Comments

• twitter

  2011-04-18 15:18:24

  Microsoft's decision to ignore Vista is an insult to users, a terrible admission of weakness on Microsoft's part and a strategic blunder all in one. If Microsoft boosters can be believed, no version of Windows has more than 33 percent of the market. Developers, web designers and everyone else in the tech world might as well move to gnu/linux rather than buy yet another set of Microsoft tools and hopeless fragmentation. It's been more than a decade since any version of Windows had more than 50% of the market to itself by Microsoft's inflated numbers. Vista 8 is being marketed aggressively, so Vista 7 is a similar mistake and failure. XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, pity the developers and companies that have to keep up with all of that. It makes the gnu/linux world look unified with only two major desktops and distro families that basically have all of the same tools in common. It is inconceivable that a version of Firefox would not be something that could run on any GNU/Linux and projects like DSL routinely prove this by mixing the latest Firefox with updated 2.4 kernels so that they fit into 80 MB images. Microsoft is so short of developers, cash and market share that they are willing to insult those few who bought into Vista. Either Vista's true market share is close to zero, which would make the total Windows market share less than 70%, or the company is willing to dump on their most loyal customers. Both are probably true and once again we see how non free software fails everyone.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2011-04-18 16:31:06

  The main problem (from Microsoft's POV) is that almost no business of real relevance is adopting Vista 7. There is no reason to.

• twitter

  2011-04-18 17:02:19

  They have had serious federal compliance issues with the whole Vista family. Authentication mechanisms are substandard and no sane organization will adopt an OS with file indexing and encrypted communications back to Redmond. The security and confidentiality problems exists for all non free software but Microsoft made them obvious and was even dumb enough to put language in their EULAs that grants them the ability to snoop if it's in Microsoft's best interest. Needless to say, that's unacceptable for diplomacy, medical records and other sensitive areas. Vista was rejected by several large federal agencies over this. Windows 7 is a minor bug fix for some performance issues that does nothing to address those problems.
  
  These are issues that loom larger for big companies than XP compatibility and performance issues. Dumping 25% of existing software is an option for a company like Boeing that might just pass the costs on to taxpayers and other customers. Microsoft can push their garbage OS onto ordinary people and might hope the nag factor will win the day but they have hit a brick wall so far and it's killing them.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2011-04-18 17:08:56

  About 9 months ago Dell said that Vista 7 had not been adopted by even 10% of businesses; if these figures changed a lot since then, Microsoft would have paid IDC/Gartner to help generate some PR.

• twitter

  2011-04-18 22:31:46

  Microsoft Jack was cheering just last week [2] but did not mention business. He referred to the latest bogus web stats that were showing Vista 7 edging out XP, Vista with double digit use and "Linux" at 1% - the usual Microsoft fantasy market share. This is damage control for studies that showed only suckers who bought into Vista bought Vista 7 and that Vista's market share was tapering to zero. That's the kind of thing you find when you look at Microsoft Jack.
  
  I also ran into this older revisionist interview with a Microsoft executive. It is funny to compare the Mojave lie about performance of Vista/Windows 7 to a conversation I had with an actual Windows 7 user today, but there's more interesting admissions in there. While bragging about winning Boeing the exec admitted the company had to throw away 25% of existing software.
  
  

  It's almost ten years since some customers have done this kind of thing, so they're using the transition to rationalise and reduce the number of apps they're using. Boeing reduced them from 11,000 to about 7,000.

  
  
  He also, inadvertently, tells us why Net Applications and other gamed statistics are so important to Microsoft:
  
  

  Q. Windows XP is no longer on sale but presumably your 240m includes PCs running XP using downgrade rights?
  
  A. Yes, it's 240m licences sold. Another statistic from NetApplications shows that 17% of PCs are running Windows 7. If there are 1.2 billion PCs, that's about 200 million PCs.

  
  
  They use these statistics to prove what sales figures and other measures don't. The more I look at them the more I'm convinced Microsoft is making the numbers up by selecting only the sites and "desktops" they want to measure. Single models of GNU/Linux netbooks and now Android should have added percentage points onto GNU/Linux that mysteriously never emerge.
  
  The above is also them pretending Boeing is a migration success story. When the numbers are not there, they will try to convince people to do what "smart companies" are doing. It bears watching, they only have 7,200 desktops and plan to put in 120,000 next year, so this is by no means a done deal and might explode in their faces.
  
  The company is doing a lot of damage control to pretend Vista was not a failure and Vista 7 is a success that it is not. The same inevitability myth and scare tactics are being used to force the issue but reality is not in their favor.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2011-04-18 22:42:46

  There are no US laws against Microsoft's relationship with Net Applications et al. Maybe the ASA would have something to counter manufactured deception.