The release of the software giant’s new operating system will be one of Microsoft’s most important product launches this decade, when it goes live next year. But despite the product’s myriad new features and functionality, current market trends could inhibit initial adoption of Vista, PC industry analysts say.
Adoption of Vista (Longhorn) will be quite slow, because it’s hardware/DRM requirements are quite high and businesses are doing just fine on their $200 copy of Windows 2000 for 1000 machines, IT budget and single processor (cheap) hardware.
Glitz isn’t part of the business world which likes drab, so Vista adoption will happen, but slowly.
Even on the Mac side there are still a great majority of graphic installations still on OS 9. Only half of 25-30 million Mac users are on Mac OS X.
1: scanners and a lot of printers don’t work with Mac OS X/G5 processor
2: workflows and software have been perfected
3: new software requires new hardware
4: intel chip announcement
Which printers don’t work with OS X? StyleWriters?
My Canon LASER SHOT LBP-1120 doesn’t work on XP64 or MacOSX. Just 32-bit XP.
95 was a big change (from the GUI That Was Less Than A CLI, Win 3.1) and times were good; it sold. Win2k also did well because times were good and what it (largely) replaced, Win98/Me, was so horrifically bad.
XP wasn’t as much of a change: compared to 2K it’s slow, expensive, no more stable or usable, and most of its new UI features are dubious improvements. It hasn’t exactly taken over the world, and it’s been shipping on most new computers for years.
Vista looks like more (or less) of the same. At the rate it’s going, by the time it ships it will literally be a re-themed XP with a few new builtins. If new machine shipments slow down, Vista may turn into a very large embarrassment. Not only will Apple have their Intel hype going, but they’ll have a cheaper OS that’s (once again) several years ahead of Windows, after a close call in the 2K days.
“It hasn’t exactly taken over the world”
XP is installed on 74% of computers according to thecounter.com, which gets browser and OS info from 60 million computers a month from a wide variety of web sites. If it hasn’t “taken over the world” what has pray tell?
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2005/September/os.php
Whoops made a mistake and knowing how pedantic the anti-MSers are, I figure I should correct it before one of you makes it the subject of one of your entire posts, the 74% for XP is for the next month’s statistics, http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2005/October/os.php – didn’t mean to post september’s, where XP only has 73% marketshare.
What is more interesting is the slow adoption of XP showed in the statistics on thecounter. According to their measurements XP didn’t start to take off until 2004, which is possibly when people started to buy new computers (upgrading from the ones they bought 3-6 years earlier).
Considering that the lifetime of their new computers is going to be a lot longer (they are fast enough for most people), the adoption of Vista is going to wait even longer.
Now this is just my speculations. But I don’t see people upgrading their computers a lot these days. Even my hardcore gamer friends buy new hardware less often.
Good thing for MS that they have the money to survive a few bad years. Because I think that it will take a long time before Vista has any significant userbase. Perhaps not until around 2010-2012.
So yeah, they really seem to be out of sync. But as I said, they have the money to cover that.
Edited 2005-11-02 00:01
Thecounter.com’s 2003 stats didn’t count XP apparently, check out pegasus’s instead, which includes google’s stats – http://www.pegasus3d.com/osshare-combined.gif – XP growth is steady and rapid since its introduction, reducing your whole argument to rubble. It’s impossible to say so early and anybody can say anything since it won’t be remembered, but I’m certain vista will be the #1 OS within 2 years just like XP was. There’s at least 2 things in Vista that everyone wants, graphics and security, that XP didn’t have, yet XP took off.
“graphics and security, that XP didn’t have, yet XP took off.”
Didn’t mean to imply XP had NO security, just that it wasn’t one of its selling points, to spair us a lame quip.
Man, if you’re not a MS shill, stop acting like one! Are you that afraid of saying something bad against Windows that you must post corrections to your posts when you do?
