Microsoft Feared Mac Vs. Vista In '05 652
CWmike writes "Gregg Keizer sifted through many threads of e-mails released under the 'Vista Capable' lawsuit to dig up this jewel...More than a year before Windows Vista's release — and long before Apple started poking fun at the OS — Microsoft officials were already worried about comparisons between Mac OS X and Vista. An e-mail thread from October 2005 showed that an article in the Wall Street Journal by Walt Mossberg grabbed the attention of managers at Microsoft. In a column headlined What PC to Buy If You Are Planning On a Vista Upgrade, Mossberg alarmed one Windows manager who forwarded a bit from the column.... 'You won't have to worry about Vista if you buy one of Apple Computer's Macintosh computers, which don't run Windows,' Mossberg had written. 'Every mainstream consumer doing typical tasks should consider the Mac. Its operating system, called Tiger, is better and more secure than Windows XP, and already contains most of the key features promised for Vista.' Warrier added a comment of his own: 'A premium experience as defined by Walt = Apple. This is why we need to address [the column].'"
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:5, Informative)
Re:OS X is no longer the only problem (Score:4, Informative)
In 2005, Mac OS X was available and rating "better" as a desktop environment in many places, but in order to "upgrade" to OS X, it required purchase of all new hardware.
by 2008, Mac had adopted Intel x86-based processors and expanded support into the realm formerly controlled only by PC.
You really mean in 2001 Mac OS X was available and by 2005 Mac had adapted Intel processors - right? Your first 2 points confused the hell out of me.
Re:As desktop support... (Score:5, Informative)
there should be an oversight committee to determine if a Mac is a necessary item
I'm sorry, that's just stupid. If a researcher feels they'll will be more productive using a mac with windows under emulation for the apps that need it who are you to judge?
I use a mac in a research setting at Purdue and run windows for a handful of Apps I rarely use. I probably fire windows up once every couple of months. I used to use it more frequently but apps like SAS, SPSS, and the windows version of Powerpoint are offered over the web via a CITRIX client so I don't need to waste disk space installing those apps locally anymore. However, if their had been the kind of unnecessary oversight you are suggesting I'd be SOL.
I get the impression from your post that you work for the researchers, but not as a researcher yourself. You are poorly equiped to decide which tools would best benefit the researcher unless you are the PI in question.
Re:I feel like the more people that use MAC... (Score:4, Informative)
mplayer -ontop -cache 102400 $drag and drop video here from NFS share$
Only way to watch videos in bed/couch. Never have to worry about Firefox or what ever being in front of the video. Caches enough to watch the movie without hiccups.
Although aalib gives new meaning to ASCII Porn.
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:3, Informative)
Only on hardware that doesn't have XP drivers (or a misconfigure xp since it has very few drivers out of the box)...
Once you have the proper drivers for your hardware XP just walks all over vista on any machine.
Re:Broken premise (Score:2, Informative)
They give them time, wait for bug fixes and evidence that the platform is stable. With Vista, that never happened, so they didn't upgrade.
How much have you used Vista, exactly? That's a pretty bold assertion to make considering that I haven't seen it crash once, it runs everything I work on well (programming, games, various music applications to record my guitar music). Additionally, I like it MORE than XP (I use both operating systems).
Is Vista perfect? Nope. No OS is. But it's not the horror that many people try to make it out to be.
Re:I feel like the more people that use MAC... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, what's not compatible with Vista 64? What's wrong with 100% working video drivers that install and function for nVidia and ATI devices exactly the same as the 32 bit drivers? I also suggest you try comparing Vista and XP boxes after a month of use. XP slows down, Vista gets faster. After even a day of use, Vista will be faster at loading some applications (at least Firefox, Word, Trillian for me). Vista will typically have lower average framerates by 0-5% as long as you run a DX9 version of whatever you're playing in Vista. If you use DX10, in most cases you'll suffer by 10-50%. App productivity benchmarks like running PS filters will probably show a very small XP advantage. Differences are negligible on most cases, but it's true that a few albatrosses are still out there, unaddressed.
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:4, Informative)
The key here is the phrase 'on the same hardware'. As operating systems do more, they take more hardware to perform adequately.
If Vista were actually doing more for the user than XP, then people wouldn't be quite so upset.
