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Yes, and to make it up to consumers, they overcharge you like a beast.
Apple seems to be doing just fine releasing new versions of MacOS X every couple years. they do have the advantage of being smaller, and not having to code for wildly varying hardware configs, but their OS seems to improve dramatically with each release. i am looking forward to Leopard next month, even though i only use it at work.
Yes, and to make it up to consumers, they overcharge you like a beast.
they charge less for OS software than MS.Yes, and to make it up to consumers, they overcharge you like a beast.
I should hope so, since their computers have horrible bang for the buck. And should we even talk about their peripherals? Who makes a $600 cell phone/mp3 player without a removable battery?
some of their products are a bit overpriced, but even dell's prices aren't much or any better when configured equally. granted, built component by component it would be much cheaper, but not everyone can do that. the iPhone is now $200 cheaper, and is a badass phone. i used to bag on Apple, but they make quality products and market them to their target audience, which can afford them. , even id software does most of their development on macs these days.I should hope so, since their computers have horrible bang for the buck. And should we even talk about their peripherals? Who makes a $600 cell phone/mp3 player without a removable battery?
Microsoft bows to pressure on XP
Customer demand has forced Microsoft to extend the shelf life of Windows XP by five months.
Microsoft was scheduled to stop selling the six-year-old operating system on 30 January 2008 to leave the field clear for Vista.
Now the date on which many sellers of XP will no longer be able to offer it has been lengthened to 30 June 2008.
Microsoft said the change was to help those customers that needed more time to make the switch to Vista.
Sales profile
In a statement Mike Nash, Microsoft's Windows product manager, said: "...maybe we were a little ambitious to think that we would need to make Windows XP available for only a year after the release of Windows Vista."
He added that most of the other operating systems that Microsoft has produced were available for about two years after a new version shipped.
The newest Microsoft operating system, Windows Vista, had a staged release between November 2006 and late January 2007.
In some quarters Vista had a lukewarm response and in April 2007 PC maker Dell was forced by customers to re-start sales of computers with XP installed. In January of that year the computer firm switched to Vista on almost all of the machines aimed at home users.
Software giant Microsoft does run a scheme that lets people rollback installation of Vista business and ultimate edition to Windows XP by ringing a customer support centre and getting an activation code.
Microsoft denied that the policy change was due to slow demand for Vista. Mr Nash said that up to the summer of 2007 Microsoft had sold more than 60 million licences for Vista. This put it on track to be the fastest selling operating system in Microsoft's history.
The XP date change applies to retailers and other manufacturers who sell Microsoft products. Independent firms that use Windows XP when installing and maintaining computers and networks for businesses can continue to offer it as an option until 30 January 2009.
Microsoft is also extending the availability of the cut-down version of XP, called Starter Edition, until 30 June 2010. It said this was because it was seeing increased demand for the software to run on low-powered devices made specifically for the developing world.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/7017624.stm
Published: 2007/09/28 09:11:17 GMT
© BBC MMVII
And don't get me started on Office 2007...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/26/excel_2007_bug/
Steve Perry is talking about software sharing. The Game and program companies are in bed with MS and the Vista is set up so it is harder to use someone else's Game or program without alerting the manufactures and then they can monitor and shut down your system if your serial number to your Windows does not match up to the serial number given when you registered or activated your game or software. XP does not have that feature. Maybe you could use some foil yourself.
In. I just fried my laptop, and had to pull strings with my Dell-employed sister to get a replacement running XP.
When you say fried, can you go into a little more detail? thanks.
Not fried the way you usually mean.When you say fried, can you go into a little more detail? thanks.
Actually, it's an incredibly embarassing story. I'm sure you wouldn't be interested.
In
You actually liked this happening?
For me, that happened a lot more with NT than with 98, even though it was supposed to be the other way around.You actually liked this happening?
Vista Resistance: Why XP Is Still So Strong
If you still don't see a need to upgrade, you're not alone--many people are opting for XP even on new PCs. We'll show you how the Vista transition will become smoother.
Erik Larkin, PC World
Tuesday, September 25, 2007 10:00 PM PDT
Windows Vista is facing stiff compe ion from an unlikely source: Windows XP.
The six-year-old operating system is showing surprising strength more than half a year after the full launch of its successor. In April, Dell acknowledged continued XP demand and resumed offering XP as an option on new systems. In July, Microsoft chief financial officer Chris Liddell ratcheted up the percentage of OS sales the company expects XP to account for in fiscal year 2008 from 15 percent to 22 percent. Finally, in August, Microsoft announced an XP Service Pack 2c release that does nothing more than add new Windows XP product keys so the company can keep selling the OS to businesses through January 31, 2009.
In addition, customers who purchase a Vista machine from Dell, HP, or Lenovo (among other vendors) can use a vendor-supplied XP Pro recovery disc to replace the Vista operating system on their system with XP Pro.