In any case, XP certainly didn’t have security when it came out. How long does it take for a Vanilla XP install to get hacked if you connect it to the net? Hint: it less than the time it takes for you to download the necessary security packages from the net…
XP SP2 solved many security issues, but not all. It is still a less secure OS than Linux or Mac OSX by default. Recently, there’s been a rootkit being spread through an IM client!
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,…
That’s not to mention that you can apparently install rootkits on a Windows XP PC simply by entering a Sony copy-protected CD…
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1880572,00.asp
The question is, with Microsoft’s dismal security record, how can you be so confident that the next version will be secure?
“Man, if you’re not a MS shill, stop acting like one! Are you that afraid of saying something bad against Windows that you must post corrections to your posts when you do?”
I didn’t correct myself ’cause I was afraid of saying something bad about MS I did so because every slightly exploitable thing said about windows is the subject of dozens of lame jokes and quips and I’m kinda tired of them so I don’t want to be the source of the next one through unfortunate wording.
“In any case, XP certainly didn’t have security when it came out. How long does it take for a Vanilla XP install to get hacked if you connect it to the net? Hint: it less than the time it takes for you to download the necessary security packages from the net…”
Yes XP did have security. What you mean is that it wasn’t secure enough to connect to the net with old versions without a firewall. That’s not the same thing as “no security”.
“XP SP2 solved many security issues, but not all. It is still a less secure OS than Linux or Mac OSX by default. Recently, there’s been a rootkit being spread through an IM client!”
How do you quantify the assertion that it is less secure than linux or Mac? More stats from the ass of the anti-MSers. All the security concerns of XP are due to the user, the user chooses to run as root and run IMs as root, the OS allows you to run IMs with no system access. This is a double standard, linux users are assumed to use non-root accounts, whereas windows users are assumed to have admin accounts, and this is used as proof that windows is “teh insecure”, it’s getting lame, compare equal settings, it’s possible to secure either linux or windows, calling windows insecure because lots of people don’t bother with the OS’s security features is disingenuous. Those same people would run as root on linux and enter their passwords for every nude screen saver they ran accross on the net, causing their boxes to get root kitted just as fast as a windows box. To paraphrase, “it’s the user, stupid.”
“That’s not to mention that you can apparently install rootkits on a Windows XP PC simply by entering a Sony copy-protected CD…”
Same would happen to linux if you had autorun on and ran as root like most windows users do and would in linux. So it’s a moot argument, and it’s getting tiresome.
“The question is, with Microsoft’s dismal security record, how can you be so confident that the next version will be secure?”
Because XP SP 2 is secure enough that I’ve seen no adware, spyware or viruses, and I’ve followed the developement of Vista so I know the new devotion to security MS devs have to security and that Vista will be even better in this regard.
it’s getting lame, compare equal settings, it’s possible to secure either linux or windows, calling windows insecure because lots of people don’t bother with the OS’s security features is disingenuous.
Notice I specifically said “less secure by default”, not “could not be made as secure”. I’m not being disingeneous, this is the current state of things.
Those same people would run as root on linux and enter their passwords for every nude screen saver they ran accross on the net, causing their boxes to get root kitted just as fast as a windows box.
You don’t know that they would in the same proportions, however. In some distros, such as Ubuntu, there is no root user by default. Other distros make you create a separate user account during installation. Every little bit help. And of course, you can’t make a file executable in Linux just by giving it the appropriate extension.
Same would happen to linux if you had autorun on and ran as root like most windows users do and would in linux. So it’s a moot argument, and it’s getting tiresome.
It’s not a moot argument, exactly because there isn’t an autorun in Linux, which improves safety (it pops a file manager window if it’s a data CD, or starts a media player if its a CD/DVD). This is a significant advantage. Also, you don’t know that most Windows users would run as root. In fact, all the Linux users I know were once Windows users (and some, like me, still are), and none of them run as root. It seems to me your basing your rebuttal on conjecture.
Anyway, I’ll keep to the record so far. Arguing that MS’s record on security has been good seems to me like an indefensible position.
“Same would happen to linux if you had autorun on and ran as root like most windows users do and would in linux.”
