A new outlook on Windows Vista
Hi!
I am fascinated by the way in which Microsoft plans to change the nature of operating systems radically. Vista promises a better future -- lots of new data exchange solutions, better information organization and an easier GUI. It looks very exciting to me.
However, there is still some doubt whether Vista will really be able todefine the new wave of technology.I've been a user of Windows for the past 9 years, and have been accustomed to it (one reason I'll accept Vista quickly). I'd like to point out a few things that Microsoft should improve in order to gain more popularity (and market share
).
Of course, I'm not a Microsoft employee so I don't know what's really going on. Just keep in mind that these are my personal opinions and mean no bias toward anyone.
1. Create seperate editions for the novice and advanced.
This is something which is already announced and put into action. However, after reading about 5 websites on the same topic, I don't really feel Microsoft is doing enough to justify this claim.
In the past and present, Microsoft is continually dodged by threats from consumers about how difficult it is to survive with their products. Of course, the initial move of setting up the operating system and getting basic things to work is very easy. But think about viruses and run-time errors. No one's to blame about this, but the nearest possible entity to blame is Microsoft (for allegedly creating incompatible software to curb competitors).
2. Don't worry too much about your finances.
Come on, I don't want Microsoft to land into trouble. But here's a radically new concept of actually gaining 10x the profit you got:
Expect money, and it'll never come your way. Don't, and you'll have more than what you ever expected.
Microsoft thinks if they focus less on how their monetary status is evolving, they'll lose. Wrong! If you focus on improving the product, on concentrating on how toimprove the world, then I believe you will definately achieve your dreams. After all, contributing to mankind is what's important. Yes, you are capitalists, but it shouldn't get the better of you.
Let me get this straight and clear -- reduce the price of your products (and don't give out free stuff like Visual Studio 2005 Team System on DVDs; it should only be free if downloaded). That kills your finances; and at the other end, consumers (who are non-programmers) have to pay for all the comforts of a very less-significant percentage of the population. Especially with Windows -- your prices are incredibly high! This is another factor for causing widespread piracy.Think about improving the world, not your finances.
And I'm still thinking. I've found several instances where I've been slightly annoyed by Windows' approach towards handling data and security. I'll write them sometime tomorrow (very busy at the moment). What do you think? (Especially guys from MSFT -- I want to hear from you).
[3248 byte] By [
KSamir] at [2008-3-7]
 KSamir wrote: |
Hi!
Expect money, and it'll never come your way. Don't, and you'll have more than what you ever expected.
|
|
Yeah, I agree 164%. Vista should be free. Maybe you could put a large 'Donate' button on the login screen that links directly to Bill's Paypal account?
i do agree 200% on this! ... lol something should be done so that it can be free, Bill Gates jus wants more money, not like he really needs it :)
| KSamir wrote: |
Hi!
I'd like to point out a few things that Microsoft should improve in order to gain more popularity (and market share  ). |
|
You obviously don't know much about Microsoft.
Microsoft has more than 90% of the market share for OSs the last time I checked. I don't think they're too concerned with popularity at the moment...
As for the pricing, Microsoft's products really aren't that expensive compared to... oh say, a mac.
And you obviously don't know much about the man behind it all -- Bill Gates. A man who can't estimate his finances himself. Media sources say he is worth more than $51 billion. That's a lot of money for a single person. Now try and guess how much Microsoft is worth. Even if 25 of its nearest competitors got together, they still wouldn't be able to put up enough money to buy Microsoft.
Why look at how much a Mac costs? Macs are useless anyway -- all graphics and idiocy inside is completely dumb. Windows is pretty good, and is for the people who actually have brains to use it. It's like a car analogy -- the performance depends mostly on the driver. So you can't complain about errors and patches for them.
I hate non-Microsoft operating systems. I would consider Linux only apart from Windows, but Linux isn't so compatible and it's all unorganized into several versions by at least 10 different companies.
However, I don't appreciate Microsoft for its greed. It has all this unwise philosophy of winning market share. Concentrate on the product quality. They talk about competition encouraging technological development, but at the same time they're freezing the competition in a way so as to block all potential development. I believe the computer industry would have been improving much faster if companies didn't go so paranoid about money. Think about it, they're using their existing market share to continue to freeze competition. The situation is improving now though with software like Linux creating wider frameworks for technological development.
The point is, stop freaking about and worrying paranoidly over money gains. You contradict your own "philosophy" by doing that. And this goes to everyone, from Microsoft to those crappy companies like Apple who stake running their entire company on one silly little headphone-accompanied product. Think about your own "philosophy" again.
I don't think Mac are useless, and don't talk about pretty graphics because that's a complement for a very great OS, they put pretty graphics because they CAN do it. I don't think windows can have that kind of graphic engine without running slow.
