Search results matching tag 'Windows Vista'

An Open Letter to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:36:00 GMT

Dear Mr. Ballmer,

Let me start by saying that I’ve admired your company since I was 10 years old. I think what Microsoft does for the industry, and the world, is amazing. I think Windows is, and has always been, the best operating system on the market.

However, I have to take issue with your recent statement that Vista beta testers failed you. The testers did not fail you sir, your development and beta processes did. Your feedback mechanism is notorious for closing bugs entered within a matter of hours. This would normally be an amazing thing, if they were actually getting fixed; however most were closed “No Repro” without contact from the person trying to repro, or worse: “By Design, Won’t Fix” (which is like a giant slap in the face).

In addition, many beta testers sounded very public warnings that Vista wasn’t ready. In fact, my post on the matter (the year my Windows MVP wasn’t renewed, BTW) gave specific causes for alarm, along with specific, actionable options for adding another Beta to the cycle. This post garnered half a million page views (my single most-viewed piece EVER) and my opinion was echoed by many major tech heavy-hitters, including Scoble, Ed Bott, Chris Pirillo, Marc Orchant, Dwight Silverman, Paul Thurrott (though he took several potshots at me in the process) and others.

Fortunately for you, Steven Sinofsky & crew have done a fantastic job cleaning house on the engineering side. Adding internal testing to the planning mix had a drastic positive effect on the quality of the product cycle, and showed that the Windows Team truly does respect the term “Release Candidate”. The only complaint that I have about the Windows 7 Beta engineering process is that there were too few builds released to testers to validate the work that was going on.

However, many issues with the tester feedback loop still remain. The general feeling from the tester community is that Microsoft only likes us when our feedback is positive, and couldn't care less otherwise. And that drives an animosity that will not be beneficial to Windows (or Microsoft as a whole) in the long-term. My personal opinion is that Scott Guthrie still runs the best teams at Microsoft, and his community engagement methodology is one that every Microsoft team should strive to emulate.

So, with all due respect, Mr. Ballmer, before you go insinuating that beta testers didn’t do their jobs with Vista, maybe you should look into how your own people kept you insulated from the screaming we were all doing about how bad Vista was. We tried to warn you, it’s not our fault the message was not relayed to your bubble.

Sincerely,
Robert McLaws
Early Windows “Longhorn” enthusiast and satisfied Windows 7 customer

The Problem With SaaS & Cloud Services

admin — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:26:26 GMT

When I heard about the iMate Momento digital picture frame, I was an instant fan. I thought it was really great how it integrated with Vista’s SideShow. Once I received one for review, I found out that the execution fell far short of expectations.

Well, today I got an email from iMate, which I am including in its entirety below:

Dear Member,
The Momento Live service will be terminated on February 25, 2009. After that date you will not have access to the Momento Live website or services. However, your Momento frame will be unaffected so you can continue to enjoy viewing your photos on your frame.

The closure of Momento Live web site means you can no longer store your photos on the Momento Live server and/or and share your photos with other Momento Live members.

Important note! Any pictures that you have stored on Momento Live server will be permanently lost after February 25, 2009. If you have any images stored on the Momento Live server, please ensure you have a copy of them stored on your PC. Any images that are hosted on Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, or similar services will not be affected.

When currently visiting the Momento Live web site you may receive a website security warning as the SSL certificate has expired and will not be renewed. Please ignore this message. You are welcome to continue onto the website to retrieve your images.

To visit Momento Live please click here.
Any questions you have may be directed to momentosupport@imate.com

Thank you,

The Momento Support Team

This was not an altogether unexpected move, since the site hadn’t been upgraded since its launch. But the frame’s RSS capabilities were also dependent on the service, meaning those will be down too. Now, its effectiveness is limited to local connectivity… which is fine, except that a bunch of customers paid a premium for the internet connected services, and those customers are now SOL.

Just goes to show you that SaaS / Software + Services / Cloud Services are only useful if the services stay online.

Who Benefitted the Most from the Vista Capable Program?

admin — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 04:53:40 GMT

Ars Technica has a wonderfully insightful piece about the Vista Capable lawsuit, and the ramifications of the $1.5B number that the plaintiffs have been floating around in the case. if you haven’t read it yet, please do so, as I agree with their points, and it is the jumping-off point for what I am about to discuss.

First off, I want to point out that the lawsuit itself is totally bogus. While it is very good that some of the information came to light, I don’t personally think it has any merit whatsoever, and it is just an attempt to pry money from Microsoft’s hands for no good reason. “Capable” means that it can run Vista, which computers that were so labeled were technically capable of. It did not say “capable of running all editions of Vista,” so any assumption on the consumer’s part, without reading the fine print, is the consumer’s fault. Caveat Emptor.

