01.16.09
Verdict of 7 Reviews: Anti-Competitive, Disappointing
“If you flee the rules, you will be caught. And it will cost you dearly.”
–Neelie Kroes (about Microsoft), February 27th, 2008
Last year we foresaw a situation where Microsoft would use a new (rebranded) operating system to promote its own Web services and formats, thus abusing its monopoly. According to the following short report, this may already be actualising.
Now it is time for the Windows 7 Anti-Competitive in Nature part. I opened IE8Beta2 and it prompted me to choose either express settings or customizable settings….. which do you think I picked. I did not want to search with Live Search. I do not want to Define with Encarta. I never want to blog with Live Spaces. Most of all I just want to use Google Mail instead of Windows Live Mail. Not that I have anything against Live mail as I do have an account and it does look really nice as the designers have finally figured out what we the customer wants.
I had decided to go to customize the preferences… Guess what! The Windows Live stuff is still recommened in every box that pops up afterward! it doesn’t want you to use google search. It doesn’t want you to use maps with google or yahoo. This started to just get plain Silly as all I could do was to keep myself from deleting the IE8 executable from the computer and not leave any marks on that nice computer.
As for the quality of Vista 7, reviewers are sometimes underwhelmed, but then again, it was expected all along.
I take the Windows 7 Beta plunge and find the waters a bit choppy.
This remains an exercise in marketing at Microsoft [1, 2] and marketing of this kind is best tackled by search for evidence [1, 2, 3]. █
amd-linux said,
January 16, 2009 at 7:10 am
Win7 is a repainted Vista:
“Bottom line: So far, Windows 7 looks and behaves almost exactly like Windows Vista. It performs almost exactly like Vista. And it breaks all sorts of things that used to work just fine under Vista. In other words, Microsoft’s follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues.”
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/11/10/46TC-windows-7_5.html
“This is Windows Vista with a new face, not a major new version of Windows.”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/08/windows_7_beta_one_review/page2.html
the11thplague said,
January 16, 2009 at 8:12 am
What a great idea ! They are getting their 7 betatesters to test their Live services too.
After all, this is not the first time they abuse of their unpaid testers: this is what you get for helping M$
Needs Sunlight said,
January 16, 2009 at 3:42 pm
People keep going back to Windows like some sick variant of the battered spouse syndrome.
The failure that Windows brings is expressed at the individual level but manifests at the societal level: individuals have nearly infinite capacity to put up with failure, injury, misery, stupidity, etc. they simply reset their baseline and, after about 3 years, forget that there was ever any different situation. However, businesses and institutions and not *things* they are processes, depending on interaction of and work by their members to persist or grow over time. So failure can be made tolerable to an individual through many small gradual steps (see the adware interview earlier). However, groups like businesses or institutions have a solid, absolute threshold below which they can only collapse.