One of Vista’s selling points is that users will not all run as admin by default. Are you going to claim that isn’t true, that they will continue to run as admin anyway? Surely not. Just so, most users would not run as root in Linux, it just isn’t designed that way.
“One of Vista’s selling points is that users will not all run as admin by default.”
To me this is all a moot arguement, because there exists a vast amount of cheesy software that needs the user to be root. What are you going to do when your mission critical software (accounting software, database client, printer drivers, scanning software, etc.) will only run as root user without problems? Yeah, you could use the “runas” feature, but a lot of times this does not work well. XP has been out for years and many of these vendors are still using antiquated programming styles and technicques from the early 90’s. I believe that if Microsoft does not use its might to seriously motivate these developers to fix their apps, Vista is not going to be any more secure than any previous Windows incarnation.
I’d also point out that “thecounter” bases it’s stats on two faulty pieces of data: nonunique hits and agent strings.
Agent strings for non-IE browsers spend an awful lot of time set to WinXP w/IE because many sites won’t permit you in if you don’t (my Konqueror browser is set to that for USPS and many other government websites that work fine with Konqueror but balk at the Agent string).
Also, they make no attempt to resolve how many unique PCs are counted. Further, they focus predominantly on sites that cater to Windows users or that generate annoying error messages if the Agent string isn’t set to something Windows / IE based.
Nearly all hits to MSN search are Windows users with IE, for example, if for no other reason than that’s where IE brings you by default if you type something it doesn’t grok in the location field.
Duh, most Win 2000 boxes are vast amounts that are on internal LANs not having a browser what so ever installed, much less connected to the internet. That’s why they are still working and unaccounted for.
We have 24,500 Win 2000 boxen running in my corporation alone, not one is connected to the outside world. And as a extra precaution almost all the ports are disconnected and there is no cd/floppy drives.
We have just a few master ghosts that if we need to image from, every machine is the same.
We usually sit around and repair boxen, train a few newbies every week. We save the company millions because we don’t need to upgrade software. We can go like this until we retire, we have a small warehouse full of compatible equipment.
Yes we used just one copy of Windows 2000 and other software for all our machines.
Are we afraid of being sued by MS? No because all the money saved is earning interest/investment and can be used as a formidable war chest to delay any settlement action. If we are caught that is.
If we are not caught that money makes a nice retirement fund.
Installing XP is DUMB. Vista is even DUMBER.
Be smart like us, go back to Win 2000 and forget the internet for every box.
It just kills productivity anyway.
Did I tell you I make six figures and get a choice of a company car each year?
Yep, and my house is paid off too, and my kid’s college fund.
Nothing can touch these, especially my little safe in a Swiss bank account and elsewhere.
Life is good and I give the shaft to MS everyday. HAHAHAHA
“most Win 2000 boxes are vast amounts that are on internal LANs not having a browser what so ever installed, much less connected to the internet.”
Where did you get that from, your ass? Personal anecdotes don’t count for shit, and I doubt you have 24k anything except maybe stuffed penguins in your parent’s basement.
Troll rating: 1/10
Thank you. Come again!
>where Linux only has 73% marketshare.
Fixed.
Windows sucks and Microsoft is nothing but a monopoly machine. I mean there is no freedom, you have to use their GUI and nothing else!
Open source or death!!!!!!
Computers should be free, automobiles should be free! Food and rent should be free and most of all Operating systems should be free!!!!
If I can’t put my own name in the operating system, it’s like being in jail and I want to be free!!!!!
Free speech!!!! Free Beer!!!!! Work for Free!!!!
Don’t get me wrong. I fully believe that msft have about 95% of the desktop. But, W2K only has 11% ? I am very skeptical about that.
W2K is not used much by consumers, but it is still very popular with businesses.
How does thecounter count?
How does thecounter count?
It counts hits on their counters. They provide a counter service for your website at a modest fee. I guess people who use the service will be small businesses and home users with money to waste who don’t know how to set up a free counter.