Anyway, I use Windows, and love PCs, and I will buy Vista, but I think that Microsoft has a lot to learn from its competitors, and "learn" is not the same as "copy". Ok, i don't know who copies whi, but now Vista (casually) has the same features that OSX!. The dashboard, the quick search, improved graphics engine, etc, etc, etc.
Come on, I'm happy with that new features, and don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining because they release "the same" features, but why didn't they do it before? Because Microsoft could do it before, but they didn't.
So I think that Microsoft really don't care about that good features, and the importance that they have in the final user, they dont care because they will keep making money, but when it comes the time when the "others" announces that features, there are they putting all that in a new windows version.
I mean... didn't they realized that anyone wants to search files in less than a sec.? Yes sure they realized, but they didn't do it until mac comes with that.
Or why didn't they put a popup blocker in IE, oh yes, they putted it! after firefox!. Again, I'm not saying they copied firefox, I'm saying they dont care about putting a popup blocker.
I would be much more interested if windows comes up with an integrated ftp client, a file renaming tool, and lot of that things that make a good OS instead of releasing windows with movie maker!.
That's what I hate about microsoft, they don't care much about making people proud of windows.
And for the pricing... Mac os X is much cheaper than windows.
Sorry for my english
Now, I need to respond to the Linux thing. (Yes, I am a Linux user, and have been for 3 years).
Linux isn't so compatible Ah, common misconception. In terms of architectures alone, Linux supports
- Alpha
- Arm
- i386
- x86_64 (athlon 64)
- ia64 (Itanium)
- m68k (old mac)
- mips
- parisc
- powerpc
- ppc64
- s390
- sh
- sh64
- sparc
- sparc64
- and more
For drivers, I have not had any compatibility problems, except with my web cam,but I had a lot iof fun getting that to work. For a business mcahine, though, that would not be a problem.
and it's all unorganized into several versions by at least 10 different companies.
actually WAY more than that, but you have the general idea. Still, you show this as a fault, while it is really a strength. It is essentially a more extreme version of Windows Home, Windows Professional, Windows Media Center, Windows Server, Windows CE, and so on.
To show what I mean, I'll give a quick comparison of several distributions:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
- Akin to Windows Server... well supported, very friendly to admins, and so on, but you pay through the nose to get a copy (just like windows server)
- Fedora Core
- RHEL for the desktop. Free, easy to use, friendly, nd well supported. However, it does use older packages, and it isn't as full-featered as other versions.
- Debian
- Fourteen CDs of every prgram you could possibly need. This is not a newbies distro, but it is somewhat easy to use while giving you freedom to do whatever you want. Totally free, and it comes in three versions:
- stable: Ye Olde Packages. programs tend to be a year or two old, but they are guaranteed to be rock solid. Security updates are avaliable as necessary, and they're easy to get.
- Unstable: The latest packages, most of them totally untested beyond what the upstream developers did. about 25 CDs worth, but it's updated every friday, so your cd's won't last long.
- Testing:between stable and unstable. Packages move to testing after a certain ampount of time in unstable without problems, and, when testing has been stable for long enough, it is released as the next stable.
- Gentoo
- The ultimate developers system. (the one that I use). It has about 100 000 packages, and it will work on anything (anyone hear of GentooX? It's Gentoo for the Xbox). It is also built from source, and it features a bleeding edge version that puts Debian unstable to shame. Still, it's not for the faint of heart; it takes about two days to install (on my 2GHz Athlon 64 box with 512 Mb of RAM). Security updates, distributed in GLSAs (Gentoo Linux Security Advisories), are wonderful.
- Xandros
- This is the one I usually reccomend to beginners. It's very easy to use, easier to install than Vista (I saw a friend's version), and it has better hardware support out of the box than Windows does.
Now, I've responded (at very long length) to the problems that KSamir pointed out, but I haven't added some of the other advantages.
- Linux is infinitely flexibe. The admin user (root) is essentially a deity (whoops! just offended half the readers with one sentence!), while regular users still have enogh flexibility to do what they want without stepping on others' toes.
- Linux came from a long line of good operating systems. So good, in fact, that Windows draws hevily from them. UNIX has ALWAYS been a multi-user operating system, while windows started out as single user and added multi-user as an afterthought. (Anyone remember hitteng escape at the Windows 9x logon screen?) I will grant that it has gotten better, but there can still be only one user at the desktop at a time (without special software), and network transparency is still abysmal.
