Why, oh why is Microsoft software so damn expensive? I bought myself an OEM copy of Vista Home Premium 32Bit with the money I got for my birthday, to install on my new system I built. That was then... this is now! My system is running fine (using it right now) and yet I have switched back to XP Pro (Retail) which cost me £250. Vista is sitting in the draw and will never be used again...

"Why do you think they have all those problems with security?" - posted by : roman, 20 December 2007

How naive. Windows has the most problems with security because it has about a million times as many users as Linux or Macintosh. Duh.

Attention span reaches only so far. Even the most intelligent executive management will experience that. Vole is so huge that thanks to its gravity explosion is not its option but implosion is still on the table. Who made Microsoft? An army of countless consultants that tweaked and implemented its' software. Who sets the standards for software? there has been a role change. Many once Anerican Domains for standards administration has moved over to Europe, if you count Switzerland and ISO as Europe and they do not take Microsofts crap anymore. Governments in Europe move to linux after frustration with Microsoft non compliance with European law and Voles tendencies to make up their own Volish law, which Europeans can't stand. Yes Vole is huge. Let me bring up an example of huge: The US was asked to leave the Bali conference after stalling and stalling the nation of New Guinee rose and asked the US delegation to leave. The US gave in. 187 nation applauded New Guinee's comments. It is not difficult to bring a huge majority of countries behind yourself to put a foot print into some one else's rear. American's have lived under the impression that the world has to be grateful for their job in WWII and the ensuing cold war. The cold war is long over. New allegiances are forming under neath the old. Microsoft is pushing their weight around. Arrogance swings in their executives voices, Always remember don't bite the hand that fed you, Vole!

I am a bit wary of such an attitude towards a community that has practically invented the word n00b.
There are undoubtedly people with a warm attitude who are ready to help newcomers, but there are also legions of smartalecs and holier-than-thou aloof lording types who like nothing better than to lay down the ridicule on anyone who does not get the l33t sp34k.
Well they can keep their club rituals. If I have a PC it's for gaming only - and that rules out Linux and Apple as much as Vista, but not for the same reasons.

Vista could've been a really nice OS.
It has some really nice features... the problem is that you have to really dig to find them.

The most important bad thing about Vista is the performance aspect... when the performance of a game or other application, on the same machine, is the same on a native OS (Vista) as on an older OS (say, XP) running within a VMware image that runs within another OS... then you can definitely call the "native" OS a failure.

Oh, and PlaysForSure isn't dead, it's only renamed, into both PlayReady and Certified For Vista.
Large companies are known for their bad decisions when adopting software, so it doesn't matter how bad the DRM scheme actually is, someone would still buy it.
See Nokia, and it's Music Shop, Music Player, and "Comes With Music" programs, some already launched, and some just started, that use the PlaysForSure DRM scheme.

Does only the majority of comments who agree with Vista Inq articles get posted? Is this why comments have to be approved? Why have that if you dont want to hide something. 

Or are Inq readers really this stupid? Have any actually used Vista?

You dont get this kind of Vista bashing on other sites, you know, good reputable sites that actually know what they're talking about and dont have personal rants your'd expect from a 14 year old.

I use XP Daily (not by choice) and i have tried Vista and i can say without a doubt i wouldn't waste my money on vista. My personal computers have either Linux Suse or Ubuntu on them and i have had Much better luck with them than any Microsoft products be it ME, 2000 pro or XP pro.
Computers are like air conditioners they stop working when you open windows.

Once, there a day that XP have been trouble since launch for first time and it got fixed many problem in past. Now it run smooth and stable. The Microsoft lure you purchased Vista and made you look more stupid for that operating system not even run smooth out yet for those ridiculous cost? Why they not make the cost on Vista cheaper unless they fix and improvement the operating system until stable then rise the price. They use you as lab rats to see what the problems on new operating system. That's why I refused buy it. I love to listen to people and news about the Vista until that system run much better and improvement for a reasonable price. Also Microsoft are famous on sucking your money for a new program with addition new feature. Those kernel inside the Vista haven't change much from the birth of Window 3.1 only improvement and add new feature. All they want $$$$$$$.