There will be an obvious selection bias in the statistics produced as the sample set will not necessarily be representative of the web as a whole.
In October they reported about 80 million hits, my guess this is << 1% of Noth American web traffic, so in that sense it is quite a small sample.
Edited 2005-11-02 17:58
In other words, its biased towards semi-technical home users.
“At the rate it’s going, by the time it ships it will literally be a re-themed XP with a few new builtins.”
That’s the most ignorant statement I have read all week. The amount of changes in Vista has been posted many times and is not hard to find. Go familiarize yourself with it and then come back and try to say that again with a straight face.
We’ll see what Vista ends up being in reality, but that statement did manage to shake me up a bit.
Of course it’s possible that Vista will end up as a rethemed XP with extra builtins… I just wonder how large extra builtins have to be before they count for more than a retheming of XP…
Anyway, Vista does not contain anything of value for me, so I’ll stick with Win2003 Server and LinuxFromScratch.
I’ll probably switch to a newer Win-OS (or Win-compatible OS) somewhere around 2008/09.
While it’s possible they end up dropping stuff, at this point it’s very unlikely, as most of the stuff is far enough along.
But you and I both know they are rewriting some core parts (driver models, sound architecture, network architecture, graphics engine, etc) in addition to adding in new stuff. I don’t know if people get off on spreading misinformation, or they just believe what they read without looking into it for themselves.
Welcome to the internet, the Mininformation Super Highway.
Ok, so the statistics are wrong and that comment about businesses liking things because they were drab wasn’t correct. But why was this comment moderated down?
When something is inaccurate, post a correction. Only when someone is being abusive or is trolling should comments be moderated down.
Maybe I missed something but I just don’t see how this comment deserves a -3 rating, would someone care to enlighten me?
“We predict adoption of Windows Vista will be the largest and fastest in the history of any operating system we’ve shipped,” said Mike Burk, product manager with the Windows client division.
On what assumption does he base that on? He probably means “most aggressive”?
XP will be replaced by Vista, it will be available and pushed towards the customers.
Anyway i would like to see a more efficient operating system instead of this bloat called Vista.
200MB of free disk space
that must be a spelling error
Anyway i would like to see a more efficient operating system instead of this bloat called Vista.
try win xp x64
I agree that adoption will be slow for Vista. PC sales growth is declining, and people have gotten used to getting reasonable performance on sub $500 (US) PCs. The Aeor GUI is one of the few killer features that has been left in Vista (since WinFS is gone, and I hardly think DRM is good), and to make use of this technology MS is calling for a video card with more than 256MB RAM, 2GB of DDR3 memory and a S-ATA 2 hard drive according to this article:
http://www.apcstart.com/teched/pivot/entry.php?id=6
MS tries to cover up the outrageous cost of this kind of hardware with marketng spiel about declining hardware prices. If trends stay the same and MS can stick to their current release date, it will probably cost at least $1,000 (US) to get a Dell that meets the necessary requirements.
Either businesses and home users will run Windows 2000 and XP longer, or they’ll start looking at more affordable alternatives such as GNU/Linux and Mac (yes, this will make the Mac look more affordable).
I’ld also like to comment on MS’s belief that Office 12 will be a huge money maker. If you look at this screenshot:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/Figure1.htm
Corporations are going to be wary of this new interface as it will require additional training for much of their staff. At this point StarOffice/OOo 2.0 has a more similar interface to what most businesses’ staff will already be accustomed to. Plus I am not aware of any must have features in the new MS Office that is going to entice users to upgrade. Even on the idea of improving the UI for users MS Office 12 is a bad idea. The central focus on a document is the document itself whereas MS has taken away from the document’s screen space to add ever more bloated toolbars (btw, the tabs metaphor is not the best idea for every app).
A badly-written and misinformed article combined with someone who has poor reading comprehension == bad facts.
