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This press conference has reached critical mass. We've enough journalists - Intel Spin Doctor
The trouble with Microsoft
MICROSOFT HAS mutated and reconfigured itself countless times during the years. Its products can be found in almost any corner of this planet. Even poor villages in China or Africa have a post office possibly running its software, no doubt using one of its mice. From the console market to hardware peripherals, from operating systems to text editing software, from media players to computer games, this titan successfully entwined our entire electronic world in its web. With revenue larger than Intel and AMD’s combined, Microsoft is that thing even your grandmother and her truck-driving neighbour know about.
The Vista fiasco
Any Volish discussion has to start with their latest doodles. The most
important of these is, of course, the next iteration of the NT-based version of
the Windows operating system, Windows hasta la Vista, NT 6.0. We won’t
jump into the gory details of this gruesome story, as it has been covered many a
times by the world+dog. However, IBM must be blushing now-and-again knowing that
a piece of software probably still carrying some of their lines of code is being
constantly designated in all kinds of “worst tech products” tops across the
planet.
Of course, everybody expected that Vista will be all around us sooner or later - it’s been nine months since that was first said at the end of countless disappointed reviews. Still, strangely enough, it isn’t so. And the adoption rate of the new OS is still sluggish. The Vole is keeping a brave whisker here, but according to its own blogging programmers, behind the curtains, they’re angrily cleaning up their cloggy kernel and preparing Windows Seven, we’ll probably see that sooner than we anticipate. Who knows, perhaps the patient ones will be able to skip one disastrous Windows edition after all.
Service Pack 1 will be emerging soon - the beta is already stalking people out there somewhere, begging Vista-ignorers to install it and give it a shot. But will that cure the itch or just apply local anesthesia? Considering everything said and heard, it’s probably just a bundle of security patches which will effectively increase the size of the hog while fixing a few bugs. Microsofties across the boglands advertise it happily though. Yawn.
DirectX 10
Microsoft’s highly advertised DirectX 10 (and its spin-off 10.1) should
have been one of the strong points convincing people to switch over to the Vista
camp. Microsoft placed a bet on the gamer segment, where fans of Crysis and
other DX10 games should theoretically migrate merrily to the shiny new OS. This
had a few people thinking for a while, but they made up their minds when they
saw the DX9 shots after a few smart brains tampered with Crysis’ files. The
differences were next to impossible to distinguish more often than not.
As for other games, of course, no game developer is crazy enough to target its content on a single DX release, especially since the new OS from Redmond is such a pathetic failure. And as a matter of fact, the Vista & DirectX 10 combination usually scores lower in benchmarks than the well-tested, trustworthy, XP DX9 combo. There goes the gamer segment.
Xbox 360 and devices
While the Xbox is doing quite well in terms of sales, the gaming Vole isn’t
doing so well. In the past few years, the gaming division lost more than five
billion dollars, mostly due to the strategy aimed at gaining market share.
Microsoft expects this to shine-up a bit in 2008, but this year wasn’t what it
expected, mostly because the outfit have to spend about one billion dollars on
replacing bricked units and dealing with minor malfunctions of the console. This
won’t be a disaster, but, it does stack-up with the rest.
Another black spot on Microsoft’s CV is the PlaysForSure campaign which resulted in utter failure, being discontinued a short while ago. Once it released Zune, Microsoft couldn’t care less about the smaller companies revolving around its Devilish Rights Management system. Speaking of Zune, the Redmondians did achieve a reasonably good market share in the first year and can grab a few extra bucks from this sector. The latest Zune devices are praised by some.
Microsoft is not all bad
Of course, Microsoft isn't all bad. Ask somebody who develops software for its
products. One of the top reasons people are still sticking with Microsoft
technology is the abundance of software available for it. And that comes from
the large palette of tools which developers have available. It’s easy
to write software for Microsoft. The documentation is great and the support is
pretty good too. Almost any imaginable problem has been run into by at least a
dozen people before you. As for the audience, you need not worry there too much,
as you’ll be coding for gazillions of machines. With the introduction of the
.Net platform, Microsoft has scored even higher, as interoperability with its
mobile OS versions is no longer such a big deal.
And, if this wasn’t enough, know that Microsoft spews so much new technology at developers, not even the greatest Voletech fanboy can keep up with all the countless versions of countless tools released each year. The marketing system is pretty aggressive too, as a simple yearly MSDN subscription will bring you tons of CDs and DVDs in languages you’ll never use, each two or three months. It’s like these people have a quota of a billion disks which have to be shipped out monthly, completely ignoring production costs (rich companies are quite talented when it comes to useless expenses). Microsoft supports its developers better than any other company in the world, and this is one of its strongest points.
Palladium - The utopian freakshow
In a utopian society, a proper one that is, artists would sing and act for free
and the ones who like them will pay them with as much money as they can afford.
All without prices, without having to pay to buy an album that ultimately
proves to be crappy and so on (Blimey, sounds like the London Underground is a
utopia - Ed.).
The Volesters have a wonderful dream about this utopian society, the digital art part of it at least. And that dream is called DRM. Of course the dream part was but an irony, as Digital Repression Management is nothing short of a nightmare (and that’s an understatement). Forcing people towards “a better world” with a gun is grotesque. And when we all thought that it couldn’t get any worse, the Palladium system comes to tell us that there are hints of Big Brother in the near future. This is sad, but it is quite certain that if things would go that bad, then somewhere, somebody, who is very rich and doesn’t have anything better to do with mountains of cash, can come up with a rival “clean” CPU and squeeze money from the people who won’t submit to such a malware infestation like Palladium was supposed to be (it is already partially implemented in some systems). Also, let’s bear in mind that there is nothing, and I mean nothing, uncrackable on this planet. There never was and there never will be. Online accounts can be shared, password exchanged and cracked, if needed, add-on chips can be sewn onto motherboards (as was the case with the Wii).
As a wise man said in an interview (and that man was Larry Flint), humans have an inherent desire to be free. And any attempt to take this freedom will cause a defensive mechanism to kick-in. This cannot be prevented. And if we all remember this simple fact and correctly understand it, you know, I know, we all know that nobody can push us around into installing that sort of crap in our systems (Sony learned that the hard way). All original music I own, I already listened to before buying, via downloaded mp3s, because there is no music store on this planet which has everything one looks for. And I do hope this last phrase won’t land me in jail.
Without end
As the largest software company on Earth, one which easily outranks in
profit the majority of computer hardware manufacturers, Microsoft is far from
hitting any real problems any time soon. Not even another three desktop
operating system fiascos will truly hurt it. It has squeezed itself in too many
areas. The truth is simple: The Microsoft Machine will be around for many more
years and even the skeptics and anti-fans should be well aware of that. However,
you can all help to balance things a bit by looking over to the Linux camp where
Compiz makes Vista’s Aero look like amateur work and where a warm community
welcomes and helps any newcomer. And as soon as more developers realise that
coding for Linux is not as hard as it looks (check out QT), things will probably
get a lot better.
If humanity ends tomorrow, little green men visiting our space ball will find our history conveniently placed on Encarta DVDs (of course, their civilization is doomed if they decipher that Vista disk you threw away four months ago). In the end, we have to ask ourselves. Did Microsoft release Vista only to show us what an excellent example of software craftsmanship Windows XP is? µ
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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!
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
"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.



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.
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.
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 $$$$$$$.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
"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.
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...