Yes, that was a very well written article but I think it misses the most significant points between propriatary and open-sauce s/w. Oh yeah - on top of that, like the comment title implies, it's a transient issue anyway.

The most important diffence between propriatary and open-sauce s/w is the motivation behind producing it. Sounds a bit tree-huggy perhaps, but that really is the bottom line.

Propriatary s/w is produced to make money whereas open-saucey s/w is produced for a wide variety of personal and selfish reasons that satisfy the individual and personal needs of the developer - these reasons range from needing a good framework to learn and develop skills to proving that your design and coding skills are as good as anyone else's. 

And the reason that these small-time personal issues are such a big factor is that whereas a propriatary s/w company might say "look at all this cool stuff we've done, but you can't see how we've done it", a cup & saucer will be saying "I've done this and this is how I did it".

Perhaps the difference could be summed up in terms of credibility. For example, Microsoft, for all it's money, has never had any credibility. Credibility is the raison d'etre of Chilli sauce s/w and credibility is what people who aren't ignorant to the issue will go for.

If the likes of Microsoft are to survive in the medium term they'll have to adopt, while not being able to extend, tomato-ketchup.

And so, to the chase. The reason that this is a transient issue is that ultimately 99.999% of all s/w will be written by AIs. Your OS will be an AI and it will probe your h/w, match the results against a shared database of results and working subroutines and write it's own driver.

Then they'll all realise that the biggest problem on the planet is us pesky humans and only the Governator will be able to save us.

Who said that MS is good for programming? May be if you are writing a million and first inventory control or cash register application. If you are trying to do anything with non-trivial UI (like CAD for instance) or non-trivial networking (like VoIP server or client) it is a nightmare. You dig a little bit and find clusterf*ck of many generations of C-grade students writing what they think is an operating system. Why do you think they have all those problems with security?

Personally I like Vista. I've lately started programming in ASP.NET and I like that too -- that's coming from a ten year veteran of Perl, PHP and the Unix world.

Msn.com, Live.com and other web efforts are where Microsoft fails completely. It astounds me that a company that resourceful can make a search engine that, at best, is completely useless.

If you're searching for a pizza restaurant or searching for help with Microsoft technologies, Microsoft search turns up junk for queries that Google hits out of the park.

I've found that it's easy to SEO msn. It takes me two months to rank #1 in msn for a site that takes me eight months to rank #1 in Yahoo and eighteen to rank #2 in Google. However, there's no point, because a #1 ranking in msn brings in negligible traffic compared to a number #25 rank in Google.

Microsoft's webmaster tools are a complete joke. They only give "top ten" keywords, pages, search results, etc. Those might be good for small business owners who have five page sites, but those of us who have hundred page, thousand page or million page sites find this useless.

Yahoo search sucks too, but at least you can do a "link:" query on Yahoo to reverse engineer your competitor's backlinks. Msn could really help us out by offering SEO's better tools than the competitors.

"Vista is a bit scary" said Bill G some years ago.
His intention, I suppose was to increase the interest in the product.
I wonder if he will call Windows 7 scary too.
There is this old saying that if seven men bild a house in six months then 700 will not be able to bild it in a day.
That is, ofcourse common sense, but I sometimes have a feeling that big companies like Microsoft never get this common sense.
The Microsoft business is depending on customers swithing regulary to a new Windows, paying the full prise for it each time..
(or lets say it's big and easy bussines is based on that)
Longhorn-Shorthorn-Vista took too long.
Eventually there was rather nothing worthwhile.
If Microsoft had instead worked on a better version of XP it probably had been better for both customers and Microsoft.
Giving a new name for a better version seems to work much better for Apple.
And meanwhile the Linux kernel group are happily improving the kernel in a x.xx.xx-x way.

When the base to the OS is sound and when your decisions are not made bye marketing people and a demand for easy money then it's the way to do it.
I bet there are lots of good developers within Microsoft who would agree.

I have a strong feeling that Microsoft has lost a lot of time beeing stupid, to put it mildly.
And I suppose the real loosers are the customers if they swith to Vista or not.