I admit that the program was confusing, but any consumer taking more than 10 seconds to look at it could have figured it out. Also, it’s not like these computers were not capable of running Home Premium or Ultimate, it’s just that a) you wouldn’t get Aero, and b) you wouldn’t get that great of an experience due to lack of performance. Hey, I ran Windows 95 on a 486 with 4MB RAM. It was possible, just not a good idea.

Secondly, having a couple years to look back on the whole thing, for all the bellyaching HP did about it, I think the effort they put in benefitted them in the end. Who is the top selling computer maker in the last 2 years? HP. It’s because they make a better overall product (regardless of how much crap they add to it, but I’ve ranted about that enough already (with another one coming soon).

In my first post on the subject, I talked about how an HP exec bristled when I even mentioned WinSAT in a discussion. Regardless of his reaction, my point about WinSAT was (and is) still valid. The OEMs know what hardware produces which WinSAT score. i don’t understand why OEMs aren’t shipping more balanced machines. Most PCs that ship today come with wildly schizophrenic WinSAT scores. My Samsung Q1 ranges from a 4.0 in memory to a 1.5 on processor with Windows 7, and the Lenovo x300 I’m also reviewing varies from 6.0 for the SSD to a 3.5 on graphics with Windows 7. That’s just ridiculous, these machines should be far more balanced than they are.

I think you should be able to go online, and say that you want a computer that rates a 3.0 across the board, and they will put in hardware that does the trick. Then, when you look online at PC games you want to buy, you should be able to see underneath it computers for sale at various retailers that meet the minimum requirements. It could work the same for servers too. Wouldn’t it be great if you could say “well, if you need to serve 10,000 SQL requests an hour, you need a system with a minimum 4.2 WinSAT score, and then you could find well-balanced machines preconfigured to handle those requirements, or servers available from hosting providers for that matter.

Anyways, getting back to the point. HP, Lenovo, Dell and the like make products with varying degrees of quality. HP’s computers were best suited to run Vista, and the market responded to that. Coupled with Dell’s piss-poor technical support, and HP is at the top of the heap. While it is understandable that they put so much effort into meeting the original requirements, and they might be upset at the change… I think that it did far more good than harm in the end. So as a company, I don’t think they have much to complain about.

But hey, that’s just my opinion.

My Take on the Vista Capable Fiasco

admin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:20:54 GMT

I haven’t said anything about this yet, because I’ve been watching things unfold. I don’t necessarily want to say anything that has an affect on the outcome one way or another, and I didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t. But after the e-mails that were released last week, some of the rumors were confirmed, and some things I had heard rumblings about started to make sense.

Let me start off by saying that I think it is total BS that any Windows executive had anything to do with the nitty-gritty on whether one particular feature made it into Vista vs. another. It should not have been Will Poole’s call by any means that the WDDM requirement was dropped. I’m also very glad that Jim Allchin had nothing to do with it. He stayed true to the product no matter what.

Midmorning on the 30th, Mike Ybarra, a product manager, sent a message marked "urgent due to customer satisfaction escalation" to then-Windows boss Jim Allchin and Will Poole, then in charge of the Windows Client Business.

Poole was the one who ultimately made the decision to drop the WDDM requirement.

In an August 2005 meeting, "you both committed to HP that we would not move off the WDDM requirement and HP made significant product roadmap changes to support graphics for the full experience," Ybarra wrote, adding that an HP executive committed to investing in graphics "if MS would give him 100% assurance that we would not budge for Intel."

By noon, anger from HP was reaching Microsoft, which had planned to communicate its changes the next day. Poole wrote to Ybarra and Allchin at 12:16 p.m.: "Intel leaked this despite my explicit agreement with [an Intel senior vice president] that we would communicate together."

The WDDM change, apparently too late to reverse, seemed to take Allchin by surprise. "I knew nothing about this," he wrote. "Will, you need to explain. I don't even understand what this means. ... "

And now I know why Sinofsky has delegated more authority down to the feature teams when it comes to what features will be shipping with Windows 7. It might have been just as much about saving his own butt as anything else, but it was a smart decision.

I had the opportunity earlier this year to ask some HP employees (including an executive) about why HP was shipping laptops that were so imbalanced on the Windows Experience Index. No sooner had those words left my mouth than I felt like I had just swore in front of my mother for the first time. I was met with stonefaced silence, then anger. The executive didn’t even answer my question, leaving a colleague to explain to me that “Microsoft gamed the WinSAT rating for Intel.” I was shocked. For the next 5 minutes, he explained what happened, and I was dumbfounded. I knew that the WinSAT team spent a lot of time trying to get the experience and algorithms right, so the decision had to have come from higher up.

But now I know why there was so much animosity about the whole thing. This is yet another reason why OEMs had no confidence in Microsoft’s ability to deliver with Vista, because requirements were changing all the time. HP had every right to be pissed about it, Microsoft had no right to move the goalposts.

