great, thanks. Now I won't be able to get that song out of my head ;)
Why should I pay $199 to buy a new OS that is slower than the one it replaces? Vista is slower than NT, 2000, and XP.
If I have Vista, I get to have Vista "speak" my emails to me (which is eerie when the computer voice doesn't match the gender of the person sending me the email, by the way).
OK, not something that I really want going on in an office of cubicles filled with other workers either listening to their emails or else listening to mine, but hey, that's a new "Feature" in Vista that's not in NT/XP/2K.
But why would I pay a couple hundred bucks for it?
We're talking about the same ancient file system being accessed by a slower OS. Why do I want that? Why not run the older, faster OS's on any new hardware that I buy?
And how do most people use their PC's? Email. Internet surfing. Word processing. Games. Spreadsheets.
Where in that list does Vista have an edge over older MicroSoft OS's?
If Vista was released today, someone will have discovered a security breach by tomorrow.
Me too. We used to have all Microsh*t, but now we have five Macs and only one old PC I built myself, running Windows 2000. I will NEVER upgrade to Vista. Every program but one that I need now runs on OS X.
I can't believe that a rational person, who didn't have some specific obsolete Windows legacy program to run, would pick the Microsoft crapware over OS X. So what if I can save a few hundred dollars with Windows compared to Mac; my time is worth too much to screw around with viruses and spyware.
-ccm
There are some things that Windows does do well...Because Microsoft usually owns the whole widget for networking that works well for them. Excel can be very powerful and Powerpoint is okay.
I don't have much fun using Windows I use it for work. But I do have fun using OS X.
That is false. Apple makes excellent profits on sales of Mac hardware and software.
Selling hardware at a loss is Dell's business model - not Apple's.
MS announced that strategy a long time ago. They know very well commercial customers in particular won't keep on paying for a new version of MS products like a new OS or Office when the previous version will do the job just as well.
They've already discovered security breaches from 2004 that still work in Vista, IIRC. There was an article this morning or yesterday to that effect.
Like what? I am not being snotty - for me I haven't come across any features that convince me it is worth the upgrade. I am just curious what others see in it.
That was my experience as well. It's not very user friendly though. My understanding is that Win2K was made to be used on business machines with the intention that an IT professional would set things up and keep things running and the actual user would be limited in his ability to change things.
Reliability I can't say, but as for speed, Win2K and XP are built on the same base, but XP has more doodads.
First thing I do when I install XP is turn off the doodads. System Restore is a big time sink, so is the indexing. GRC.com has some tools for turning off UPNP and a few other services that are actually dangerous. I also turn off MS Messenger in all its forms (hijackthis is the best tool to kill MS Messenger). Eventually, with all this crap shut off, XP can really hum.
NOT a flame question, since I am seriously considering a Mac purchase.
I am a 25+ year PC user...what is fun about OS X. BTW...I don't do video...so that is irrelevant to me.
Linux has had well over a decade to polish up, and even with today's various X choices it's still unready for widespread consumer acceptance thanks to it's nerdly archaic foundation that will probably never be clean and simple. I can't be helping my elderly mother rebuild her Linux kernel over the phone. Why on Earth can't someone finally make a friendly Linux distro that doesn't act like it has roots in the Apollo space program?
Apple used to be the absolute king of OS's, particularly in the realm of desktop publishing. Now it's just the opposite. Today, even the simplest printer driver interface is such a horked-up confusorizing mess, I can't even believe that it's the same company that had the catbird seat all those years ago when OS7-OS9 ruled the world and Microsoft only had Windows 3.1x to show for itself. Like Linux, we can thank the nerdly underpinnings of FreeBSD/NeXT for OSX's revolting development. It's not the fact that for years there was a chasm in connectivity between OSX and Windows; For years, OSX didn't even play well in an all UNIX environment. Only recently has that finally changed.
What else but Windows is there? SunOS? Shadowy cults still supporting freeware BeOS? Screwball Danish UNIX variants with drivers from Khazakistan that require you to spend the wee hours of the morning cursing your CPU box like we did back in the days of running MS-DOS trying to unscrew your IRQ and DMA channel conflicts in our unintelligent BIOS/CMOS's? Please.
No thanks. It sucks, but Windows is really all there is.
In my opinion, Mac OS X is a better operating system than Windows in nearly every aspect - better quality, better design, easier to use, more secure, more functional, more fun. Here are the links to info about the current version Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and the forthcoming Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. The quality of the Mac hardware is excellent. Apple has the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the industry.
All new Macs include the iLife software. There are thousands of Mac programs available from Apple, Microsoft and third parties.
Macs can run Windows now, but like all Windows computers, that requires more maintenance and security precautions, which is no fun.
Finally, Free Republic looks great on Macs with the Safari web browser. This is fun.
That was quite a list you posted; good information, I'm sure.
What I'm wondering is why anyone would put up with all that hassle unless they absolutely have to run something that only runs on Windows?
Since that doesn't include Office or Adobe products.. why? Unless you absolutely have to have it for some other app.
That was Windows NT 4.0. Win 2K is really Windows NT 5.0, and Windows XP is NT 5.1; just run the VER command at a DOS prompt in Windows. Win 2K has the Windows 98/ME interface on top of an improved Windows NT kernel. It has all the plug and play self installation capabilities of Windows 95/98/ME while being much more stable and efficient.
I upgraded a Pentium Pro machine from Win NT 4.0 to Win 2K, and it ran much better. NT was very temperamental. I'm sure if I never made any hardware and software changes on that machine that NT would have continued to run ok, but it had serious difficulties dealing with the various upgrades I put on it from dual 333 Mhz Pentium II Overdrive processors (actually Xeon processors with 512K SDRAM in the package), memory, hard drive, dual screen video card, etc. Win 2K installed on that machine an ran perfectly; whereas, the last six months before the upgrade, it would crash if left on over night. Even for technically savvy users, NT 4.0 was a bear to maintain. I have better things to do than debug hardware installations. The Windows Update, Plug and Play, USB, and Firewire capabilities made the upgrade a no brainer. It is one of the few OS upgrades I've ever done that actually worked well, and mainly because I did a fresh install including a complete reformatting of my hard drive.
XP on the other hand is a pain. It takes a much larger bootable partition than Win 2K. I have been able to install Win 2K on partitions as small as 4 GB. I have yet to see XP installations work well without at least 25 GB on the boot drive. I also had problems with it corrupting the boot partition of my workstation, mainly because I didn't initially allocate enough space for by bootable partition. One of these days when I get finished with a current big project, I'll have to backup all the files on the boot drive reformat the drive, then restore the backup to the boot drive just to fix the the stupid NTFS indexes.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.