Mojave Experiment

[Rsak]

http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

I realize most of the people on this board are probably not the target audience of this kind of marketing campaign, but I think it has some validity for those people who have negative impressions of windows Vista yet have never seen it firsthand. They interview people who hate Vista and then show them Windows Mojave (Vista relabeled) and get their opinions before revealing the truth.

Do you think this is a good marketing campaign for that audience?
Or with your knowledge of Vista and Microsoft do you think this is completely deceptive?

[Ddrak]

I don't know if it will make a good marketing campaign, but it was a pretty damn clever trick of Microsoft's to be able to actually pull it off. They must have already done a bunch of research because they'd never have tried something like this if they hadn't known in general terms what the outcome would have been.

The campaign could well backfire though - unless you handle it just right, you'll end up giving people the impression that Microsoft is a bunch of sneaky and underhanded asses.

Dd

[Rsak]

*nod*
I am seeing a lot of that sentiment from some of the technology blogs and other people who are big Linux promoters. I think they have some validity in their arguments, but I suspect they are missing the point that Microsoft was trying to make and largely were not who MS was targeting with such a campaign.

[Klast Brell]

I have always felt that Vista is a great OS for my mother, or my grandmother. If you just need a basic computer with a pre installed OS and everything else Vista will do fine. If you are starting out as a computer user Vista is fine. If you need an electronic nanny to keep you from installing malware because you don't know its bad to click on random attachments from strangers vista is fine.

If you are a power user who is upgrading the OS on an XP machine you are deeply fucked. Everything that is new is coming out vista compatible. But companies are slow to go back and update drivers and issue Vista patches for hardware and software they don't sell any more and can't make a profit on any more. Vista's security features will cramp your stile as well. UAC will drive you barking nuts popping up every time you try to do anything.

Again. Great OS for the non power user who just buys a computer and uses it as is out of the box. Terrible for a power user who is upgrading and likes getting under the hood and fiddling.

[Rsak]

I think they have made huge strides when it comes to driver compatibility the big issue is 3rd party software support of the new OS. The development groups for application specific software are very slow to get their software compatible with Vista. Some of that is the SQL 2005 compatibility since these types of applications need SQL. That said I largely agree with Klast about who really is targeted by Vista since the big business IT power users are probably using the Server line of operating systems.

[Arathena]

I think they have made huge strides when it comes to driver compatibility the big issue is 3rd party software support of the new OS. The development groups for application specific software are very slow to get their software compatible with Vista. Some of that is the SQL 2005 compatibility since these types of applications need SQL. That said I largely agree with Klast about who really is targeted by Vista since the big business IT power users are probably using the Server line of operating systems.

It might be Server on the backend somewhere... But everyone here has XP or in a few cases, Win2000 as the user desktops. I don't know why we haven't migrated to Vista, but I'll bet it has something to do with the custom SAP system we run, combined with the need to run large amounts of very customized equipment - We still have NT 4.0 boxes on some shop floors because of the need to run equipment on them.

For every 'Big buisness Server OS' running, that same business has several thousand PCs that they're not upgrading to Vista. On top of that, those large businesses don't pay the one time, $350 or whatever liscence you pay to use your Windows PC at home. They pay MS many times that in seat liscences, plus an annual support fee, so that if something goes wrong, they have a contract to make MS liable for the something that went wrong. When I get home, I'll dig through the MS investor information and see if I can extract the relative percentage of home vs business customers - but the legacy issues of Vista have to be costing MS a fortune.

PS: The Microsoft site crashes IE 6.

[Fallakin Kuvari]

I used Vista for a few months, but after several lag issues in game related to windows media center running updates as well as some other minor vista updates without any easy way to disable them I switched back to XP.

[Ddrak]

Upgrading to Vista is stupid. If you're going to get it then you should do it with a new computer - it's just not worth the money otherwise.

Business adoption is a tricky thing to measure. I think I saw somewhere that the Vista numbers are about on the same path as the XP numbers. I know my last workplace had only just finished its official migration to Win2000 in late 2007...

Dd

[Klast Brell]

I was the vista Ginny pig at my office. I say was because we took it off my machine.

The problems were the same ones I mentioned in my previous post. Incompatible with older mission critical software (ended up running XP in a virtual machine to be able to use one program) Other than that it ran well until we removed Symantec and installed Trend Micro. At that point everything went to hell in a hand basket. Outlook started refusing to acknowledge attachments. Computer would spontaneously crash off every few hours as if it was overheating. Yup it was probably removing Symantec that did it. Its well known in certain circles for fucking yup your computer if you uninstall it. But that was the last straw. Rather than reinstall Vista and the XP virtual machine we just installed XP.

[Rsak]

The big factors in IT departments will be the support/compatibility of the tools they use like office, antivirus, and remote access tools. Past that it is just the resources needed to make the transition and those are always in short supply.

My company certainly has no incentive to roll it out, but they are forced to support it since of the 5 product lines we sell only 1 supports Vista at this time. In the coming months or year that will change and it will be a phased roll out where newer computers will have it rather then trying to upgrade the older computers.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

I've been using Vista x64 for a couple months now and I'm really happy with it. People say it's bloated, but they said that about XP, and honestly my quad core CPU sits at 0% most of the time so it's nice and perky. The sidebar and aero glass have really grown on me. I can't see why people despise it so much. I can see waiting a year or so for any OS to stabilize before running it, but Vista's kinks are pretty much all worked out and it's a good OS.

I also run MS Virtual PC 2007 x64 with a copy of my development environment in Windows XP, and my SQL Server 2005 in a Server 2k3 virtual machine. That took care of the few campatibility issues I was having. I can quick boot my copy of XP in about 5 seconds, hit right-alt-ENTER and I'm full screen in XP and can't tell the difference.

