Best Selling Windows Ever

WITH TWO OVERLAPPING events, Microsoft admitted what we have been saying all along, Vista, aka Windows Me Two (Me II), is a joke that no one wants.

It did two unprecedented things this week that frankly stunned us.

Dell announced that it would be offering XP again on home PCs. The second that Vista came out, Microsoft makes it very hard for you to sell anything other than Me II. It can't do this on the business side because it would be laughed out the door, but for the walking sheep class, well, you take what you are shovelled.
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The other equally monumental Me II failure? Gates in China launching a $3 version of bundled XP. Why is this not altruism? Well, it goes back to piracy and how it helped enforce the MS monopoly. If you can easily pirate Windows, Linux has no price advantage, they both cost zero.

With Me II, Microsoft made it very hard to pirate. It is do-able, you can use the BIOS hack and probably a host of others, but the point is, it raised the bar enough so lots of people have to buy it. Want to bet that in a country with $100 average monthly salary, people aren't going to shell out $299 for Me II Broken Edition?

http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39087

Voice Recognition

A Fair Comparison

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols takes a pretty high-end PC and installs Vista and Ubuntu Linux in dual boot and does comparisons.

http://desktoplinux.com/articles/AT9727687530.html

My test system's high-end audio outputs are S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format) compliant. S/PDIF is probably the most common high-end audio port around for PCs today. It also has no built-in DRM (digital rights management) capability, and that turned out to be an important matter.

When I switched back to Vista, I tried to play Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot CD. Whoops! Not a single sound emerged from my speakers. After a little investigation, I found that Vista disables media outputs that don't incorporate DRM, when you try to play DRM protected media through them.
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That was a kick in the head. I have a fully legal CD in my hand. Any other version of Windows will play it, Linux will play it, Mac OS will play it, and my CD player will play it, but if you're using S/PDIF for your computer-driven audio and Vista, you're out of luck. If you have a card with a Toslink optical digital audio port, you will be able to play it.

One of the ironies of the situation was that this very album had been first released on the Web without any DRM, in part as a protest against DRM. Ah well, that was yesterday.

There's a very detailed report on just how Vista goes wrong with DRM, which I recommend to you. I'll just content myself by saying an operating system -- any operating system -- is not the place for DRM.

Dandy

Vista - NO Need

I've been saying it for months. So have a lot of others.

http://review.zdnet.com/Windows_Vista_Ultimate/
4505-3672_16-32013603.html

The bottom line: Windows Vista is essentially warmed-over Windows XP. If you're currently happy with Windows XP SP2, we see no compelling reason to upgrade. On the other hand, if you need a new computer right now, Windows Vista is stable enough for everyday use.

So, If you're getting a new computer - maybe. I'd still go Win XP Pro in a business setting. Better idea - spend your money on more memory for your current machine. 1GB of mem makes a vast improvement in performance.

On an other note IE7 breaks many web applications. I had to roll back some machines this week when the software support people said their product would not run on IE7. Fair warning.

More on Vista

Well it's out - at least to volume license purchasers.
So if you're interested in Win XP SP3 at a greatly inflated price - go for it.
I have not seen one compelling reason to buy it. The only ones praising it are MS flunkies and PR firms and magazines with MS advertising to protect.

Soon it it start being bundled on new computers and that is where most sales will come from. There will still be Win XP SP2 sold on new computers and I would recommend that until Vista SP1 is out.

Vista

Yes I've been lazy.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2062318,00.asp

Microsoft really doesn't want you to know this, but many of your existing applications won't work with Vista. In fact, some brand new products won't work with Vista.

At the top of that list of "It doesn't work," we find, believe it or not, Microsoft new music player, Zune. Yes, that's right; Microsoft's iPod killer doesn't work with Vista.
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Then, consider if you will, Windows Live Messenger 8.0 and the beta 8.1. Both IM clients blow up after a few hours of use on Vista.

Oh, and the new IM client from AOL, AIM 6? I can now attest from personal experience that it goes "boom" too on Vista.
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That said, I do wonder a bit why many major anti-virus programs, such as AVG Free, Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition for Vista, and Kaspersky Anti-Virus & Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0 are all reported to crash and burn.
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You should also know that some of Microsoft's own programs won't run with Vista. For example, Microsoft's own Virtual PC 2004 won't work.

Neither will Visual Studio .NET 2002, Visual Studio .NET 2003, and Microsoft SQL Server 2000. Visual Studio 2005 SP1 will work... sort of.

So, if any of you developers out there are planning on creating.NET 1.1 applications in Vista, forget about it!

And that should be quite enough.