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].'"
What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:1, Insightful)
What Microsoft should really have considered was why, even before they released it, customers were ready to say NO to Vista.
It's been a huge albatross around their neck. It's Windows ME 2.0, has gotten the same response (and even MS eventually had to list Windows ME as "Do Not Use") and yet the consumer is getting fucked by MS's trying to kill off XP and force them to install the Vista Virus instead.
The "Aero" interface is a standing joke; the supposed "security" of Vista is laughable compared to simply keeping XP properly updated and behind a NAT at home; and the performance hit it takes to run is incredible. Vista is half as fast as XP on the same hardware, that's reason enough not to use it even before all the other crap and nonsense.
News??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh... this is news? Any good businessman always watches the competition and tries to estimate how many customers might switchover. That's not "fear". That's just good old commonsense.
Broken premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is just plain wrong. Consumers don't upgrade operating systems. They use the one that came with the box until they need a new box. Techno-nerds and enterprises upgrade operating syatems. In the case of Vista, enterprises have stayed away in droves.
Tiget may be better than Vista, but (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm the kind of person who hates it when politicians run smear campaigns and TV ads slandering the opposition, and for Apple to be doing this for their TV ads seems unprofessional and childish.
If you want to highlight your product, great! Do so, and let the product speak for itself. People who are so fed up with Microsoft will see a commercial highlighting the Mac's features, and they will generally go research it. I have been put off by the commercials, and any interest I genuinely had in getting a Mac was completely destroyed.
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:5, Insightful)
the supposed "security" of Vista is laughable
Excellent comment. Those of us who work in computer repair or who have porn-addicted friends know that getting malware on Vista is as easy as getting malware on any other version of Windows, the sole difference being that the UAC dialog(if enabled) pops up 5 times a second instead of 5 times a minute.
Vista is an epic fail! They moved everything around and added unnecessary menu options making navigation a nightmare for people familiar with prior versions. Bold moves in changing the layout for Vista and the latest Office, though it turned their user experience into a counterintuitive nightmare!
As desktop support... (Score:2, Insightful)
So working at a University, I'd like to say that we have a lot of people throwing a lot of money at Mac hardware, only to turn around and install Bootcamp or Parallels so they can run the science software needed to do their work and research. And they use federal grants to do this. I'm thinking there should be an oversight committee to determine if a Mac is a necessary item (it almost never is) or if Linux or Windows will do the job more efficiently (they usually do).
$12,000 dual quad core Mac that we had to spend two months rewriting code to compile that worked fine on an old Linux cluster. The professor could have gotten a lot more parallel processing power if he'd gone with a newer cluster rather than a single, decked out Mac.
Re:Broken premise (Score:5, Insightful)
And, as an aside, business do upgrade operating systems. But not immediately. 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.
OS X is no longer the only problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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. While technically you still need to upgrade to Mac hardware according to the Mac OS X EULA, the validity of that claim is currently being questioned. Additionally Ubuntu and other Linux distros that make setup easy and are very user-friendly have started spawning and are also beginning to take a significant chunk out of MS's market share.
There may have been signs of things to come in 2005, but thinks look even more bleak for MS now unless they can get things together with Vista or at least Windows 7.
Re:Trailing Edge Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft knows this and they know all about Tiger, they copied alot of it. What Microsoft was concerned about was rogue press saying things like Mossberg wrote. Anyone who knows technology over the last 20 years knows that Microsoft is a marketing company before they are a tech company and this email just shows that. 'Don't let the public know there is something better' is all this says and that is SOP for Microsoft. IMO
LoB
Vista the bloated pig (Score:5, Insightful)
Russell went on to defend Vista, specifically its ability to "run on a very wide-ranging set of systems from the minimally capable to the incredibly capable," he said. "Apple doesn't do that."
Riiiiight. Apple was able to slim down OS X to run on an ARM smartphone, can MS do the same with Vista ? Oh yeah that's right, they had to extend the life of XP just for the netbook market, cause there's no way Vista could run on that hardware, and they were afraid of Linux taking over.
