Ted, I think the point in the article that was made about Apple actually "bites the bullet..." every so often really sums up the basic difference between the two companies' business philosophy. Even though I'm not an Apple man I must admit that they have made a much bigger leap in improving and changing the way people use PC's than Microsoft, despite keeping their instantly recognisable and distinctive "apple look" as well as simple clean interfaces.
I'm just running the latest Vista Beta and yes it is quicker and it looks very nice aesthetically but it still doesn't give me any more functionality when using day to day tasks than my Win2K machine does. Unless users have a clear advantage in productivity to be gained from upgrading or changing platform I feel that M$ will have a very hard time converting users over to Vista. The days when large corporates just went out and did a wholesale upgrade of hardware are becoming rarer and rarer with prpffit margins being squeezed all the time. I have a colleague who disposes/recycles PC's from government and Health authorities. His comment recently was that whereas these orgainisations were renewing hardware every 2 years, that has now gone up to 3 years and looks like rising towards 4. Technology for technology's sake in SMB's is a difficult road to tread when you have shareholders breathing down your neck. I guess there are very few users who could not survive on a PC that was 3 years old without maybe the addition of extra memory, but that itself has only been brought about by XP needing more and more RAM to perform at the same level as the service packs have arrived. The staple trio of Wordstar, Supercalc and Dbase would still be adequate in terms of functionality for most users - and much easier to learn. Also, if M$ are going to penetrate into the newer markets where broadband is not available in the majority of cases (India, Africa and the far East for example) how can they hope to keep satisfied customers when the updates needed to a basic XP system can take hours to load. For example, I re-installed an original XP system pre SP1 and the total time to upload/install all the updates was in excess of 3 hours using a 3Mb link. That is totally unacceptable in these markets - especially if you have only got a 56K modem! The products such as Ubuntu which promise a stable "one off release" are bound to penetrate into these areas and gain more and more converts as time goes on. Maybe someone at M$ will bite the bullet eventually - but I bet it won't be voluntarily. Dave Crozier The secret to staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and to lie about your age -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ted Roche Sent: 15 September 2006 14:22 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [NF] -- Good InformationWeek articles On 9/13/06, Bill Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The Next Windows After Vista Will Demand Radical Rethinking From > Microsoft > > <http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=L23HLZAEI > VRZYQSNDLPCKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=192501131&queryText=Windows+After+Vi > sta> > > <http://tinyurl.com/j8vhs> > Somehow I ended up getting the print version of InformationWeek and I read the cover article proclaiming that MS's future direction had to be different than the monolith. I found the article really disappointing, and suspect the editor who tacked the title on the article only read the first couple of paragraphs. The conclusion of the piece was that, no, Vista.Next ("Fiji") had to just be more of the same, backward-compatilble, bug fixes, minor enhancements, etc., but that Vista.Next.Next ("Vienna") -- "Windows after Vista is likely to include a revamped desktop and the ability to wall off old code from critical parts of the system and deliver features over the Web" -- Ooo! A revamped desktop! And we only have to wait TWO more veersions! Just what users have been demanding! NOT. Despite the impression that Microsoft needed to make radical changes, the article seemed to conclude that things will pretty much stay the same. That just reinforces my decision to look elsewhere for innovation. Small businesses that are not so "ebedded" with MS software and technology that they can work outside the ever-more restrictive envelope of Windows software and try out the vast assortment of software out there that isn't dependent on a jarring every 3-to-5-year transition, but instead incremental transitions at the discretion and in the control of the business. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
