Forbes - Microsoft Vista: Not 'People Ready' - Page 12

|Zach| · 03-24-2006, 10:44 PM

http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...microsoft.html

Boston -

The new version of Microsoft Windows, called Vista, has slipped again. It was originally going to ship in 2003. Then 2005. Then 2006. Now in early 2007. I'm not surprised, having seen a demo of Microsoft's new programs at an "event" for tech buyers in New York last week.

The new programs are phenomenally complex, with scores of buttons and pull-down menus and myriad connections among various applications. A Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) VP zipped through a demo, moving information from Outlook to Powerpoint to Groove to some kind of social networking program that lets you see how your colleagues and your colleagues' colleagues rate various Web sites.

Meanwhile, 500 tech buyers sat there in the dark, their eyes glazing over from the sheer mind-numbing pointlessness of most of this stuff. The audience laughed out loud when the Microsoft guy showed off a kludgey system that lets you fetch Outlook e-mail messages using voice commands from a cell phone.

The system has all the charm of those automated phone systems you encounter when you call customer service: Your call is very important to us. And while it is cool and futuristic to have a computer "read" your e-mail to you, uh, dude--we all have BlackBerrys anyway. In fact, many in the audience weren't even watching the voice-activated e-mail demo--they were checking mail on their BlackBerrys.

Even more ironic is that Microsoft has ginned up a new slogan, "People Ready," which apparently is meant to describe its software, or maybe it describes companies that use its software, or whatever. Who knows? It's one of those phrases that means anything, and so means nothing. Who makes this stuff up? Do they actually pay this person? And is Microsoft just figuring out now that its programs are used by--gasp--people?

Microsoft execs also talked about "Impacting People," then they dragged out fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger, who seemed very "impacted" as he sang praise for Microsoft programs. Actually, he was reading meaningless statements from a TelePrompTer. Here is one of his quotes, verbatim: "When you combine people and technology, you have a very powerful combination." Think about that. Just let it sink in for a minute.

And then there were the hacks. The press folks. Corralled down in back. Some were just talking out loud during Steve Ballmer's keynote speech, not even bothering to keep their voices down. Yeah. It was that kind of show.

Worse yet was the grumbling afterward in the press room. Why the hell did they drag us here? we wondered. We'd been promised big news and some earth-shattering announcements by Microsoft flacks who insisted this was something we shouldn't miss. Instead, we got a demo that was about as compelling as a root canal followed by a 15-minute press conference with Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive who seems incapable of speaking at any level softer than a bellow. Ballmer took a few potshots at IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ), claiming the computer giant doesn't innovate anymore.

No one mentioned the fact that in 1997, Microsoft held a similar event in New York City to declare that IBM's "big iron" was dead, because Windows NT--remember Windows NT?--was going to "scale up" and replace the mainframe. I wonder if Ballmer ever feels like the guy in Groundhog Day, reliving the same press conference, over and over. I know I do.

Oddly enough, some of the language of the Microsoft event was eerily similar to language about innovation in the new huge advertisements that IBM started running a few days later in newspapers. Did Microsoft somehow get wind of the ads? Who knows. But the event seemed thrown together to blunt the new ad campaign from IBM.

Worst of all, I can't believe Microsoft actually held this big nonevent "event" only a few days before announcing another screw-up in Vista. If Ballmer knew he was about to announce a delay and still had this event, he's crazy. If he didn't know Vista was about to slip again, then Microsoft is in worse shape than anyone realizes.

Microsoft can't afford to screw up like this. There are free alternatives to everything Microsoft sells, like the Linux operating system and the Open Office application suite. Rivals like Novell (nasdaq: NOVL - news - people ), Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ), Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) and, yes, IBM are pushing those programs big time.

Given Microsoft's delays I can't believe open-source stuff still hasn't caught on for desktop computers. It's amazing, but people will wait months and months for products that are so complicated that no ordinary person can figure out how to use them.