I can't see how this guy could think that, did he not ever use Vista ?
Re:Broken premise (Score:3, Insightful)
shooting the messenger... (Score:5, Insightful)
"A premium experience as defined by Walt = Apple. This is why we need to address [the column]."
That suggests that when Microsoft received reports of a competitor offering a superior product that executives regarded the reports themselves as the problem and not Microsoft's deficient offerings; Warrier writes of addressing Mossberg's column, not of addressing the problems with Microsoft's planning and development processes which led them to an inferior market position.
Blaming someone outside the organization is smart corporate politics because it does not make enemies inside your own organization who might retaliate against you. But then maybe that is the problem with Microsoft management, that it is full of shrewd corporate ladder-climbing types instead of inspired artists and engineers.
Why People Said No to Vista (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft didn't sell the reason people needed Vista. They polished a dashboard up with some glassy looking graphics and slapped a pricetag on it. That's not relevant to 99% of users. Most people use their computers for the internet, or for writing letters. Could Vista do anything like that better than XP? No. And there's your answer.
If Microsoft wanted to sell Vista, they should have examined what the main concerns are of people and acted on them. Most people don't care about what is happening behind the scenes... that's what nerds are for. Most people care about what the computers can do for them.
Now if they wanted to sell Vista, they should have got Jerry Seinfeld to do the Vista commercials from the beginning, and keep Bill Gates out of them. Seinfeld would simply sell the reason people need to upgrade to Vista which is for security and for expanded multi-media capability.
Jerry could have also addressed most of the user objections to Vista openly and with a dash of dry comedy that people tend to admire in the comedian.
But they chose to do a faceless monolithic kind of ad campaign, to combat Apple's ads but that actually made people think about how good Apple is compared to windows which was the kicker-backfire!!!! OMG yes.
features myth (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Broken premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista Ultimate was what, like â600 retail when it first came out?
Re:News??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, there's a sense, at least to many on slashdot, that Microsoft owes its position not to good software, but to its monopoly status. Thus, if the MS execs are concerned about the competition, it means maybe the end of the windows domination is that much closer.
Broken ad campaign (Score:3, Insightful)
In the case of Vista, enterprises have stayed away in droves.
Which is a point I've been making for months to pro Vista people who don't understand why this is such a disaster and keep claiming "Vista isn't that bad." What they don't understand is that for the business market, Vista is extraordinarily bad!! That's extraordinarily bad for Microsoft, and which is their main source of income. Business are still buying XP licenses for new machines, but they aren't upgrading current machines to Vista because it's an admin nightmare and companies have lost complete trust in Vista.
Microsoft has then been trying to fix the problem by putting out odd consumer ads? The problem isn't primarily with consumers, which is why their ad campaign is broken, too.
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:2, Insightful)
Excuse me? I thought the people who work in computer repair ARE the ones with porn-addicted friends.
-cough- Geek Squad [slashdot.org]-cough-
Enough already! (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, I know this is Slashdot and all, but honestly I'm starting to get microsoft-vista-embarassing-email-story fatigue. Ever since the Vista class-action exposed all of these internal Microsoft emails, people have been cherry-picking emails and making them into full-blown stories for months it seems.
I'm no Microsoft apologist, it's just that it's starting to get old. Yes, we know Vista sucks. We know Microsoft felt the same way. We get it!! Please stop beating us over the head with it already.
Re:As desktop support... (Score:1, Insightful)
First, blaming Apple because whoever was making a purchase couldn't be bothered to grab an OS X machine and do a quick ./configure; make; makes no sense.
Second, if it is taking you two months to port to OS X, there is something seriously wrong with your code. No scientific app should suffer that lack of portability. And since there are many people using OS X in science (natively, not emulating windows), I'd say that two months and $12,000 spent to increase the population who can use your government grant supported software is time and money well spent.