They talked about how Vista will make extensive use of SATA2 technologies — you took that as “It will need a 200 GB SATA2 drive”. When is the last time you’ve seen an OS calling out for a specific drive interface requirement? Get a clue.
And 256 MB video cards? LOL Minimum spec for Aero will be any fully-compliant 64 MB DirectX 9 video card. That’s not to say you won’t be able to run it at all on lower specs — just without the glitz.
Please. Get on the clue train.
They talked about how Vista will make extensive use of SATA2 technologies — you took that as “It will need a 200 GB SATA2 drive”. When is the last time you’ve seen an OS calling out for a specific drive interface requirement? Get a clue.
Yes, Vista does not need a SATA2 drive, but it is what they (Microsoft) are recommending (so you can take advantage of the Native command queuing). But, I will acquiesce to your statement being correct
And 256 MB video cards? LOL Minimum spec for Aero will be any fully-compliant 64 MB DirectX 9 video card. That’s not to say you won’t be able to run it at all on lower specs — just without the glitz.
Considering the number of technologies that have been cut from Vista, glitz seems like one of the few things it has to offer. Considering that most people will not be able to just upgrade to Vista, but will need to purchase a new PC, 64 bit machines have an obvious enticement as that is the market I suspect MS Windows will push. On 32 bit machines MS claims the minimum requirements to include the glitz is a 64 MB Graphics card and 512 of DDR RAM, and on 64 bit machines they want you to atleast double the capacity of each. Couple that with the fact that in the past Microsoft’s minimum requirements have always been insufficient (look at XP). You really need to double their requirements for a usable environment. But maybe MS is giving us useable numbers this time (I’m not holding my breath).
I installed the last major leak on two different machines: An Athlon XP 1800+ with 512 MB of RAM and a GeForce FX5200, and my Athlon 64 2.4 GHz with 2 GB of RAM and an X800 XT PE. There was no doubt in my mind that the Athlon 64 would perform very nicely under the Vista environment, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that even given the assloads of debug and unoptimized code, it ran pretty damn responsively even on the Athlon XP 1800+.
Vista will take advantage of new technology as you feed it, but this crying and bitching about high hardware requirements is all bullshit. Think about it — if it ran decently (not much slower than XP) on a semi-aging machine, then the finished product, free of debug and extra code, will run *very* nicely.
As for doubling the requirements for 64-bit … whoever wrote the article that suggested that has no idea how 32-bit vs. 64-bit software works. Some people seem to think you need 2x the RAM, 2x the hard disk space, and 2x the raw MHz to run 64-bit software. That’s simply not true. In my experience, x86-64 binaries tend to be about 15% larger than their 32-bit counterparts, and memory usage is more or less the same. Remember, you don’t have to be using 64-bit data types just because you’re on 64-bit …
Awesome. It’s already at -3. Hey Thom, can I write a complaint about the moderation system and how it’s being abused by frothing fanboys?
You actually believe that bullshit about doubling your specs for 64-bit? Come on, you can’t be serious.
You certainly do NOT need to double everything just because you’re doing 64-bit instead. That’s flat out bullshit.
Every informed computer enthusiast knows that’s bullshit. The problem is that informed computer enthusiasts are not usually the ones who write “tech” articles.
Actually… You shouldn’t be able to run it with less than the needed RAM. There simply is a needed amount of RAM to store the frame buffer for every window you have open in VRAM.
A 128MB card would be a minimum in my mind, unless you aren’t big on this whole multi-tasking thing…
Otherwise it’s going to have to do widget rednering cpu side and waste system RAM and AGP time transferring the buffers for a final composite.
The glitz is only dependant on the GPU, and I don’t think there’s a GPU on the market that couldn’t handle the nastiest glitz you throw at it (with the restriction of what would cause physical pain trying to understand).
Understandable. For this reason, word is going around that Vista performance will be much better on PCI-Express systems, due to the amount of information that goes back and forth through the graphics bus.
However, as for video requirements … let’s say you’re running at 1600×1200 @ 32-bits.