Why not at least switch to an Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) Mac? Apple's new operating system is stable, reliable and easy to use. The applications are simple, gorgeous and work well together. And they're here. Today. Steve Jobs must be waking up a happy man this morning.

**morphius** · 03-26-2006, 12:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by conchshell

Yep. have you ever tried to compare Open office and MS office? O-Office is a pathetic excuse for a software project. Make no mistake, if it was even borderline decent, MS office would have been doomed.

For most home users I bet they could get along just fine with Open Office, and I doubt the same couldn't be said of most business users.

Yes I have used them both, on my home machines I only use Open Office because I work to keep my machine as legal as possible.

KC Jones · 03-26-2006, 12:50 PM

Open source is here to stay. I work for a fortune 500 company with more than 20K employees and revenues exceeding $8 billion. I can't even begin to tell you how much I hear about open source now from the CIO, VPs, Directors, etc. If you look around at the big players in enterprise software (IBM, Oracle, etc.) they all have strategies revolving around open source in place. The vendors are finding that if they want to sell support contracts for their 'value added' non standard additions, they have to spin those off as open source projects. Many vendors are adding open source projects to their support, maintenance, and PSO offerings because of the money to be made there.

...and yes, there is something magical about being open. Open standards ensure compatibility and independence in the enterprise. Open source ensures that *if* the vendor goes under, or you find yourself down a dead end path, you can allocate your own resources to make required changes to a software package or solution to keep your business running until you have the means to correct your IT path. It *can* also signifigantly speed up development and improve QA. This is more of a mixed bag though. For a popular open source project you get thousands of brilliant people around the world looking at the source code, making improvements, and pointing out flaws. For a not so popular project you can get a lot of spaghetti code - but this is another great thing about open source. Your staff can tell you pretty quickly from browsing the source and the project discussions if a project is crap or not. In the open source world, the strong survive and the shitty implementations or unecessary crap dies off quickly. In the proprietary world you don't know if something is ready for prime time until you buy it. Also, a vendor may keep pushing crap (with incremental upgrades at a high price) for years and years, and because you bought the crap in version X, you keep getting strung along until they get it right or until you pay the big penalty to switch.

conchshell · 03-26-2006, 12:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by morphius

okay, just installed slow Open Office and both Word and Open Office Writer started up in the same amount of time and excel opened about 3 seconds faster, ooooooh.

and this

Quote:

Originally Posted by morphius

Yes I have used them both, on my home machines I only use Open Office because I work to keep my machine as legal as possible.

hmmm. why did you install open office? is that your work machine by any chance?

**morphius** · 03-26-2006, 12:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by conchshell

and this

hmmm. why did you install open office? is that your work machine by any chance?

I have a laptop from work and it was the only place I could do a valid side by side comparison.

conchshell · 03-26-2006, 01:02 PM

Ok, here is a professional comparo. There is more in the link.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=120
In my last blog, where I did a high-level technical evaluation of Microsoft Office 2003 and OpenOffice.org 2.0, I showed that OpenOffice was a memory and resource hog. Contrary to popular belief (among Open Source advocates), Microsoft Office came out very lean and fast while OpenOffice.org Office Suite was just the opposite. Some couldn't accept the numbers and complained that the Task Manager numbers may be inaccurate and hiding memory usage. They demanded more proof, so here it is.

Oh and here is a comparison of formats from the same link:

Even when dealing with what is essentially the same data, OpenOffice Calc uses up 211 MBs of private unsharable memory while Excel uses up 34 MBs of private unsharable memory. The fact that OpenOffice.org Calc takes about 100 times the CPU time explains the kind of drastic results we were getting where Excel could open a file in 2 seconds while Calc would take almost 3 minutes. Most of that massive speed difference is due to XML being very processor intensive, but Microsoft still handles its own XML files about 7 times faster than OpenOffice.org handles OpenDocument ODS format and uses far less memory than OpenOffice.org.