I hope Will Poole is held personally responsible for this. His damage to the Windows brand is without measure.

Apple Should Count Its Own Beans First

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:58:11 GMT

Apple’s latest ad, “Bean Counter”, attempts to claim that Microsoft should have spent the $300M it used on its latest marketing campaign on fixing Vista’s issues. Let’s set aside the fact that Windows 7 sticks it to Apple (hard core), or that Apple can’t ship anything without a v0.1 release 4 days later, and focus on just the Bean Counting, as Apple suggests.

Steve Sinchak from WinGeek did an exhaustive breakdown of Apple’s spending vs Microsoft’s spending, and if you’ve ever spent any time looking at Microsoft’s quarterly reports, the following won’t surprise you (I’ve broken it down into table form for easy reading):

Besides what Steve pointed out, a couple things jump out at me:

Microsoft has twice the sales income as Apple.
Microsoft spent the equivalent of 64% of Apple’s entire yearly advertising spending on a single campaign.
Microsoft spends 10x as much on R&D as Apple. On a % of sales basis, Microsoft spends 4.2x more per dollar earned than Apple.
Apple spends 1.7x as much per dollar on R&D than it does on advertising. Microsoft spends 5.2x per dollar on R&D than it does on advertising.
Put another way, Microsoft spends nearly as much in R&D per year than two years of Apple net profits.

The old saying goes, “If you point a finger at someone,there will be three pointing back at you.” I guess in Apple’s case, there are 4.2 fingers pointing back at them. Apple would do well to get over its penis envy and heed its own advice than to point fingers on this one.

[Hat tip to Steve for doing more investigation on the matter than any of the mainstream tech press did.]

Why Vista Maximized Windows Are Black

admin — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 06:28:34 GMT

Raymond Chen has the answer.

This is a performance optimization.

For a not much longer version, read his post.

Photos from Microsoft’s Home at Disneyland’s Innoventions

admin — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:04:19 GMT

Haven’t gotten a chance to get down and see Innoventions yet? Well, that’s ok, because it’s apparently not quite finished yet. But Andy from MiceChat has a ton of pictures from the parts that ARE finished, as well as some commentary. His review is decidedly mixed, with his worst criticisms stemming from the “forced” nature of the Elias family script. But he had good things to say about the technology.

Head on over and check it out.

I Can’t Believe New York Times Let This Get Published

admin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:27:16 GMT

You know, it really surprises me sometimes how little reporters that cover technology actually know about technology. Case in point is an article in this Sunday’s New York Times that claims that Windows should undergo that same under-the-covers change that OS X went through a number of years ago.

There are a number of problems with this article. The first is the list of Windows versions that are delineated in the fourth paragraph. He says that there have been 12 versions of Windows, and later says that the Windows “7”codename doesn’t mean anything. Well, since Windows Vista is Version 6 of the kernel, then Windows “7” means that it’s the seventh major release of the Windows Kernel. Duh. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out, it’s right there in the computer properties.

Then, he goes on to compare the state of Windows now to the state of Mac OS9 a number of years ago, and seems to think that the lions share of the 1 billion computers that are out there should be forced to go through a major overhaul like Mac had to. He says that:

When I.T. professionals and consumers got a look at Vista, they all had this same question for Microsoft: That’s it?

That is the type of skin-deep assessment that only people who think form is more important than function. People who take the “beauty is skin deep” approach with Vista miss features like Web Services for Devices, ASLR, the WPF-based printing subsystem, ReadyBoost, and the many security-related changes Microsoft has made with Vista… among many other things.

Here is the problem with that reasoning. Windows just went through a major overhaul in how things work under the covers. It’s called Windows Vista. What is the number one problem people complain about with Windows Vista? COMPATIBILITY. Windows customers DON’T WANT their stuff to stop working, something that Microsoft was made all too aware of.

The reason Mac could afford to undergo a major rewrite in 2001 is because at that time, Apple had just 3.1% marketshare (which represented a DROP from 4.6% the previous year). According to this site, that amounts to about 19.4M computers… which isn’t bad, until you take into account the fact that it took 17 years to get there. That’s 1.1M a year, for those of you keeping track.

Guess how many of those systems were “mission critical” systems in Fortune 500 companies at that time. Fortune 1000 companies? Fortune 5000 companies? The correct answer is ZERO: not a single business in the Fortune 5000 at that time ran Macs as their primary computer system. So Apple could afford to tell those users to run their existing applications in a legacy emulated environment, because few people of importance were actually using them. (And BTW, for those of you still keeping track OS X was not the 10th release of the same kernel, it was the first release of a new one. So the recent OS X 10.5 “Leopard” release is really “OS X 1.5”.)