The wait-and-see approach of Mark Sanford, a 40-year-old software developer in San Francisco, seems typical of many users. Sanford's PC--with a 3-GHz CPU, 2GB of memory, and a 256MB video card--could handle Vista, but he says he has no plans to upgrade from XP. Sanford says he's gotten to know XP's idiosyncrasies, and has his network and software running smoothly on the aging OS. "XP is plenty good enough," he says. So nothing is pushing him away from XP, and likewise nothing is pulling him strongly to Vista. "The Aero interface is beautiful," he says, but "When I look at Vista, there's really nothing there that's a must-have kind of feature."
Behind the Pace
Certainly sales of Vista aren't blowing away XP in stores. Chris Swenson, director of software industry analysis for the NPD Group, says that, from January through July of this year, XP sales accounted for a healthy 42.3 percent of online and brick-and-mortar retail OS sales. By contrast, from January through July of 2002, after XP's launch in October the year prior, Windows 98 accounted for just 23.1 percent of retail sales. (Windows Me launched after Windows 98, but it didn't supplant the older OS.)
Of course, retail sales are only part of the story. With PC prices dropping over the past few years, and with Vista's higher hardware requirements, it's a "no-brainer," according to Swenson, for many people to buy a new PC rather than upgrade an old one. And the large majority of Vista users get the OS on their new systems.
( boutons: the OTC sale of an MS OS has always a very tin %age of total MS sales. The next MS OS is always fatter and slower, disqualifying existing most hardware as too weak. MS's monopoly OS/Office abusive profits come almost exclusively from the DOS/Windows tax)
Still, PCWorld.com visitors don't seem to be in any rush to switch to Vista. Our traffic numbers show Vista machines accounting for just 10 percent of the traffic to our site during September (see "Vista vs. XP After 8 Months").
Dell, which offers a choice of Vista or XP on its new computers, is staying close-lipped about how many XP computers it sells compared with Vista. But Mic e Pearcy, manager of the global marketing software team at Dell, confirms that the company is seeing the same trend as Microsoft: XP sales will be higher than expected during its next fiscal year.
Apple Impact?
XP satisfaction might keep many people from picking up a Vista box at the store, but another, more surprising factor may be leading others to buy a new copy of XP instead of Vista: namely, Apple.
While Windows PCs still outnumber Macs by a large margin, the latter are becoming much more popular. Stephen Baker, another analyst with the NPD Group, notes that more than one in six laptops sold at retail are MacBooks. Those figures don't include direct sales from huge vendors like Dell; if they did, Apple's market share would shrink significantly. Nevertheless, the statistic underscores that many people are buying Macs.
In years past, switching to a Mac meant saying goodbye to all of your Windows software. But today's Intel-based Macs can happily run Vista or XP, either natively with Apple's Boot Camp or in virtualized form with Parallels or VMWare Fusion--if the new Mac buyer also purchases a copy of Windows.
That's just what Sanford's mother did recently, he says, when she bought a new MacBook, intending to run Windows on it as well. Given the choice between a copy of Vista that may or may not run all of her current Windows software, and a cheaper copy of XP that definitely will, she opted for XP.
Hurdles for Gamers
Similarly, many gamers are choosing the supposedly outdated OS for new purchases. Dell's Pearcy says that a large majority of consumers buying new PCs decide on Vista, but that the choosy gaming crowd is one niche group that seems to prefer XP. One reason, she says, is the lack of games that take advantage of Vista's DirectX 10. Also, the normal performance and compatibility issues encountered with a new OS might merely annoy an everyday user, but to gamers looking for top speed, they're a killer.
For example, older games that use DirectSound 3D got short shrift in the new OS, since Vista lacks the audio feature entirely. (And without support for that API, sound cards capable of accelerating DirectSound lost much of their utility.)
Newer games using the OpenAL standard that Vista supports won't suffer, but older favorites such as Blizzard's Diablo 2 require a software workaround from Creative Labs to run with surround-sound effects--or in some cases, to run at all.
Transmuting Sound
Creative's ALchemy software for older games translates the games' DirectSound output into OpenAL. Having to use ALchemy is a minor annoyance, but absent some compelling reason to switch to Vista, it's one that most gamers would rather avoid. Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director at Jupiter Research, says that he isn't surprised to see many people still choosing Windows XP over Vista.
"Microsoft's compe ion is always what their last operating system revision was," he says. "And in this case, XP was pretty good."
Gartenberg doesn't see the same kind of "burning drive" to upgrade from XP that many people had when upgrading from Windows Me, for instance. He notes that people lined up to buy XP; but now, "consumers and businesses have learned to be a little hesitant about adopting new products."
Vista SP1 Is Coming
And businesses are understandably hesitant. Vista's improved security and other features could be a boon to business, but IT staffs that have spent the past six years smoothing out an XP network and training users are loath to consider upgrading to a new OS before it has had much time to settle.
"Any number of people are saying, 'Wait for SP1,'" Gartenberg points out.
Dell officials echo that observation. "We're hearing that from our customers today--that they're waiting for SP1 as a signal of code stability," Dell's Pearcy says. "That's historically very much in line with what has happened in every major OS transition."