**morphius** · 03-26-2006, 01:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by conchshell

Ok, here is a professional comparo. There is more in the link.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=120
In my last blog, where I did a high-level technical evaluation of Microsoft Office 2003 and OpenOffice.org 2.0, I showed that OpenOffice was a memory and resource hog. Contrary to popular belief (among Open Source advocates), Microsoft Office came out very lean and fast while OpenOffice.org Office Suite was just the opposite. Some couldn't accept the numbers and complained that the Task Manager numbers may be inaccurate and hiding memory usage. They demanded more proof, so here it is.

Oh and here is a comparison of formats from the same link:

Even when dealing with what is essentially the same data, OpenOffice Calc uses up 211 MBs of private unsharable memory while Excel uses up 34 MBs of private unsharable memory. The fact that OpenOffice.org Calc takes about 100 times the CPU time explains the kind of drastic results we were getting where Excel could open a file in 2 seconds while Calc would take almost 3 minutes. Most of that massive speed difference is due to XML being very processor intensive, but Microsoft still handles its own XML files about 7 times faster than OpenOffice.org handles OpenDocument ODS format and uses far less memory than OpenOffice.org.

I'd be interested in a comparison on OSX, MS may still win the speed and memory battle, but it would be interesting to see. We are also still on OO 2, and up to what, Office 10?

conchshell · 03-26-2006, 01:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by morphius

I'd be interested in a comparison on OSX, MS may still win the speed and memory battle, but it would be interesting to see. We are also still on OO 2, and up to what, Office 10?

Wait what's with the sudden love for OSX? isn't OSX a proprietary OS too, why does it matter?

OO might be only version 2 but the code base has been inherited from star office which has been in development since '94. Is that a reasonable timeframe to compare?

**morphius** · 03-26-2006, 01:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by conchshell

Wait what's with the sudden love for OSX? isn't OSX a proprietary OS too, why does it matter?

OO might be only version 2 but the code base has been inherited from star office which has been in development since '94. Is that a reasonable timeframe to compare?

I'm just interested in what the two apps look like on a level playing field, you know, where one of the companies doesn't own the OS code.

My expierence is that most things written to be mulitplatform will run slower then those that are platform specific.

Simplex3 · 03-26-2006, 01:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by morphius

I'd be interested in a comparison on OSX, MS may still win the speed and memory battle, but it would be interesting to see. We are also still on OO 2, and up to what, Office 10?

OpenOffice won't win a memory war with MS Office because OO relies on the Java framework. The MS guys aren't going to include all the supporting code that MS Office is relying on from the OS in their calculations, so you're fighting a losing battle.

All you need to know is that, for free, you can open, edit, and create documents the exact same way and in the exact same format as an application suite costing several hundred dollars.

**morphius** · 03-26-2006, 01:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Simplex3

OpenOffice won't win a memory war with MS Office because OO relies on the Java framework. The MS guys aren't going to include all the supporting code that MS Office is relying on from the OS in their calculations, so you're fighting a losing battle.

All you need to know is that, for free, you can open, edit, and create documents the exact same way and in the exact same format as an application suite costing several hundred dollars.

I was just happy when OO got away from having their own desktop, that drove me nuts.

Simplex3 · 03-26-2006, 01:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by morphius

I was just happy when OO got away from having their own desktop, that drove me nuts.

Yeah, that was one of the dumber moves ever made. A reach in every sense of the word.

conchshell · 03-26-2006, 01:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by morphius

I'm just interested in what the two apps look like on a level playing field, you know, where one of the companies doesn't own the OS code.

My expierence is that most things written to be mulitplatform will run slower then those that are platform specific.

Ah, the old "office runs faster because of secret api's theory" This has been refuted lot of times before. Also, IIRC office and ie on mac are a different code because of the difference in architecture. And ms-office performance on a mac is comparable to windows

conchshell · 03-26-2006, 01:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Simplex3

OpenOffice won't win a memory war with MS Office because OO relies on the Java framework. The MS guys aren't going to include all the supporting code that MS Office is relying on from the OS in their calculations, so you're fighting a losing battle.