1600 x 1200 x 4 bytes = 7,680,000 bytes
Double-buffered: 15,360,000 bytes
So we can see that with a 64 MB card, we could raw data for 4 entire double-buffered 1600x1200x32-bit screens. Given that most graphical resources will be re-used (think widgets and all that), I would say that 64 MB is definitely enough for even a heavy multi-tasker, as a single application would not be using an entire 15 MB of video memory.
A post from “Linux is Poo” that made some sense and was not denegrating anyone ?
surely this cannot be true ?
did someone steal his username ?
anyway – here is a +1 for you
If you actually read my posts, only about 50% are inflammatory. The other 50% get modded down because of crybaby Linux fanboys who can’t accept differing opinions about their religion — I mean operating system.
Thanks for the +1 though. 🙂 I see someone has already brought it back down again. Waaaaaah! Baby need a diaper?
I know, I was surprised as well…but then he replied to your post with more insults towards those he disagree with. I guess you can’t change someone’s true nature.
To Lippy: claiming that only 50% of your posts are inflammatory is being too modest. I’ve been reading your posts for a while and I’d say the figure is closer to 90%, perhaps even as high as 95%. Please grow up.
Corporations are going to be wary of this new interface as it will require additional training for much of their staff. At this point StarOffice/OOo 2.0 has a more similar interface to what most businesses’ staff will already be accustomed to.
I personally think it’s one of MS best moves recently. It’s a bold move but a good one. The interface of Office has been pretty much the same from the start, they have just been adding features and features, leaving us with a crowded GUI that is confusing and ineffective to work with.
While I haven’t used Office 12 I can’t say if the new GUI is actually more efficient, but I applaud the effort to clean up the big mess it is today.
Businesses may very well see it as a long term investment to upgrade if the new GUI makes people more productive.
The OOo GUI is IMO just as messy. If MS are successful I sure hope that OOo choose to copy them. Otherwise, I hope they take a look at products such as Gobe Productive and KOffice which are both tons better in the usability department.
It looked to me like Office 12 was going to a more Frontpage-esque style. Where you seperate what you type from how you format it (sort of), and you give power users more fine tuned formatting control.
I like the idea. But, frankly, I’ve never seen Word processors as a big area for innovation anyway. It’s all about making some poor secretary’s job easier … yet more annoying.
Give the poor person something simple, I mean geez a typewriter did the job a hundred years ago. We haven’t changed *that* much in how our pages have to look before we can read them
.
“While I haven’t used Office 12 I can’t say if the new GUI is actually more efficient, but I applaud the effort to clean up the big mess it is today. “
Personally I don’t find the GUI of MS office to be any worse today than that screenshot, Office 12 sure looks interesting but my initial impression from the screenshots is that it’s going to be frustrating to use until people get used to where things are in this new layout.
I don’t mind the new look so much, but I hope if OO.o follows in that direction it’s easy to switch it back to the way the UI looks now. IIRC Corel’s Wordperfect Office can emulate the look of different office suites, including old dos ones, hopefully they will keep that up as it’s a brilliant feature in my opinion.
I know some people think Wordperfect office is dead, but if they get their Linux version working and it’s as good as the Windows version then I’d be more than happy to buy a copy. WP Office was the first office suite I had, it’s my favorite, and the 2000 version still has some features that I haven’t been able to turn up in MS Office 2003 after hours of looking.
The article also says this:
“If you move from 32 to 64 bit, you basically need to at least double your memory. 2 gigs in 64 bit is the equivalent of a gig of RAM on a 32bit machine. That’s because you’re dealing with chunks that are twice the size� if you try to make do with what you’ve got you’ll see less performance. But RAM is now so cheap, it’s hardly an issue.”
So, why exactly should we believe what it says? It’s simply bad information.
Anyway i would like to see a more efficient operating system instead of this bloat called Vista.
win xp x64 has that reputation
I love the part where they predict a surge in PC buying based on Vista needing better hardware- This assumes that people will want Vista badly to get a new computer to run it on. The rest of that first part of the article seems to say that there’s nothing cool enough in Vista to do that…
I get the impression that anyone who thinks hoardes will flock to Vista, are making way too many assumptions.
