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Blessed are the Geeks, for they shall internet the earth |
Sucks or Not Sucks, That is the Question?
Piracy or just a lack of acceptance:
William Nett
This week Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer lamented on the lack
of acceptance and sales of Microsoft's latest flagship, Windows Vista. His
current place of blame is Pirates!
Um, Pirates? Ok, I'll play along. My current employer has an enterprise class
license for the software and as such, I opted to install it on my work
computer... big mistake. After 30 days, I was told to verify my copy of Vista.
The online validation failed. My support call to Microsoft yielded the same
results, my license was
used, and I was locked out of my computer... thanks Steve.
Operating System upgrades have traditionally been incremental, but Vista seems
to be a huge leap... into the grand canyon. Eye candy that has been around for
years in Linux now requires at least 1GB of RAM and 256MB of video memory for
Windows Vista.
I can only surmise that adoption to Vista will be slow at best, surely Steve
could have seen this coming. Even pirates on Digg are commenting that this new
OS is a pig and a half on resources, RAM, and Hard Drive space. With regard to
legacy support, Vista strongly reminds me of the Navy Marine Corps Intranet
complications. Despite having several dozen Microsoft personnel on staff, very
little works.
Still Microsoft developers call this "Teddybear Syndrome." The rest of the world
calls this migration or evolution. My big question is this, "If my Windows XP,
2000, or NT, works nicely... Why should I migrate to Vista?"
Steve Ballmer seems to have lost touch with computing requirements and
advancements. We advance our computers like we buy tools. We buy them not
because they look pretty, but they do the job, and they do it better. They solve
our problems, they make our jobs easier, they reduce our time spent on issues.
Only gamers are interested in mod aesthetics. Well, gamers and artists anyways.
My point is this... I have been to customer sites that still utilize Windows
3.1. Not because they have limited money, but because it still works for the
purpose that it was designed for. Why should I a company drop thousands of
dollars for an operating system that neither works with my legacy applications
that perform flawlessly at the current moment or supports my drivers for this
new OS?
-- "Software will be broken by software... piracy is inevitable. If I can hear
it, see it, or read it... I can copy it."
William Nett