[Partha]

I like Vista x64 as well, with one exception.

Can Adobe get off their asses and patch Flash for x64, already?

[Kulaf]

It's an effective campaign to run against Apple.....because let's face it Apples adverts are pretty much bold face lies.

[Minute]

I like Vista x64 as well, with one exception.

Can Adobe get off their asses and patch Flash for x64, already?

They really are super fucking slacking as of late. I've had a AVCHD camera for almost a year now and the fuck sucks still won't release a patch/update to allow premier to edit it. There's a 3rd party plugin you can buy for 500 bucks, but you know what fuck that?

Oh and this "experiment" doesn't sound like much of one at all. Each one of those videos seemed to be completely geared towards the people having the same reaction. You ever watch Bullshit? They do the same thing, when people think they are supposed to like a product they are being shown, they do. Never seen anyone in the crowd on one of those Ronco things stand up and go "This is a piece of shit!"

I will say that Vista would have gotten a lot less flack had they not put the min system requirements so low that everyone and their brother slapped it on some old piece of shit and then cry about why this thing is so damn slow. And it IS slow as fuck on most of the machines they shoved it on.

[Ickhor]

The question about enterprise Vista adoption is not a "Why not?" question, it's "Why?".

Before even enumerating risks of Vista for the corporate desktop (legacy app functionality, user training, how much new hardware will we have to buy, etc), we must first understand what benefit Vista brings to this environment.

And really, I don't think there is one.

You have to realize that the cost for switching desktop operating systems for a large corporation is huge. Even disregarding the price of licensing, it's a project which requires hundreds of man hours and continuous support. And in the current environment, there is little benefit. There has to be a compelling reason to switch. And right now, there isn't. This is why Linux will never make it to the corporate desktop, at least for the forseeable future.

There is simply no reason to adopt Vista that counterbalances the cost of switching. XP is supported and stable. Everyone is used to it, and support staff knows it like the back of their hand. Bolt-on endpoint security packages are much cheaper than switching to Vista.




In my personal life, I just bought a new laptop that came preloaded with Vista. I have had Apples for the last five years but this one was a much better price/performance ratio than Apple could offer, so effectively this is the first Windows PC I had owned in quite a while.

I didn't see anything wrong with Vista as far as bugs, compatibility, ETC, but maybe I wasn't using it as hard as some people were. I did experience "bells and whistles overload", and it felt like it was much too big an operating system for me. I'm sure that I could have configured Vista to be minimal enough for my liking given enough time, but I just decided to take the easy road and install ubuntu/XP dual boot.

Which brings me to the point that XP is a bitch on new computers. First, I couldn't install because XP didn't support my PCI-Express card. So I had to go to the office (had already installed ubuntu over Vista so I couldn't have done this on the same laptop) and use the computer there to build a slipstream XP CD with SP2 installed. Then I got that home, and turns out it can't install because XP doesn't support my SATA hard drive. Turns out, you can also slipstream a SATA driver in there. So I went back to the office and brought home the THIRD version of the XP CD, and it installed. Now I just had to get drivers, and of course nothing is found by default. The laptop manufacturer didn't even have XP drivers on their site. I had to download the spec sheet, and go to the hardware manufacturers sites for about 8 different components, and download and install each of them.

Thing is, five years ago, XP would have "just worked" and I would have been fiddling for days to get everything working in Linux. This time, I was fiddling for days to get everything working in XP and Linux just worked. Now, this doesn't speak to the quality of the operating systems (XP is an old release, the release of Linux that I had came out in April), but it's a funny reversal.

Important to note that my frustrations with XP seem to conflict with my praise of it in the enterprise environment, but really they don't apply there. With master images and standardized configurations, fiddling with drivers isn't something you have to do very frequently.

[Rsak]

There has to be a compelling reason to switch. And right now, there isn't.

Not true. The Enterprise level is going to be driven by the productivity you get from Outlook, Office, and business centric programs like Dynamics. As more and more programs interface with services such as Sharepoint you are going to have businesses convert more and more to Vista and Server 2008 Operating Systems.

[Ickhor]

But what functionality do Outlook, office and Sharepoint offer on Vista that they don't offer on XP?


I've never heard of anyone that actually used Dynamics in production -- but I can't imagine it not working with XP.

[Ddrak]

Vista offers about as much over XP for the corporate environment that XP offered over Win2k. There's quite a few improvements in the group policy stuff, and a bunch of work been done that lets you run stuff in a non-admin environment but really nothing that would be a compelling reason to shift from a *working* XP environment. I think you'll just see the same thing happen with Vista as happened with XP - companies will slowly introduce it as an option and then when they reach a critical mass they'll switch over and use the new stuff it does provide. Won't happen for another 24 months or so though.

Dd

[Kulaf]

There has to be a compelling reason to switch. And right now, there isn't.

Not true. The Enterprise level is going to be driven by the productivity you get from Outlook, Office, and business centric programs like Dynamics. As more and more programs interface with services such as Sharepoint you are going to have businesses convert more and more to Vista and Server 2008 Operating Systems.

Microsoft has already committed to a new workstation OS by 2010. There is really no compelling reason for any enterprise to migrate to Vista.

[Ddrak]

Microsoft has already committed to a new workstation OS by 2010. There is really no compelling reason for any enterprise to migrate to Vista.

Huh?

There'll be exactly the same reasons to not migrate to Windows 7 as there are to not migrate to Vista as there were to not migrate to XP as there were to not migrate to 2000, etc.

The "next release date" has virtually nothing to do with enterprises migrating or not migrating.

Dd