Bonum Certa Men Certa

Randall C. Kennedy is a Scam, But Vista 7 is Still Bloated

Little piggy



Summary: Randall Kennedy fooled his own employer (IDG), so his over-the-top 'reporting' will be no more; but the claim that Vista 7 is a pig remains in tact

THE reality behind Vista 7 remains unchanged, even after this revelation which will cost sensationalist Randall Kennedy his job:

Editor's note: The person quoted in this story as "Craig Barth" is actually Randall C. Kennedy, an InfoWorld contributor. Kennedy, who presented himself as the CTO of Devil Mountain Software, no longer works at InfoWorld. Given that he disguised his identity to Computerworld and a number of other publications, the credibility of Kennedy's statements is called into question. Rather than simply remove stories in which he is quoted, we have left them online so readers can weigh his data and conclusions for themselves.


Let's remember what Groklaw's Pamela Jones wrote about Randall Kennedy two weeks ago: "Is he Rob Enderle's son or something?" Kennedy is attacking GNU/Linux quite a lot too and he lies/trolls in order to do this.

Gregg Keizer was fooled repeatedly by Kennedy:

The Florida firm that last week said most Windows 7 machines exhaust their physical memory, and as a result take a performance hit, defended its data and conclusions after naysayers dismissed its findings.

"Everyone thinks that they're a [Windows] performance expert," said Craig Barth, the chief technology officer of Devil Mountain Software, a performance metrics software maker. "They look at their PC and say, 'My PC doesn't do that.'"


As a bit of background, Vista 7 was shown to be too bloated as early as 2008 and even last year (it is even slower than Vista sometimes). Kennedy merely reiterated claims, but he relied on a benchmark of memory which got covered in many places like this one.

A Microsoft spokesperson told InternetNews.com that the company had no comment on Devil Mountain's latest report.


Microsoft had no comment, i.e. it did not deny the allegations when approached by its own booster/journalist.

There is a parallel here involving the leak of E-mails about global warming. Just because there was an alleged scandal does not mean that the actual claims are magically being falsified or that the hypothesis gets refuted; in fact, Vista 7 has been a resource hog for quite a while and various journalists pointed this out and showed it empirically, albeit differently. Maybe there is no "Memory Problem" per se, but there certainly is a speed/performance problem. Microsoft boosters like Preston Gralla are probably among those who would deny and then assume that just because the messenger was fake the results too are invalid (like confusing causality and correlation). It's natural to think that if the claim comes from a fictitious source, then that also means that there is no memory problem in Vista 7 (well, Gralla is also attacking UNIX/Linux and Macs over security this week while pretending to be "just curious", which is a common tactic of Microsoft boosters). Windows is demonstrably less secure.

Despite some other reliability problems in Vista 7, Microsoft has its share of partners who are pushing businesses to adopt scarcely-adopted and scarcely-tested software. Microsoft is paying other parties to impose this it upon businesses (without success).

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) released several non-security updates for Windows 7 and its server counterpart, Windows Server 2008 Release 2 (R2) two weeks ago.

The main purpose of four of those patches was to improve stability and reliability of the two operating systems. Unfortunately for an undetermined number of users, one of those updates broke their systems rather than make them more stable.


Windows can never be as reliable as UNIX/Linux. Windows was just built so poorly as a shadow of something that was built more properly, sometimes correctly.

'While both Microsoft's and Apple's systems were graphical, the guts of the two were completely different. McGregor told Gates as much.

'"How are they different?" Gates snapped back. "They both draw fucking lines on the screen, right? They both put things in windows, right? Mac wrote a windows thing, you wrote a windows thing, they ought to be able to run the same stuff together." Which is when it became clear to Eller that Gates still didn't have a clue as to how the Mac system worked.'

--Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed
by the daughter of Microsoft's PR mogul

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