When vista arrives I will keep my linux and XP boxes…
And then join the horde that will flock to Mac(intel)
>When vista arrives I will keep my linux and XP
>boxes…
>And then join the horde that will flock to Mac(intel)
Can’t wait to have to buy all new software again!
Instead of buying macs they are out buying IPODS. Macs are the new BETA machines. (They arn’t free so screw em!)
Edited 2005-11-02 10:16
Didn’t you hear, people use their computers for the OS not the apps
.
Even though you jest, I think its true for a lot of folks. The desire for choice is so strong that many will accept limitations of applications just for the sake of the OS.
Look at how many people got new computers to run Half-Life2 or Doom3.
DOWNLOAD Windows Vista: http://windows.czweb.org/show_article.php?id_article=173
I’m not sure what this tripe about Longhorn needing insane hardware is all about. Their predictions are that you’ll need/really really want:
1.) A Gfx card with 64+ MB of VRAM. These are about $30, and there’s little demand for them now. Imagine how many there will be when everyone wants a low end gfx solution?
2.) A dual core processor: These are expensive today. But I have news for you: Intel/AMD/IBM, they all hit this wall on moving things closer and clocking things up. That doesn’t mean processors won’t get faster. It means they’ve been continually getting faster at a slower pace. And now, dual core processors look like they’ll be common place soon enough.
Really, it doesn’t need that much. And while I may disagree with everything Microsoft wants to do with your second core, I think it’s good to ask people to buy quality (read: not junk) hardware. Yes, people with old computers are SOL. But hey, there’s a host of operating systems which will still support 2d bitmap graphics for a long time: And supposedly Longhorn is going to support it too!
Quit complaining. The graphics technology they’re writing makes so much sense that everyone else is either doing it or shipping it now. Maybe not exactly the same, but the same ideas.
Windows XP was not exactly a *stellar* seller when it first shipped and now its pretty much the “MS standard” with a large marketshare.
I’m sure vista will follow suit in much the same way considering that the only people I know who will not end up with a vista box at some point are a few of the ‘out of touch with reality’ kind that frequent forums like this. *shrugs*
Based on past history, Microsoft will probably release a follow-on version within a couple years that includes many of the features dropped from the Vista schedule. And of course, the “service pack” that will be effectively a mandatory download for security reasons, but which will also probably include late features. After that it gets interesting… it certainly looks like Windows as a platform has more years behind it than ahead of it. Although .NET is now widely used for enterprise and vertical applications, the installed base of Win32 apps is huge and many have no plans to port to .NET. There will always be apps for which the managed code environment is impractical anyway. So Microsoft is stuck with supporting a sprawling, 20 year old legacy APIs (including MFC and COM) at the same time the .NET class libraries are sprouting like weeds. They’ve pretty much acknowledged that they’ve found this a nearly impossible project to manage, and it only gets worse from here.
The old tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Microsoft might shift to a BSD-derived code base is not looking so unlikely after all. One team in Redmond has already ported the CLR to BSD (the Rotor project) and they’d need something similar to WINE, of course. As for marketing, I would imagine they would claim that the OS kernel is now all commodity plumbing anyway and that the real value-add are the UI, web services, and rich media infrastructure they would supply atop the base OS, somewhat in the vein that Apple does today.
Paul G
This is just stupid vista is going to do well because every Dell, HP, Compaq, Gateway and IBM computer you buy will mostlikely have Vista on it, not because its a good product.
Also why is MS advertising XP? Why would anyone buy an XP box when Vista is coming out next year? and If they havent upgraded from 95/98/ME/2000 shouldnt that tell you somthing?
Why should businesses upgrade?