All you need to know is that, for free, you can open, edit, and create documents the exact same way and in the exact same format as an application suite costing several hundred dollars.

hmm. Parts of OO use java but most of the code base is in C++. If OO can't win in speed using a format they have proposed what good are they?

And your price point is moot. It's like me bitching about the price of a bmw being higher than my accord. Sure they are the same aren't they?

**dirk digler** · 03-26-2006, 03:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by morphius

For most home users I bet they could get along just fine with Open Office, and I doubt the same couldn't be said of most business users.

Yes I have used them both, on my home machines I only use Open Office because I work to keep my machine as legal as possible.

I agree. Our business users had a revolt when we made them start using StarOffice and then OO. Part of it was just the dislike of change but the biggest complaint was that OO really screwed with the users old documents formatting and it was just a pain in the ass to get a documents old formatting back to where it was originally.

03-24-2006, 10:44 PM
\|Zach\| For The Glory Of The City Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Kansas City Casino cash: $2966768	Forbes - Microsoft Vista: Not 'People Ready' http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...microsoft.html Boston - The new version of Microsoft Windows, called Vista, has slipped again. It was originally going to ship in 2003. Then 2005. Then 2006. Now in early 2007. I'm not surprised, having seen a demo of Microsoft's new programs at an "event" for tech buyers in New York last week. The new programs are phenomenally complex, with scores of buttons and pull-down menus and myriad connections among various applications. A Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) VP zipped through a demo, moving information from Outlook to Powerpoint to Groove to some kind of social networking program that lets you see how your colleagues and your colleagues' colleagues rate various Web sites. Meanwhile, 500 tech buyers sat there in the dark, their eyes glazing over from the sheer mind-numbing pointlessness of most of this stuff. The audience laughed out loud when the Microsoft guy showed off a kludgey system that lets you fetch Outlook e-mail messages using voice commands from a cell phone. The system has all the charm of those automated phone systems you encounter when you call customer service: Your call is very important to us. And while it is cool and futuristic to have a computer "read" your e-mail to you, uh, dude--we all have BlackBerrys anyway. In fact, many in the audience weren't even watching the voice-activated e-mail demo--they were checking mail on their BlackBerrys. Even more ironic is that Microsoft has ginned up a new slogan, "People Ready," which apparently is meant to describe its software, or maybe it describes companies that use its software, or whatever. Who knows? It's one of those phrases that means anything, and so means nothing. Who makes this stuff up? Do they actually pay this person? And is Microsoft just figuring out now that its programs are used by--gasp--people? Microsoft execs also talked about "Impacting People," then they dragged out fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger, who seemed very "impacted" as he sang praise for Microsoft programs. Actually, he was reading meaningless statements from a TelePrompTer. Here is one of his quotes, verbatim: "When you combine people and technology, you have a very powerful combination." Think about that. Just let it sink in for a minute. And then there were the hacks. The press folks. Corralled down in back. Some were just talking out loud during Steve Ballmer's keynote speech, not even bothering to keep their voices down. Yeah. It was that kind of show. Worse yet was the grumbling afterward in the press room. Why the hell did they drag us here? we wondered. We'd been promised big news and some earth-shattering announcements by Microsoft flacks who insisted this was something we shouldn't miss. Instead, we got a demo that was about as compelling as a root canal followed by a 15-minute press conference with Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive who seems incapable of speaking at any level softer than a bellow. Ballmer took a few potshots at IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ), claiming the computer giant doesn't innovate anymore. No one mentioned the fact that in 1997, Microsoft held a similar event in New York City to declare that IBM's "big iron" was dead, because Windows NT--remember Windows NT?--was going to "scale up" and replace the mainframe. I wonder if Ballmer ever feels like the guy in Groundhog Day, reliving the same press conference, over and over. I know I do. Oddly enough, some of the language of the Microsoft event was eerily similar to language about innovation in the new huge advertisements that IBM started running a few days later in newspapers. Did Microsoft somehow get wind of the ads? Who knows. But the event seemed thrown together to blunt the new ad campaign from IBM. Worst of all, I can't believe Microsoft actually held this big nonevent "event" only a few days before announcing another screw-up in Vista. If Ballmer knew he was about to announce a delay and still had this event, he's crazy. If he didn't know Vista was about to slip again, then Microsoft is in worse shape than anyone realizes. Microsoft can't afford to screw up like this. There are free alternatives to everything Microsoft sells, like the Linux operating system and the Open Office application suite. Rivals like Novell (nasdaq: NOVL - news - people ), Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ), Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) and, yes, IBM are pushing those programs big time. Given Microsoft's delays I can't believe open-source stuff still hasn't caught on for desktop computers. It's amazing, but people will wait months and months for products that are so complicated that no ordinary person can figure out how to use them. Why not at least switch to an Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) Mac? Apple's new operating system is stable, reliable and easy to use. The applications are simple, gorgeous and work well together. And they're here. Today. Steve Jobs must be waking up a happy man this morning.
Posts: 54,807

