11.26.09
Reader’s Article: Vista 7 Versus Vista
Summary: An explanation of why Vista 7 is moving in the same trajectory as Vista
ONE of our readers has contributed the following thoughts that more or less agree with what we’ve been showing for over a year (since Vista 7 was first publicly introduced to bribed friends of Microsoft with access to the press).
I still look for Vista failure news and now see it as a test of journalistic integrity and market share. Vista dominated Windows tech news for a long time. You would think the authors that praised it for a year or two would still write about it if they meant what they said or actually used the software themselves. Reality shows otherwise and this is a failure of its own. Three years after launch Vista has vanished.
As Boycott Novell noticed, Vista has disappeared from the news. Google News searches are more likely to turn up news from towns named Vista as they are to turn up news about the failed OS. If journalists and market share numbers were honest, you would expect to see somewhere between two to fifteen times as much news about Vista as you do about Linux. Instead, a news search for “Linux” turns up 22,900 items and one for “microsoft vista” turns up only 8,400, only 500 if you include the quotes. In fact, you will find more news about XP than Vista.
What does this mean? Is there really no independent press that cares about Microsoft software? Are there really four times as many GNU/Linux users as there are Vista users? Is all news about Microsoft Windows advertising in disguise? “Windows 7″ pulls in 34,000 results and “Windows XP” finds 9,000. The disparity between use and reporting is interesting to say the least.
The results are not a fluke of search terms or Google bias. A search for “Windows Vista” finds 8,500 and the first page is nearly identical for a search on “Microsoft Vista”. Google knows what I’m looking for. Bing News presents exactly 100 results for any search term, so it can’t be used for comparison. The Microsoft damaged Yahoo News search finds about 2,000 results for “microsoft vista”, 2,600 for “windows xp”, 3,000 for “windows vista”, 4,100 for “linux” and “windows 7″ pulls a whopping 13,300. I expect ratios between Google and Yahoo elsewhere.
see
news.google.com
news.search.yahoo.com
and push the “news” tab on any Bing query to find 100 hand picked articles about anything you would like Microsoft guidance about.In other news, I thought BN readers would enjoy this article by a stock analyst who thinks people don’t care about Windows and Microsoft is too stupid to learn how to sell it.
“The marketing effort for Windows 7 now underway clearly illustrates one thing: Microsoft has not learned from the past. For some reason, they seem to think that people actually care about the features of their operating system. The truth is, people don’t really care. … Windows 7 is likely to follow the same fate as Vista.”
“the upgrade cycle bonanza came to an end when… the PC became good enough! At that point, upgrades went from being no-brainer decisions to true nightmares. The major issues faced by users today are not speed or capacity — it is simplicity and inter-operability. The most common problems faced by PC users occur when what used to work just fine now no longer works. The most common problem faced by PC users today is making sure that a new piece of software recently installed does not disrupt everything else that already works.”
All very obvious. The broken software issue is old, Comes vs Microsoft email shows that Microsoft was aware of the issue almost 10 years ago. He’s also a little confused if he thinks that Windows 7 is much of an improvement over Vista but his arguments for Windows 7 failure do not depend on that because he knows that Microsoft’s market is still using XP and Vista is irrelevant. What’s interesting is seeing this kind of reasoning in print.
Microsoft’s cycle will repeat itself in a couple of years. Alastair Otter disappointingly participates in Microsoft’s vapourware tactics, perhaps not realising that Vista 8 fantasies are reminiscent of lies about Vista 7. People no longer remember all the stuff that was not delivered other than a new deskbar for Vista (which acts similarly to KDE4/Plasma). Vista 7 too was a case of vapourware, due to many features that Microsoft promised and never eventually delivered. Why don’t people learn from history? █
David Gerard said,
November 26, 2009 at 5:54 pm
But Vista 8 will have a DATABASE FILE SYSTEM!!!
Roy Schestowitz Reply:
November 26th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
No, WinFS is off the “vapourware list”.
It was on it for like a decade. Fast boot is a more recent item in the vapourware inventory. Still waiting…
Dario said,
November 27, 2009 at 9:18 am
if i’m not mistaken, wasn’t WinFS promised for windows XP ? i think i heard about it when the “windows Wistler betas2″ were out
Roy Schestowitz Reply:
November 27th, 2009 at 9:21 am
Yes, in has been in the “vapourware list” long before “Longhorn” (not under the same name/s).
your_friend Reply:
November 27th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
According to Roughly Drafted ‘s history of Microsoft vaporware, they have made this promise since 1991. They were trying to compete with popular Unix versions like Next when all they had was DOS, Windows 3.0 and some work with IMB on OS/2. As Roughly Drafted puts it, this is a 20 year fraud.
Microsoft has been living off the inertia that IBM gave DOS for 20 years but the end has been predictable since the late 90s. Roughly Drafted misses parallel OEM manipulation that thwarted more capable rival hardware platforms, Motorola processors, ARM, PowerPC, Alpha, SGI, and others. A NeXT Cube cost $6,000 in 1989 but by 1999 there was no excuse for an Intel only world, especially one dominated by Microsoft. The failure of ME, W2K, slow sales of XP, and Vista debacle were predicted by people who knew what they were talking about. The only surprising thing is the time it took for rivals to take market share back.
Roy Schestowitz Reply:
November 27th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Illegal tactics can achieve that.
your_friend Reply:
November 27th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Mono advocates note: OpenStep is yet another warning against working with Microsoft. According to both Roughly Drafted and Wikipedia, “By 1994, Microsoft and NeXT were collaborating on a Windows NT-port of OpenStep; the port, however, was never released.” Every dollar spent on Windows was a dollar that could have been used to promote NeXT instead of Microsoft. It is particularly ironic that people at GNOME would fail to notice this because of GNOME’s adherence and worship of Human Interface Guidelines, a concept also dearly loved by Apple and NeXT.