But, most of what makes Vista slow are either bugs (file copy bug, poor algorithm used by SuperFetch that actually slows down real-world usage, etc.) or things the user doesn't want, like DRM or the extra pseudo-security features that don't really do anything, since there are still exploits from the Win2K days that work on an out-of-the-box Vista install.
Re:Microsoft Created Much of the Comparison (Score:1, Informative)
I'd say OS X is pretty trim, actually.
Out of the box, you have a bunch of BSD command line utilities and typical server software found in Linux and the BSDs. That's a good chunk of the size. Then there are actual useful programs included, like a general disk utility with disk imaging.
Ruby, Python, PHP and Perl scripting is possible right out of the box. It is still smaller than Vista Ultimate's 14GB footprint, which doesn't really give you much more than file exploration, a browser and a media player.
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:5, Informative)
Not necessarily. MacOS X, 10.2 was faster than 10.1, and 10.3 faster than 10.2, on the same hardware. It wasn't until 10.4 that you actually started seeing a performance hit on G3 and slower G4 computers.
Re:I feel like the more people that use MAC... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Vista the bloated pig (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OS X is no longer the only problem (Score:3, Informative)
Wow. You mean MS might have to continue to limp along with a mere 91.8 percent market share!?
Balmer must be totally losing bowel control over the whopping 0.63% of users who roll with some flavor of Linux.
(Going by web-use stats, Linux is currently in 4th place behind "other", but don't let the numbers get in the way of a good story. Curl up with your ragged copy of In the Beginning There Was the Command Line and you'll feel better about the inevitable Free Software revolution.)
I'm not quite sure if you're trolling or just completely misrepresenting what this conversation is about. We're talking about the adaptation of Windows Vista, not MS on the whole. Within that 91.8% of the market share you quoted, there are a very large number of people who aren't willing to switch to Vista from XP and because of the poor support and large system requirements there is a lot of attrition to other operating systems.
Even the article you quoted says:
Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows still dominates, with a 91.8% share as measured by the Web metrics company. But it lost ground in December, as it has for seven of the past 11 months.
.63% share)
The Mac OS share, by contrast, grew 7.4% in the past month, nearly double November's rate.[...]
The Linux operating system also showed strong growth (up better than 10% to hit a
This is also what we're talking about... the change rate, not the market share.
Re:features myth (Score:2, Informative)
Except that Apple is not working on adding new features. OS X 10.6 (a.k.a. Snow Leopard) is going to be a performance upgrade [apple.com]. Features aren't the focus of the release.
Re:Enough already! (Score:3, Informative)
As of Leopard, OS X is certified UNIX.
Previous versions had full or nearly full UNIX underpinnings, it just didn't meet certification requirements.
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:3, Informative)
You realize your perl cache has overhead and the execution time is actually a negative there, as miniscule as it is. Vista's method doesn't do things like hit the FS every few minutes "just to see how it's going" when it does prefetch.
The reason people complain about Vista's memory usage is because they see this:
Physical Memory (MB)
Total: 3069
Cached: 1794
Free: 13
And they think "OH MY GOD IT'S USING ALMOST ALL OF IT."
No.
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:4, Informative)
I, for one, would welcome our upgrade treadmill overlords more if I were delivered faster performance with my upgrade.
Re:I feel like the more people that use MAC... (Score:3, Informative)
Except that Apple *never* uses "MAC" to refer to their machines or software in its literature anywhere. It is always "Mac" or "Apple Mac" or "Apple Macintosh" or sometimes just "Macintosh" but never "MAC".
The only exception would be if it appeared in an all-caps paragraph or something, which the original post clearly is not.
Re:Why People Said No to Vista (Score:1, Informative)
This exactly the reason why I ditched Windows for OS X from the get go. I had not upgraded to XP, and was still using Win98 for audio production when the choice to upgrade to XP or switch platforms became available. With a background of always building my own systems, and then working 75% of the time to get the OS out of the way of production (and this had been going on since Win 3.1 days, when getting the timing of MIDI to not be hampered by the OS was an ongoing chore...), the choice was an easy one. I would have invested heavily in Apple at the time had I the money, as I knew OS X was going to be a great option and savior for the company down the road.