My company has a mix of PII with 32mb of ram running win95/98. I can only barely get firefox to load on one of them. Of course for your Point of Sale systems it is over kill and we don’t even need that much. We should we spend 20,000 on new hardware and software when your existing stuff has run fine for 8 years. hell the Main file server is a Pentium 150 with 48 mb of ram, with 5 clients connecting to it for all their data. simultaneously, and any one client can print to any of three different printers at any one time.
now tell me why I need to go buy Vista or XP, and machines to run them? My network can use a 286 as a client. Heck I could get ambitious and port the setup over to Sharp Zarous handhelds connect wirelessly with zero loss of functionality. They would be more than fast enough. hmmmmmm
Most businesses will eventually upgrade because their support contracts will eventually require them to.
Even third parties only support older versions of Windows for a finite period of time.
Anyone taking bets on how long it takes before the first Vista virus is released into the wild. As soon as that happens it will destroy one of the prime MS reasons to upgrade and you’ll be better off continuing to patch XP…
p.s. I’m giving it 3 weeks…
Yes Vista should have been released/ready 1.5-2.0 years after the introduction of XP.To be frankly XP should have been Vista,and i doubt it would have been enough to stop OSX.
Really don’t microsoft get frustrated releasing systems for the legacy computer market.
Computers are Designed for Ubuntu or Debian.
>Computers are Designed for Ubuntu or Debian.
Amen! Freaking free dude! strait up!
So freaking free, it’s like a flower child with every download!
Edited 2005-11-02 10:18
A lot of XP growth is down to people like me, buying ex-corporate Dell P3 500mhz machines. Given a RAM upgrade to 256/320mb they run XP, AVG, Firefox and Zonealarm just fine and make good cheapo surfing machines for friends, costing less than a third the price of the cheapest new PC
Vista won’t run on one any time soon..
“A lot of XP growth is down to people like me, buying ex-corporate Dell P3 500mhz machines. Given a RAM upgrade to 256/320mb they run XP”
Sound dead cheap, just as a matter of interest how much did you pay for the copy of Stand alone XP copy? I’ve only seen it for half the price a low end cheapo PC
The big difference with previous releases is that there used to be big expectations of MS fixing the mess that 3.11 and then 98 where.
For most corporations, Windows has stopped being a real problem with NT4 and 2000 and for most individuals, with XP.
In my company, we run a huge windows 2000 park and we build packages that are remotely hosted for clients. I can’t see that changing any time soon.
Finally most corporates run on very cheap hardware. Requirements are low heat, low noise, low power consumption. And most machines run on integrated graphics. A 3d accelerated card on a corporate box ? unheard of.
Second that, I have a celeron 1600 with 1gig of ram developer machine at work. The buildin gfx is a 16MB nvidia vanta. I’m still running win2000 (which is prefered by most of my coworkers as more stable than xp). So if we concentrate on corporate desktops whats left of vista, …per application volume control:) ?
Dell P3: £25.00
RAM Upgrade: £8.00
XPHome OEM: £60.00 <- fully legal !
total cost £93.00 UK – about $160 US. Cheapest PCs in the UK cost over £200, usually over £270
My next computer purchase will be a Mac, not a Windows based PC. No matter how much glitz it has, or how much Microsoft market it. I’m tired of the insecure, unreliable that has been Windows.
In other words, is Microsoft out of touch with what people want for an Operating System?
Linux is the future
They rewrite the OS from scratch (or so they say), and they still doesn’t manage to get rid of that steaming pile of shit called Teh Registry. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about their incompetence…
Don’t you know there’s a war on terror?
So don’t support a convicted monopoly
Don’t let criminals dictate the future
Format Windows and install Linux
Why can’t people get over this Vista talk? Vista is just like Civic 2006 from Honda and XP is the 2001 model. That’s it. As a company, they need to roll out new stuffs to attract eye balls. But the functionality remains pretty much the same. As a matter of fact, the price does as well. The bottom line is people are relying on MS platform to do business and entertainment. If that’s not changed, then MS can still earn big money with some mysteriously bloated software. There is really NO point in arguing which MS OS is better blah blah.