- Linux is fully network transparent. I mentioned this in my last post, but it deserves further comment. Earlier today, I was helping my friend with his Linux system. With Windows, I could have run a remote desktop session, and have had him watch as I went through test after test after test. Instead, I connected with a terminal, he gave me a temporary root password, and I got it working with he browsed the internet. During this time, I ran several grphical programs, and they showed up on my desktop like any other porgram. They were very responsive, unlike Remote desktop over a similar connection (56K), and unless I knew better, I would have thought they were running on my machine directly.
- Linux is stable. I used to have an ATI Radeon 7000/VE, which failed about a year ago. Windows wouldn't even boot up with the bad video card; giving me a BSOD before I even got to the Welcome screen. Linux, on the other hand, happily dropped down to a level that the card could support and was prfectly stable. I have had similar problems with mice, my webcam, my ZIP drive, and so on. My DVD burner, in particular, causes no end to the grief. Under Windows, it either brings down the entire network in a magnificent explosion, or it churns out a coaster, miscalibrating itself in the process. Under Linux, however, I get a perfect DVD every time.
- No virii. Recently, everybody was paranoid about the Nyxem/Blacmal/Generic.FX/Karma Sutra virus. I, however, watched the whole debacle with a slight bit of humor, half wondering what the virus whould do under wine. (the WINdows Emulator)
- Linux is scalable. I worked on a project (The DARPA Grand Challenge; my team was terra engineering), for which we needed a system that was rock solid and small enough to run on a Diamond Systems PC104.board Windows CE didn't fit the bill; we didn't have the money for it, and it didn't give direct enough access to our hardware. Linux did the job perfectly. It should come as no surprise that the team that Microsoft highlighted on their front page was the ONLY team (of 40) that used Windows. It should also come as no surprise that they had enormous troubles getting things to work. (this comes from my talks wih various members of the team; I seem to remember them mentioning that they wished they had used Linux)
So, Now that you've read that beautifully thought out (snork) piece on the advantages of Linux, maybe some people will be motivated to make the switch.
And by saying "all graphics and idiocy inside is completely dumb", are you implying that performace depends on ugliness? I just dont understand this theory of most Windows users; "Good design = Bad Performance, and vice versa"...
Or are you just one of those people who honestly believe that by cramming a 3ghz chip into your pc you get better performace?
Please do explain... I'm quite curious
PS: I'm by no means a Windows hater, I use it on a daily basis; however I also use Macs just as often, and from experience with both systems, I can safely say that at this moment Apple destroys most PC companies with both hardware and software...
I started working with Linux some time ago, and have taken a few classes on Unix and shell scripting. Shell scripting is very powerfull and I would love to be able to run bash on Windows so that I could write scripts for it. I've tried using scripts with Windows Script Host, but I really preffer working with bash. I'm hoping that Vista offers more Unix compatibility, and the ability to use bash to work with the Windows operating system. Being that Microsoft already licensed the Unix technology, I'm hoping that they will come out with a fully Linux and Unix compatible Operating System. I would love to have the best of both worlds.
Well... I've found that I can't live without bash (even under Windows), so I found Cygwin. (http://www.cygwin.com/). Basically, it's a complete Unix toolset (with an X server, all of the compilers, and everything, and all of the libraries) all for native windows. Given that it has a port of libc, you will be able to compile any Unix program you want under it and it should run right off.
It's somewhat analagous to winelib, except from Unix to Windows.
Still, as I've learned from experience, scripting is much slower under Windows than Linux. Linux is able to create processes REALLY fast, so the pipeline/tiny program paradigm is great. Windows takes 0.7 seconds to spawn a new process, so throw out any ideas of calling ls or sed too much.
Instead, something like Perl would be a better bet for Windows.
Now, as for Windows licensing UNIX, they can license the name UNIX, but the program interfaces are all preely shared (Google "posix").
Finally, about whether Windows will become Unix/Linux compatible... maybe source-level compatibility, but I can't see binary.
To explain what I mean, Linux and most Unices are based on an executable format called ELF, which is an incredibly powerful format; it is the whole reason that binary compatiblity exists between different compilers and library versions.
Windows, on the other hand, usedd COFF (Common Object File Format), which is ancient (It dates back to the original AT&T Unix, if not before) and is reponsible for DLL hell, wrong libraries being loaded, and lack of cool linux stiff like "LD_PRELOAD" (For all of the Windows-only people, LD_PREELOAD is an environment variable that specifies some library to load before libc (like MSVCRT). Using it, you can override various libc functions to track system calls, or log what files are opened and closed on boot so that it can all be prefetched. There are tons of other uses as well). Coff is also responsible (I believe, but only Microsoft developers would be able to verify this) that COFF is responsible for the 0.7 second process spawn time.
Now, I seem to remember reading somewhere that supporting other binary formats than COFF would not be an easy thing to do, simply because of the design of Windows.