Multimedia my ass. MS couldn't multimedia themselves out a brown paper bag. They have nothing to offer but half baked products delivered by the likes of marketers and other assorted bean-counters. This weakness is the reason they fear.
Delusional to the last.
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Got that backwards (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps the example that causes the most confusion is the missing Word document. When you save a document attached to an e-mail on a Mac, by default it saves to /username/Documents, which is a single click to get to in Finder. Compare that to C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLKD3.
Disclaimer: For all I know, Vista has removed this ridiculous obfuscation. Having not used Vista, at home or at work, I don't know and don't really care. :D
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:5, Informative)
On another note:
Windows 2000 - Version 5.0
Windows XP - Version 5.1
Windows 2003 - Version 5.2
Hmm, seems like somebody was barking up the wrong tree...
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:3, Informative)
Not necessarily. MacOS X, 10.2 was faster than 10.1, and 10.3 faster than 10.2, on the same hardware. It wasn't until 10.4 that you actually started seeing a performance hit on G3 and slower G4 computers.
What you say is true, but to be fair MacOS X was so unbelievably slow to start out with that it was pretty easy to find places to optimize.
In contrast, Windows 2000 was pretty darned speedy and optimized already. XP slowed it up a bit, but mostly with eye candy that could be turned off. IIRC, it's the same basic thing under the hood.
And I'm saying this as someone with 2 Macs, so this is not intended as a flame. I love OSX.
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, but how much time do you spend loading apps vs using them ?
It's true. I find OSX to be so slow opening (some) apps that I just leave them open all the time. After my computer's been up for a month or so they pretty much are all running. Looking down my dock right now there are 15 apps running. Generally I find the VM swapping preferable to the bouncy bouncy in the dock.
Certainly application startup has almost no bearing on my choice in OS, though. It'd have to be really obscene to sway me.
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:1, Informative)
Don't be dumb. x64 is Windows XP Pro x64 edition [microsoft.com].
Gee, random dude on Slashdot, or Microsoft's own website? That's a tough call.
Re:Broken premise (Score:1, Informative)
Call me a MS fanboy all you want but here goes...
Your mother purchased a pre-built computer with Vista already installed...
You were cursing at it while "setting it up..."
Was the keyboard hard to plug in? Did it not boot fast enough for you? Did you find it difficult to adjust the monitor to a comfortable brightness level?
Or did you actually have trouble with drivers etc? And if so, why aren't you complaining to the pc builder? Why is it Microsoft's fault, should they write drivers for every piece of hardware out there?
If you had maybe guided your mother on her purchase and had her acquire a pc with components from quality sources (which apple forces you to do) you would have had no issues.
If your argument is that she only needs a basic pc with which to email and web shop then why are you updating drivers in the first place, 2% better hotmail performance?
I work as a HP-UX/Linux sys admin and still run Vista at the house (I do have a play machine with Debian on it.) I have run Vista since the day of release and the only issue I have ever encountered was difficulty getting my older SoundBlaster card to work. Which was resolved within an hour of first boot by a google search.
Yes, file copying was slow for a while. I don't personally move large files around on my pc randomly and without cause.
The backup features are nearly idiot proof (I run Vista Business), save for really imaginative idiots.
The biggest complaint most people seem to have grounds for is UAC, which is one click... the ONLY reason unix/linux based OSes are more secure is because the average knowledge level of the users is exponentially higher than your average home web surfer...
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:3, Informative)
I told him that he should consider downgrading to XP or moving to a Mac
FYI: Apple is starting to implement HDCP/DPCP DRM as well. [arstechnica.com]
Re:News??? (Score:3, Informative)
Mac locks down their software just as much as Microsoft
"Mac" is a product. Apple is the company selling it.
Apple don't lock users into software. Look at every Apple application. All the file formats are open formats. Hell, most of them are gzipped text or XML files.
The OS is locked to Mac hardware through the weakest of chains, so there's some truth to your comment.
I find the whole "Apple is as bad as Microsoft" meme pretty sad. People have forgotten the criminal acts of Microsoft, and assuming that Apple would do the same. Not that the company is completely without any stains, but seriously people, think before you post!
Re:I haven't had any problems... (Score:2, Informative)
uh a Mac can't do what I need it to do.
A Mac can't dual boot with XP? When did they take that feature away?