But such waiting now has an end date, since Microsoft announced that it will release a final SP1 for Vista in the first quarter of 2008. That will follow a September release of an SP1 beta, giving on-the-ball companies time to test its many compatibility and performance fixes.
According to Microsoft's overview do ent for the SP1 beta, Vista's first service pack will offer improvements for security, reliability, and performance, and more support for emerging hardware and standards. In addition, the company will continue to introduce drivers to support more devices, bumping Vista's count from 1.7 million in January 2008 to 2.2 million in July. But SP1 "does not deliver substantial new operating system features," according to the do ent.
BitLocker Drive Encryption will receive an upgrade, and security companies will get long-awaited programming interfaces to work with the 64-bit version's kernel patch protection. Microsoft also says that SP1 will boost reliability on systems upgraded to Vista from XP, and that it will offer better compatibility with printer drivers.
Performance Tweaks
After the release of SP1, Vista should be faster at copying and extracting files, according to Microsoft, and should wake more quickly from Hibernate and Resume modes. Company engineers should have corrected a bug involving slow network file-share browsing, too, as well as the occasional 10-second delay before a password prompt pops up when you press <Ctrl>-<Alt>-<Delete> to log in after resuming your PC.
Also, we may see further Vista-focused game development after SP1 adds support for Direct3D 10.1, which expands the API to allow game developers to "better take advantage of a new generation of Direct3D graphics hardware," according to Microsoft's SP1 overview.
So what does all of this mean for Microsoft? Though the company might not have liked adjusting its 2008 forecast to account for more people buying XP, CFO Liddell says that the expected income from OS sales "is still exactly the same," and Redmond's bottom line should be fine. "We tend to get paid either way," Liddell says.
These fixes, along with the many others promised for SP1, may suffice to lure current consumer and business holdouts to the new operating system. But come January, you may not have much of a choice for new computers, even if you're still on the fence. Pearcy says that for Dell customers, "XP as a readily available OS will come to an end" next January for consumer PCs, in keeping with Microsoft's current plans. Businesses will have a wider window: The new SP2c build of Windows XP will be available through January 2009.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,13...l?tk=nl_esxnws
Windows XP SP3 to Include Some Vista Features
A Web site that leaked details of Windows XP Service Pack 3 claims that the update includes several new features, including some borrowed from Windows Vista.
Gregg Keizer, Computerworld
Tuesday, October 09, 2007 12:00 PM PDT
A Web site that leaked details of Windows XP Service Pack 3 over the weekend claimed that the update includes several new features, including some borrowed from Windows Vista.
According to NeoSmart Technologies, Windows XP SP3 build 3205, which was released to beta testers on Sunday, includes four new features among the 1,000-plus individual hot fixes and patches that have been issued since XP2's debut three years ago.
Features backported from Vista, said NeoSmart, include Network Access Protection (NAP), an enterprise policy enforcement technology that inspects client PCs before they access a corporate network, then updates the machines if necessary or blocks them if they don't meet specified security criteria.
Other additions range from a kernel module containing several encryption algorithms that can be accessed by third-party developers, to a new Windows activation model that doesn't require users to enter a product key.
Microsoft had previously announced SP3 support for NAP, which is part of Windows Vista and will be included in the not-yet-finalized Windows Server 2008.
Windows XP SP3, which Microsoft has said will be released early in 2008, will be one more move by the developer to extend the lifespan of the six-year-old operating system.
Last month, for example, Microsoft gave Windows XP a five-month reprieve by pushing back the end of retail sales and sales of XP-powered PCs by large resellers to June 30, 2008.
And last week, Microsoft debuted a new "get-legal" program that lets companies purchase large quan ies of Windows XP Professional licenses through their usual resellers.
Microsoft was not immediately available for comment on the leak, or the new features touted by NeoSmart.
Blizz to call Bull in 3..................2.............
only reason to upgrade for me is dx10.
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13846_1-981...g=2547-1_3-0-5
November 14, 2007 4:50 PM PST
Vista's biggest problem is Windows XP
Posted by Dave Rosenberg 2 comments
Computerworld reports on a recent survey of nearly 600 U.S. and European companies that have more than 1,000 employees, 84% of all their PCs now run Windows XP, up from 67% the year before."
That sounds pretty good for the Windows monopoly, right? So, one could assume that Vista should start to creep into those numbers.
Nearly a third of the polled businesses -- 32% to be exact -- said they would begin deploying Vista by the end of 2008, while another 17% said they would start in 2009 or 2010.
Still good right?
But more than half of all companies remain skittish about Vista, according to Forrester's data.
What's interesting is that many open source companies find their biggest compe ion to be themselves--that is, the free version of their products. Microsoft is competing with is the absorbed-cost version of Windows XP that customers already have. But XP wasn't actually free. Customers were bonked on the head to move from W2K (and I would say it was a good upgrade) and now are being strong-armed to upgrade to Vista which has minimal upside.
Vista simply isn't compelling enough to upgrade.
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