Re:Their fears were justified. (Score:5, Insightful)
If Apple would simply allow their OS to run on generic PCs, Microsoft would have a true competitor.
If Apple would allow their OS to run on generic PCs, they would fall into a support hell.
Re:As desktop support... (Score:5, Insightful)
In general, funding oversight should focus on inputs and outputs, not process.
Assuming that the committee will know better than each and every researcher is a bad idea, and inputs and outputs are easy to measure, meaning that monitoring them will probably require less bureaucracy than making sure that all dollars are spent in 'approved' ways.
Re:Their fears were justified. (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree, though Apple naturally dropped the opportunity to really take on Microsoft. If Apple would simply allow their OS to run on generic PCs, Microsoft would have a true competitor.
This old canard again?
Nobody makes Big Money on desktop operating systems. Microsoft uses theirs to leverage sales of MS-Office and their enterprise solutions.
Apple uses theirs to sell hardware.
The only people who get worked up about the "OS wars" are fanboys. Everybody at Apple and Microsoft is too busy making money to care.
Re:Their fears were justified. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple makes their money as a hardware vendor. People would just pirate the OS, and everyone else would rather just run Windows on their PCs and have all their apps. Apple would fade away if you were running the company.
Oh, and the iPhone isn't going anywhere. THAT'S how Apple is taking on Microsoft--invading the mobile market where PCs are inevitably headed. Their laptop sales go up every year, and they have portable media and cell phones.
Re:Enough already! (Score:1, Insightful)
"Just make the machines shinier, those idiots will think it's a more powerful and configurable machine"
"Let's tell them it's Unix-like, they'll think it IS Unix!"
"Those ads were a great idea, even I can't find flaws with them!"
But if we did, I'm guessing that we'd suddenly have a host of Applogizers (get it? Apple+apologizers? Ha ha, my wit just cut my jugular) lining up to explain why those statements aren't really true or valid.
Please, corporations work like this, just stop already. Find something better to publish, like a Monty Python video.
Re:Their fears were justified. (Score:5, Insightful)
If Apple would simply allow their OS to run on generic PCs, Microsoft would have a true competitor.
People say this, but Apple would have to take on a lot of expense to support generic hardware. They'd have to massively upgrade their test procedures, spend huge amounts of development time on drivers, hire reams of new tech support... unless their market share spiked, there is no way that they could justify the expense. Either that or the "generic" OS would cost a lot more than it does today.
Apple is perfectly happy with their niche of selling only high-margin products. Dell has margins of under 5%, Apple is over 14%. MS is 29%, for comparison. Of course, Apple could never get to that high of a number since MS is only able to price gouge due to their monopoly. It would be kind of fun to see how cheap Windows got if Apple entered the marketplace. We're already seeing it in sub-notebooks where the monopoly was destroyed.
As a bonus, Apple doesn't get called "unstable" every time the crappy $300 Dell hardware flakes out.
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:3, Insightful)
Not Fear (Score:3, Insightful)
What you see here is an interest in the competition, a dialog to consider improving your own product in response to a competitor.
Sounds like the market actually working, but it's not fear.
Re:I feel like the more people that use MAC... (Score:5, Insightful)
MAC = Media Access Control
Mac = Short for Apple Macintosh.
My friend, I fear that the computer you chose to use will have no bearing on what people already think of your intelligence.
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:News??? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only people who care about such things as 'monopolistic software prisons' are geeks. A very small percentage of the overall population. The rest of the population just wants something that will work.
Macs work. PCs running Windows I must begrudge mostly work too.
Linux? meh
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:1, Insightful)
This.
UAC has got the whole security thing backwards. It has the computer asking "Am I allowed to do this ?". Of course you are as far as I am concerned, I just told you to do that!
Who buys a safe that asks a potential thief if you really want it to open ? A safe must only open to authorized personel, and those people have to prove they are authorized by entering a code. Same goes for UAC, you're asking the same person who's possibly trying to do harm if (s)he is allowed.