03-26-2006, 12:50 PM	#167
KC Jones Genious Join Date: Aug 2000 Location: Colorado Casino cash: $10012761	Open source is here to stay. I work for a fortune 500 company with more than 20K employees and revenues exceeding $8 billion. I can't even begin to tell you how much I hear about open source now from the CIO, VPs, Directors, etc. If you look around at the big players in enterprise software (IBM, Oracle, etc.) they all have strategies revolving around open source in place. The vendors are finding that if they want to sell support contracts for their 'value added' non standard additions, they have to spin those off as open source projects. Many vendors are adding open source projects to their support, maintenance, and PSO offerings because of the money to be made there. ...and yes, there is something magical about being open. Open standards ensure compatibility and independence in the enterprise. Open source ensures that *if* the vendor goes under, or you find yourself down a dead end path, you can allocate your own resources to make required changes to a software package or solution to keep your business running until you have the means to correct your IT path. It can also signifigantly speed up development and improve QA. This is more of a mixed bag though. For a popular open source project you get thousands of brilliant people around the world looking at the source code, making improvements, and pointing out flaws. For a not so popular project you can get a lot of spaghetti code - but this is another great thing about open source. Your staff can tell you pretty quickly from browsing the source and the project discussions if a project is crap or not. In the open source world, the strong survive and the shitty implementations or unecessary crap dies off quickly. In the proprietary world you don't know if something is ready for prime time until you buy it. Also, a vendor may keep pushing crap (with incremental upgrades at a high price) for years and years, and because you bought the crap in version X, you keep getting strung along until they get it right or until you pay the big penalty to switch.
Posts: 5,366

03-26-2006, 01:02 PM	#170
conchshell Just another football fan Join Date: Sep 2004 Casino cash: $10004900	Ok, here is a professional comparo. There is more in the link. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=120 In my last blog, where I did a high-level technical evaluation of Microsoft Office 2003 and OpenOffice.org 2.0, I showed that OpenOffice was a memory and resource hog. Contrary to popular belief (among Open Source advocates), Microsoft Office came out very lean and fast while OpenOffice.org Office Suite was just the opposite. Some couldn't accept the numbers and complained that the Task Manager numbers may be inaccurate and hiding memory usage. They demanded more proof, so here it is. Oh and here is a comparison of formats from the same link: Even when dealing with what is essentially the same data, OpenOffice Calc uses up 211 MBs of private unsharable memory while Excel uses up 34 MBs of private unsharable memory. The fact that OpenOffice.org Calc takes about 100 times the CPU time explains the kind of drastic results we were getting where Excel could open a file in 2 seconds while Calc would take almost 3 minutes. Most of that massive speed difference is due to XML being very processor intensive, but Microsoft still handles its own XML files about 7 times faster than OpenOffice.org handles OpenDocument ODS format and uses far less memory than OpenOffice.org.
Posts: 80