OT: Redmond

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2009-01-16 at 12:24 -0700, Alan Dayley wrote:
> My 10-month-ish old Eee PC 701 is running the Ubuntu Eee distribution
> with Firefox, OpenOffice.org suite and many other apps, and my data on
> the 4GB storage it came with.  10GB just for the OS (no office suite,
> etc.) seems really, REALLY big to me.
> 
> Microsoft is just stuck in the hardware upgrade treadmill for their
> development model.  Computers got "fast enough" for the public back at
> Windows XP.  But MS kept counting on the public running the hardware
> treadmill for Vista.  The public stopped running and Vista was left
> too bloated for what people wanted.  Now MS is trying to change to
> match the market's growing realization that most computers and
> software are already "good enough."  That's my theory as to why MS
> missed the mark with Vista.
> 
> Windows 7? Don't care about it until I run into it on my path to a
> Linux install.  ;^)
----
Vista...

- device drivers had to be re-written to conform to their new security
roles
- security implementations added to application startup delays and much
of this has migrated into WinXP now via SP3
- various 'dumbing down' default settings tends to get a lot of ridicule
from power users
- poorly written applications break or work poorly on Vista
- and the killer in corporate world is that changes to networking and
user environments breaks a lot of things that they finally got working.

Yes, the Aero stuff requires more/better hardware but really is only
cosmetic.

Current hardware - RAM is cheap, hard drives are cheap, processor power
is cheap - so the ramped up requirements seemed to be an easy hurdle.

I don't think that the issue is whether Vista hit the mark or not, I
think the buying public mostly didn't care and were happy enough with
WinXP which mostly works now and wasn't eager for another beta cycle
where things would be fixed over time.

Craig