The question every sane OS is asking it's users when doing something dangerous is: "Are YOU allowed to do this ? Please prove so by entering the admin/root password".
What is the security team at Microsoft smoking, and where can I get some ?
Re:Vista the bloated pig (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not Fear (Score:3, Insightful)
What you see here is an interest in the competition, a dialog to consider improving your own product in response to a competitor.
That theory might hold more sway of Microsoft actually improved anything.
Re:As desktop support... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Obviously you're a PI, then. Most PIs seem to think that way. In my experience they are usually wrong, but that control is more important to them than results.
Believe me, you have no idea how many researchers think that throwing more CPUs or memory at the problem is the way to go even when the bottleneck is clearly disk speeds. The last guy I worked for wondered why I couldn't just compile (someone else's) Linux software for his Mac, since "it's all UNIX". This was in the G5 days, and based on my code review the data analysis code in question did assume little endianness, but hey, who cares about little things like that when it comes to crunching numbers, right?
In my (roughly ten years of) experience way too many researchers in general overestimate their technical skills. They think that because they know MATLAB or used UNIX twenty years ago and still know Pine that they "get" computers. They don't.
Furthermore, most PIs are pretty far removed from doing the actual work in their labs. Grad students and postdocs do most of the work and the PI evaluates the results. Who is really qualified to judge what kind of computers are necessary?
So in summary, if you're a PI, you probably aren't a computer expert. You're an expert on whatever you are researching (it's your "life's work") and everything else is a distant second. Meanwhile, folks like your IT guy really are computer experts, first and foremost. Seriously, unless you're a Linux kernel hacker or something, start consulting a computer expert on computer issues please!
Re:Tiget may be better than Vista, but (Score:3, Insightful)
I get the opposite reaction. I find Apple's ads cute, fun, and surprisingly truthful as Microsoft runs desperate "I'm a PC, so I'm nowhere near my computer" ads.
MS's first ad in that series I thought was brilliant. (The two guys in Apple's ads are nowhere near PC's either.) It was both a really positive message for MS and a really subtle but effective needling of Apple. It showed the diversity of PC users, with both regular and famous/creative people, and by extension implied pretty effectively that Apple users were all just bratty hipsters without ever even mentioning Apple or the Mac. It was kind of like that 30 minute Obama ad where he never once mentioned John McCain's name, because he didn't have to.
They've since stupidly retired that ad after only showing it for about 2 weeks, and have now jumped on the "user generated" bandwagon with these horrible ads filled with YouTube-quality videos made by a bunch of dorks sitting in front of their webcams. Stupid.
I do agree about the Apple ads, though. Much as I like the first MS ad in that series and thought it was an effective counter-argument, the Apple ads it was in response to are just as effective and funny in their own way. And the latest two Vista ones really hit home, because they are true - and I can identify with them now that I'm an unhappy Vista owner myself. (Though a Mac is not an alternative for me, as so much of my software is not available on Mac and I'm not about to buy it all again anyway.) I laughed out loud at the "advertising, advertising, advertising, fix Vista" one.
Good so ! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:4, Insightful)
OSX is often optimised for speed over successive releases... in fact one of the goals for snow leopard is improved performance.
It's something MS could probably learn from.. OTOH keeping everyone on the upgrade treadmill is worth it to them.
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:5, Insightful)
There are no intuitive interfaces.. everything it learned.
One thing that doesn't help is hiding options.. the original IBM style guides (that MS prety much stuck to until Vista) were clear that an option shouldn't appear and disappear as it's confusing.
Max. 'oops' points of cours goes to Office 2007 that manages to hide the file menu so successfully I've actually been called in to 'fix' a machine when 5 people in an office couldn't work out how to save a document.