Still, Cygwin has worked perfectly with every version of Windows since 2K (maybe earlier, but that's when i started using it), including Vista, so that does the trick.
I just hope that Micro$oft decides to put a reasonable price on VISTA. I've been dual booting Mandravia and XP now for several years. If it weren't for a few odd and end programs for work not built for linux/unix, I would be in linux fully. Micro$oft has been reverse engineering MacOS for over 11 years now with the release of Win95. It took about 3 seconds to realize you could move the task bar to the top of the screen and see how much of a copy it was. Now with the addition of the widgetts it's even more of a copy.
My major issue with all of the windows distro's has been price. Windows XP upgrade is still $100 for the home edition at retailers. I'm not saying to make it completely free. I know it takes money to develop, but they need to make the majority of money from the computer manufactures, not people that can't afford it. The company I work for is still using Windows 2000 Professional because they cannot afford the upgrades to XP now. The only way we get XP computers is to blow a processor or mainboard.
Anyway...points of the day.
1) Opensource is always great. Do you ever stop to think why there aren't that many opensource viruses?
2) Windows looks to MacOS for inspiration. So don't knock it.
3) Microsoft charges way to much for OS and Office products
Sounds like you have some issues to deal with!
I can, however, give you a few reasons why people use Macs...
- no Viri's so far.... (as compared to 16,000 or so Windoze ones)
- Stability, its rare that Mac OS will crash (My current iMac hasn't crashed in over a year)
- Ease of use.
- Plug and Play
- iLife apps built in for free (photos, video, DVD suites)
- Longer life, Macs tend to be more usefull for longer.
I could go on... but I am sure you think I am a smug Mac user!
My suggestion would be for you to try some other OS's, Mac OSX is great, Linux is very good too. You should also ask youself where MS get their ideas from.... Most things you see on Windoze is ripped off from a mac, We get it first and you guys get a watered down version 2 years later!
Try another OS, its nothing to be scared of!
thequux,
I see you are a Linux guy, maybe you can help out.
what is the best dual boot software available... I have purchased redhat but still cannot afford to migrate completely to it.
thanks,
Hassaan
You pretty much are my hero because of this post. Wow! This topic is like a carnival of clueless posts
1. This forum is for software developers, not for general chit-chat.
2. KSamir, every business is concerned about profits. Microsoft is no different.
3. Gonzalingui, Windows had fast built-in search since Office97 and Windows2000 - most people just don't know how to turn it on. Dashboard (aka sidebar) was in Longhorn before it appeared in MacOS X.
And Vista's improved graphics engine is much more then CoreImage and other Mac stuff - take WPF for example. MacOS may be cheaper in the beginning, but you pay for new releases every year, so it is more expensive in the final run.4.
thequux, Linux is not UNIX, it is similar but not in the same line. As for your hardware problems, come on - it's not the fault of Windows that your DVD burner sucks.
And Windows does not have preset delay of 0.7 seconds when creating new processes - yes, it is somewhat slower to create new processes, but only because it is very different from Linux (Linux and *NIXes traditionally had big problems with threading - there was no good portable library for that, so they had to use separate processes as replacement; WindowsNT had great threading from the very beginning, so there was no need to use same model as *NIXes). Of course when you try to do something in *NIX style on Windows, it probably won't be as efficient as native solution.
ELF is not that good, it is less efficient in terms of consumed space + it also has .so problem (when you need to have ten versions of the same library for different programs). COFF/PE itself has no relation to DLL hell (which is actually solved in .NET) and you can use hooks instead of LD_PRELOAD.5. Ink Master, Apple uses exactly same hardware as the rest of companies (except for the desing/casing), so it's just eye candy and not real value. As for software - well, it's your opinion against mine.6.
Mal555, I suppose you don't even know what "reverse engineering" really is... and your points are total bs, "open source" does not equal to greatness - it is just as capable of producing *** as closed source (Mozilla suite anyone? OpenOffice?). And if your company couldn't find money to upgrade to XP for the past 4,5 years since XP release - well, either it does not give a s**t about computers or it will go bust soon ;-) (come on, you can get XP Home for 10$ and XP Pro for 60$ - legally - as OEM versions - bundled with new PCs of course!).7. And to finish the rant - about
photek's comments on MacOS X:
- I use XP since 2001 and haven't had a single virus on my PC
- XP is stable and does not crash
- XP is easy to use
- XP has plug and play (and yes, it works)
- XP does not have analogs for most of iLife built-in (Vista will have), but you can easily have much better software for free online (and the selection is many times bigger then for Macs)
- XP perfectly runs on my old 1998 PC, will MacOS X run on Mac that old?
Now, the real question is why the hell did I write all that? 