I put Vista on my PC when I built it earlier this year and I must admit that I've had very few problems with it. Given that RAM is so cheap right now, put the max in your system. Vista likes having alot of RAM to cache all your programs and recently used data.

I put Vista on my PC mostly because I'm too lazy to install a floppy drive to get the drivers loaded so XP would install. I know you can slipstream these, but did I mention I'm lazy.

One feature XP doesn't have is the speed at which you can resume from sleep mode. Vista is very fast at that, and it handles throttling my Core2Duo better than XP.

I think Vista is a good alternative to XP if you have a fast PC, and yes, I've run XP and the latest on my laptop. I even had to install NDISwrapper to get wifi to work.

Digital Repression Management is the Yin of Yang's Digital RePressed Memory ...... Virtualised Real Time Embedding CodeXXXX for Future Memory Reception for Perceptions.

RobotIQs Programming on the Fly by Wire. 

Quantum Sub Atomic NEUKlearer Programming of HyperRadioProActive CyberIntelAIgent Assets 

Universal Virtual Forces for Provisional Continuity. A Little Something Enigmatic with AI Wealth of Colossal XXXXPerience against Mindless Mayhem under Olde Holywood Style Direction and Production Regimes.

The problem with microsoft is that it has all the characteristics of a tyrant.

It has been labeled a monopoly, found to be so and yet remains whole.

Despite the wishes of its customers microsoft does basically as it pleases. Right now its trying desperately to shove vista down our throats.

At this point there are only two things that could stop microsoft's on going growth.

First of all, its sheer size. The beast is so large that it becomes a true nightmare to manage. Its span is such that it is a logistical nightmare for almost anything really. 

That can actually cause the bottleneck that kills the beast. Like an over-grown human it may actually not be able to carry its own weight and hopefully have a seizure.

The second option is the EU, since the US has shown it has no backbone to act upon any ruiling of microsoft being a monopoly. It has fallen to the brave new collection of countries to do so. So far they are fighting the good fight, for how long and to what effect I do not know.

Maybe the lumbering giant has grown so fat that the multitude of things that sting it will manage to overwhelm it into over exertion and then, luckily, a sudden and abrupt fall.


P.S.

Did I mention that I feel very strong, in the negative sense, towards this company?
You may go so far as to say I am biased, but that is only an understatement!

I have to question the reasoning of a company that claims to back PC gaming but puts the majority of their resources into consoles; more effort has been put into pushing the Xbox than any GFW or DX10 campaign. 

Microsoft’s plan to ‘fix’ PC gaming judging GFW is to turn it into a console, which obviously doesn’t sit very well with PC gamers, but they don’t seem to have figured that out yet. It should be quite obvious supporting 360 controllers and porting console orientated games onto PC a year after their release isn’t going to win points with the PC crowed. Being treated as a secondary milking platform for Microsoft’s console titles doesn’t exactly give the impression that PC gaming is being taken seriously at MS.

Hopefully Microsoft will learn from the PC versions of Halo and Shadowrun; but something tells me they will simply push the same failed plan harder rather than try something innovative, the usual Microsoft way. I imagine we can expect more Vista only; Windows Live only, outdated 360 ports for years to come.

All this from a company who has a massive stake in PC operating systems, messing around trying to get their piece of the console market while their main business with Windows goes to hell and Apple/Linux makes a mockery of them. If it wasn’t for the fact that they are so ridiculously rich and have weaselled their way into a secure place in the market they would be getting a well deserved butt kicking right now.

Microsoft really needs to get their act together; people only buy Windows at this point because there are no decent alternatives for PC gaming, any other PC task can be done just as easily on competing operating systems. If a 'real' alternative appears, then they would pull their thumb out.

XP is OK - not excellent. 
The main reason why Vista is so bad is Microsoft sees its future as domination and what better way to prevent interoperation than DRM?
Open API's wont help if you hvent paid a small fortune for a key!

I'm not so sure about the "human's inherent desire to be free".
See the Inquirer's other article: http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/20/swedish-athletes-favour-chip.

I really enjoyed this well written article. It was one of the best I read in a long time and is 100% reality! Thanks and keep up the great work!