03.01.09
Demise of Microsoft’s Core Business, as Captured by the Press
Summary: Stories of failure for Vista and Vista 7, Office substitutes, and XBox hostilities
YESTERDAY we wrote about Microsoft winning the “Great Fiasco Award” for its — err — “exceptional” achievements with Windows Vista. There is further discussion about it even in ‘big’ sites such as:
- Scientific American: Microsoft Vista voted tech world’s top “Fiasco”
- Fortune/CNN: Microsoft’s Vista wins Fiasco Award
As a further sign that Vista 7 may replicate some of Vista's failures, behold the revelation that Vista 7 has over 2000 known bugs. In reality, there are far more (not detected yet) and Microsoft refuses to fix them because it puts this successor of Vista on the fast track. It’s said to be slated for release no earlier than next year (there are contradictory reports).
Steven Sinofsky, the Senior Vice President for the Microsoft Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, in an attempt to quell a beta tester rebellion over a perceived lack of feedback concerning bug reporting has made an astonishing confession: Windows 7 has at least 2000 bugs.
No wonder early adopters are disappointed (some are being bribed to brag about it).
Vista 7 will be as vulnerable as Vista and some researchers argue that it will even be more vulnerable than Vista because of changes made for convenience’s sake. Either way, anti-virus software will be needed and this interesting new post speaks of the impact on the environment (spare resources and CPU cycles).
Windows = Antivirus = Pollution?
[...]
I just read an article by the University of Calgary where the author claims (and I think he’s correct) that IT is a huge pollutant. For example, we have hardware that becomes obsolete, we have to produce electricity to pump into our gadgets, etc.
Not long ago I read another article where it’s calculated (or so they say) how much pollution is produced by each search on google.
[...]
So… coming back to the question: Windows = Antivirus = Pollution? Can anybody try to make a wild guess about how much pollution is produced by antiviruses?
There are several other posts or articles that are worth linking to. IDG shares “10 Reasons to Avoid Office 2007,” but being IDC, it almost completely ignores the fact that there is another option (or many) other than different versions of Office. Another Microsoft-friendly site, namely ZDNet, writes about substitutes to Outlook, which is part of Microsoft Office.
If you’re using a Microsoft Windows operating system there is also a good chance that you use Office and Outlook as your email client. But is this really a choice?
More than likely it was a default option; the software is there, so why not use it? Why? Because there might be something out there that suits your needs far better. Other email clients can be highly customised to suit particular industries and may include options not available in Outlook.
Trouble and unrest in XBox land too:
The Xbox Live banning of a lesbian gamer who self-identified her sexuality created a huge furor on Thursday, prompting Microsoft to characterize its own banning policies as “inelegant.”
Things are not working so smoothly up there in Redmond. Marketing may fool the broader audience until they actually try the products. It was the same with Windows Vista, which was mostly hailed in 2006. █
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