Missing the point... (Score:2, Insightful)
Got that backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
OS X has a simple metaphor that exposes the underlying principles of computers in a way that average people can understand -- apps are files you drag from an archive to an HD to install for instance. That's the exact opposite of dumbing things down; it's making things clear. Windows, by contrast, hides the issues -- having programs you download actually be installers that download more files and install them to a non-obvious place, for instance. THIS is dumbing-down -- it leads to users that don't understand what they've just done, never mind how to solve problems. And don't get me started on how illogical having a "file" menu with an exit option is in a PC browser, or an anti-virus program. Macs make that app vs. file distinction much more sensible too.
Even worse, Macs can run XP (Score:5, Insightful)
'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.
When my wife was asked to do half her work from home (and be much more productive that commuting to the office, it turns out), she had to look into replacing her ancient (4 years old ;-) Windows box. It was running XP, and her office hasn't upgraded to Vista, so she was looking for a PC to run XP. She couldn't buy one, until she asked at an Apple store. They explained to her that she could indeed run XP on a Mac. She got an iMac, installed XP via Fusion, and it works fine. Now a number of other people at work want her to teach them how to do it.
This has gotta be one of the things that terrifies MS's management. They lost a customer to Apple because the customer couldn't use Vista (for work-related reasons), and a competitor's system can run a virtualized XP subsystem. You could probably do the same with Linux.
Back in the 1970s, when the VM OS was taking over the IBM mainframe world, IBM responded by adopting VM and supporting it. This radically improved the usefulness of IBM's mainframes to their customers, and helped them consolidate their stranglehold on the mainframe market. So far, MS has viewed virtualization as a threat to their business, and has tried to block it. Maybe we shouldn't tell them that they're making a huge mistake. If they keep fighting it, they'll never be able to duplicate the total takeover that IBM managed in the mainframe arena. Virtualization is just too useful to a large percent of the users. And if we can avoid that sort of monoculture in the desktop, laptop, etc parts of the industry, we'll have a much healthier industry that will continue to innovate.
So let's all encourage MS to continue to try to block this development. It's for the benefit of everyone (except for MS's main stockholders).
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:3, Insightful)
The same universe where windows 95 is faster than XP on a Pentium-MMX with 64mb of ram but not on a 2 processor system with 2 gigs of ram.
Re:Got that backwards (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe that Vista downloads to \Downloads. Its true path is still c:\Documents and Settings\\Documents\Download, but it is now only one click. Hallelujah! ...cept I run linux which is just dumps it to the user directory.
Not exactly (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless your wife installed a cracked version of XP she got off of Pirate Bay, Microsoft didn't lose a customer. I'm betting the license for the copy of XP she's running was paid for and did, in fact, generate a sale for MS. She probably also installed a paid for copy of Office as well.
Some PC manufacturer lost a sale but MS didn't. In fact, they probably made more money than they would have if they'd sold the OEM license.
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:3, Insightful)
As operating systems do more, they take more hardware to perform adequately.
I could actually argue that any properly programmed OS should perform it's usual tasks just as well as it's predecessor even if you add new bells and whistles to it. You simply optimize your current code to account for the minor branch in the code later that determines if a user wants to use the new feature. If the user decides to run that feature, then you of course incur a slowdown but if they never turn it on, there's no reason that feature should slow the rest of the system down by 20-40%.
Re:I feel like the more people that use MAC... (Score:1, Insightful)
Hahah, yeah, I'm a seasoned Windows, Linux, and Mac admin that recently purchased a Macbook to use for consulting work, since it could run all the OSes I have to support on one machine. I run lots of command line apps such as nmap and the like from an OS X terminal, I hack together C# programs in VS 08 running in a VirtualBox VM'd copy of XP. I build HA systems using my Mac to manage ESX servers. I'm really dumbing society down hardcore.
The stereotypes of a clueless user on a Mac might be generally true, but a few folks buy them because they know what they want and know Apple makes solid hardware.
Folks like me that buy a Mac don't dumb down society; myopic dumbasses like you dumb down society.
Re:What Microsoft should really have considered (Score:3, Insightful)
The normal quote is: "The only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned."