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Well, I don't think manufacturers are gonna have the squeeze you think they are - they get volume pricing.

What is gonna kill them is the people who don't want to pay the high upgrade cost - especially those running dual procs, they have no choice but to buy the expensive version.

Its also pretty evident that MS wants to go to a subscription model. That will hurt, though I think they'll get a lot of pushback from the corporate world so its hard to tell wether that will get off the ground or not.

I have a friend who was convinced by the pricing scheme to go predominantly unix until he absolutely needs to buy a new windows box (he's doing some game development in a cross platform engine so he'll be able to get away with having XP to test against for a long while to come).

I will probably never get Vista unless I actually buy a PC for some reason.

Last edited by Gipetto (2006-08-29 8:38 pm)

barrfid_od wrote:

I see absolutley no point in upgrading to vista, I have xp the way I like it. Why does Microsoft have to go and do somthing stupid like having multiple versions of an OS, its only going to confuse the hell outta average joe, and Best Buy Guy is going to screw him over with fetures he doesnt need, I think MS needs to go somthing a bit AIO, Like that of Apple

You are the perfect example of the consumer I was trying to talk about. (No Offense.) (Or you could be a company, it's the same sort of example.)

You like it the way it is.  Why upgrade?

I hope that projects like ReactOS (www.reactos.com or .org) flourish.  So that we have a simple, non-bloated and probably more secure Windows NT-like os to run that occasional PC-program on.  Oh and did I mention it's Free? (It's not *very* usable yet, as it lacks a lot of drivers.  But being compatible with Win32, the biggest platform around, is a huge plus for ReactOS.)

IMO, it's going to be the same Microsoft BS with a new (over the top) interface. It will be more bloated than ever, with insane system requirements, and run slowly. Over the years, it's dropped "revolutionary" features like it's on diet pills. (WinFS anybody?) They're redoing their security, but as we've already seen, it isn't any better. While true it's still in beta, I don't really expect it to be all that huge of an improvement. Windows 2000 will probably still continue to be the best OS Microsoft haas produced. However, one redeeming point is they won't be crippling OpenGL like they were originally planning.

ctachme wrote:

3 ) More secure. Windows security sucks right now. You know it, I know it, I'd willingly spend a little to improve it.

Microsoft said before XP came out that it would be the most secure version of Windows, and since then history has shown us that it was the least secure Windows version. You can't say that something will be more secure. Security is something that is proven by history.  Did you know that Vista really does have a completely redone networking stack, and years old security problems have shown up again in the new one?

Last edited by Macskeeball (2006-08-29 11:45 pm)

They weren't planning on ditching OpenGL. They were going to have a version that was basically layered on top of Direct3D that was going to be stuck at 1.4 without any extensions. (and had worse performance) If you were to install a real version of OpenGL, then it would disable all of Aero's eye candy. A while ago, they changed it so that full-screen apps could use OpenGL normally, and then just recently they decided to ditch that horrible plan all together.

Whats the deal with microsoft there is litterally no windows on windows anymore, false advertisment, at least on OS x they have wallpapers with cat prints

I think corporations will move to Vista, some slower than others, but they will upgrade.  Large corporations have far too much infrastructure in place to ignore the upgrade.  There are entire divisions inside large corporations whose purpose in life is to install and maintain Windows PC's - they have to upgrade.  In my experience, once a corporation decides on a path, it must follow that path - there are really no options.  I've seen it first hand over and over again - corporations survive on bad decisions all the time, because they can't afford to abandon them!  Straight out of "The Dilbert Principle" (a book written by Scott Adams years ago that still holds true in todays corporations.)

It's like finding a cure for the common cold, imagine the economic disaster that would occur if we suddenly removed ALL products related to cold symptoms - imagine all the empty product shelves in the thousands of drug stores and grocery stores, and all the employees it takes to run it all - oh the humanity...

Think about it, in order for our market economy to thrive, we absolutely MUST have large corporations that will be duped into purchasing piles of garbage in the hopes that it will revolutionize their businesses, and gainfully employee hundreds of thousands of people to keep the garbage steaming (if garbage isn't steaming, then it's not good garbage.)

Disclaimer: I am one of the idiots described in "The Dilbert Principle."  Now get back in your cubicle and act like you're working.

DudetheCreator wrote:

The planed obsolescence of Windows XP (a tactic M$ will surely use to try to move people to Vista) will not work, just like it did not work for windows 2000.  It has been five years since the release of XP and people are *still* using 2000.  Universities, hospitals, clinics and corporations (big & small) cannot afford to suffer the disasters XP can cause when it is implemented.  Any software upgrade causes trouble (usually) but even more so in the land of M$.  If there's gonna be pain in upgrading, why not explore other kinds of pain. (Like switching to Macs/Linux.)

Does Apple support OS 9? How about OS 8? Or even 10.1?

No you say?

This planned obsolesce you accuse “M$” of is some thing that Microsoft  does not come close to comparing to Apple they are the Masters of Obsolescing not only their OS support but hardware as well.

http://www.osnews.com/
“Microsoft is breathing more life into older versions of its products by offering businesses extended coverage for fixing security problems and bugs. Large companies running old favorites Windows NT 4.0, Exchange Server 5.5 and Windows XP Service Pack 1 can expect at least three more years of support from Microsoft after it decided to update the Custom Support Agreement program. There is even the suggestion support will go beyond three years.”


Yep that is some mighty fine planed obsolesce there…… Wait looks like that article is STATING that MS is EXTENDING support for versions of Windows that would be equivalent to say Mac OS 8?…… Apple still supports OS 8 and 9 right? I bet this costs money and its support with the goal of moving companies OFF those particular versions but its three years of support or more none the less… but will Apple support OS 8 or  9 even if you paid them?

Now there are good tings to be said for ridding an OS of legacy code its part of the reason Vista is such a mess but I have to call shinangenans on this because in one of your particular MS bashings you bash MS of something the Apple is much much more guilty of.

jetson wrote:

I think corporations will move to Vista, some slower than others, but they will upgrade.  Large corporations have far too much infrastructure in place to ignore the upgrade.  There are entire divisions inside large corporations whose purpose in life is to install and maintain Windows PC's - they have to upgrade.  In my experience, once a corporation decides on a path, it must follow that path - there are really no options.  I've seen it first hand over and over again - corporations survive on bad decisions all the time, because they can't afford to abandon them!  Straight out of "The Dilbert Principle" (a book written by Scott Adams years ago that still holds true in todays corporations.)

It's like finding a cure for the common cold, imagine the economic disaster that would occur if we suddenly removed ALL products related to cold symptoms - imagine all the empty product shelves in the thousands of drug stores and grocery stores, and all the employees it takes to run it all - oh the humanity...

Think about it, in order for our market economy to thrive, we absolutely MUST have large corporations that will be duped into purchasing piles of garbage in the hopes that it will revolutionize their businesses, and gainfully employee hundreds of thousands of people to keep the garbage steaming (if garbage isn't steaming, then it's not good garbage.)

Disclaimer: I am one of the idiots described in "The Dilbert Principle."  Now get back in your cubicle and act like you're working.

Most corporations still use 2000, not XP.  Upgrading to Vista would be insanely expensive, since most systems are already 5 years old and would have to be replaced - highly unlikely since things are working fine as is.

jcleek wrote:

Now there are good tings to be said for ridding an OS of legacy code its part of the reason Vista is such a mess but I have to call shinangenans on this because in one of your particular MS bashings you bash MS of something the Apple is much much more guilty of.

Apple has shown a continued effort to ensure some (perhaps a minor amount) of stable backwards compatibility.  Classic Runtime and Rosetta are great examples of this.  What does Windows XP have? Not much in that regard.  Oh I forgot, it's got DOS & DOS compatibility mode.  Not only is that DOS yet *another* gaping security hole in the system, it is also half as useful as Classic.  I've tried forcing DOS mode on some programs from that era, and none of them seemed to work *at all*.

What if you need a copy of Windows 95 to run that one old program? 50$. You need a copy of OS 7 for that one old program? FREE from apple.  Many OS X installations came with classic installed, but  *also* bootable, so you could return to full blown OS 9 any time you wanted.

Apple offers what you may see as less backwards compatibility to help achieve the goal that makes them superior to M$.  That being the rate at which they innovate and deliver new useful tools and software that really *does* boost productivity.  If they were constantly trying to ensure that junk from the days of Mac OS 1.0 (like MS with DOS) still worked then they'd be pressed for engineers that had time to create and design the great programs we each use every day.

Last edited by DudetheCreator (2006-08-30 10:24 am)

Pariah wrote:

All in all I prefer Apple's approach to backwards compatibility. Doing it with an optional module that has nothing to do with the guts of the host OS. I can only imagine the kludge that results from building the legacy handling into the OS.
Imagine if Apple had somehow coded OS9 into OSX instead of having it run as an application on top.

Suckedness!

Apple would do it better than MS though, that's for sure.

Heh, strikes me more people hold off on upgrading MS OSs than automatically upgrade. The rate of businesses adopting XPpro was glacial, damn near as slow as businesses adopting OSX