Randall Stross, the article’s author, claims to be a Professor of Business at San Jose State University. So he ought to know that a business would not invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on IT infrastructure and custom software development if they thought those investments would in any way be invalidated further down the line. So while Mr. Stross advocates the kind of “screw the customers” approach Apple took 6 years ago, to which critics said the OS was “not ready for mainstream adoption,” Microsoft (who has more experience with releasing stable software) understands that compatibility is critical, and would rather research new ways to maintain compatibility while keeping the codebase secure, instead of giving their users the finger.

I agree with Ed Bott that Microsoft’s biggest mistake was to make Windows XP SP2 a free upgrade. It should have been Windows XP R2 instead. Their second biggest mistake with Vista was not making a more radical change to the UI, to appease the “beauty is skin deep” types. (I know about the “businesses would need to retrain” argument against that, but the new Out-of-Box-Experience Wizard could have had the option to choose Windows Aero, or something sexier.) Their third mistake was not making people sit through a 3 minute video on why UAC is a good thing, before letting them do anything else on their computer, a la Windows ME.

But anyway, I believe that Mr. Stross has allowed his prejudices to cloud his search for the real facts. He uses Singularity as the impetus for his overall argument (hardly a novel strategy, as others with similarly nonexistent experience with this research OS have also taken this tack) without ever actually using the OS that he suggests should replace Windows on the at least 800M PCs it is currently running on. Singularity is designed to help people re-think application isolation for robust security, not for getting your 9-year-old printer to work.

So I guess the real question is this: Mr. Stross, what operating system did you write that article on, a PC or a Mac? And what was that old saying about “those who can’t do?” I forget. Anyway, I think Windows needs some fresh air as much as the next guy. But throwing out the baby with the bath water is NOT the way to do it.

And even my arch-nemesis Paul Thurrott agrees with me.

Hulu Coming to Vista Media Center?

admin — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:11:13 GMT

Hulu is my favorite video sites on the Internet. Why? Because I can watch almost all of my favorite shows for free, with far less advertising than television. The problem with the site is, if I want to watch it on my Vista Media Center PC, I have to go out of the 10-foot experience, and use my keyboard and mouse… which I’d really rather not do. On top of that, I can’t use it at all on my Xbox 360, because no one has built a decent browser add-on for WMC yet.

So the other day I sent Hulu an e-mail inquiring about a public API so that I could build my own Hulu add-in for Windows Media Center. This is the response that I got, verbatim:

Robert,
Thanks much for the message! We love to here [sic] from our users. Rest assured we certainly have plans in the works to support a living room experience. We will definitely keep users in the loop as those progress. Hopefully it won’t be too long before you will be able to lean back (with remote) and enjoy Hulu.
Hulu Distribution Team

While that doesn’t solve my immediate problem, it is good to hear that the Hulu team is forward-thinking enough to include Vista in their distribution plans. When I hear any more about this, I’ll be sure to let you know. In the meantime, does anyone else out there use Hulu? What do you think about it?

Wired's Vista "Do's" Have Some Major "Don'ts"

admin — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 03:27:00 GMT

Wired has an article up about how to speed up Vista. While they have a couple OK tips in there, there are a couple of suggestions that caught my attention as colossally BAD. I tried to edit the wiki page to reflect this, but I was rebuffed by the original author. So much for community contributions.

DO NOT under *any* circumstances, shut off Windows Error Reporting. How do you think Microsoft knows what to fix in the Service Packs? Microsoft doesn't collect personal info with these reports, so what are you worried about?
DO NOT use vLite, despite it's perceived appeal. Look guys, there are *thousands* of people at Microsoft who helped engineer Windows, including the new dependency engine that manages the Setup process. Do you seriously trust ONE GUY to understand enough of all that to be able to delete files safely without affecting anything else? Using this program will make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to install SP1, PLUS it needs to be run to make a custom install of Vista, so it won't help anyone after the fact. Even so... seriously, you mean to tell me you can't spare 6GB on your hard drive?
YOU DON'T NEED TO manually defragment. Vista's defragmenter, though seemingly hobbled, is actually quite good. Vista has a new "prioritized I/O" system that pauses lower-priority operations (like defragmenting) for higher-priority operations (like saving Word documents). Even if it runs while you're working, you shouldn't really notice it too much. And while the author will tout the usefulness of a visual UI showing what's going on, that actually DOES take up processor time, and will slow down the defrag. You're better off without it.
YOU REALLY SHOULDN'T shut off Aero if your graphics card is capable of it. Aero at it's core moves desktop drawing off of the CPU and onto the GPU. Even if you don't want the transparencies of Glass (you can turn those off), unless you're on a laptop trying to conserve battery life, you should let Aero do it's thing.

Maybe next time, Wired will get someone who has actually used Vista, instead of regurgitating XP tips, to write their tuning tips. Just a thought.