On May 17, 8:10 pm, Chris Ahlstrom <ahlstr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> After takin' a swig o' grog, Rex Ballard belched out
> this bit o' wisdom:
>
> > Microsoft likes to quickly bury their failures. Windows NT 3.x and
> > Windows ME were also failures, and Microsoft went to some
> > extraordinary efforts to move people off the legacy product. Windows
> > NT 3.x machines were easily converted to Windows 95 machines, and
> > Microsotf tried hard to encourage businesses to use Windows 95 instead
> > of NT 3.1 OR Windows 3.1
> I don't know about that, but they did bring out a 95'ish desktop look for
> Win NT 4.
Windows 95 was the stop-gap to get people off of NT 3.1 as well as
Windows 3.1. NT 4.0 came out in 1997, and Microsoft sweetened the
deal for corporate customers by offering them a free upgrade to NT 5.0
aka Windows 2000, if they purchased a service plan for every employee.
When Windows 2000 release came out, it was obviously very popular.
However, the problem for Microsoft is that they didn't get the "pop"
in revenue normally associated with new releases of Windows, because
retail consumers were still using Windows 98. Microsoft tried to get
a "pop" by releasing ME, but ME was so unreliable and buggy that
people actually purchased "downgrade kits" to install Windows 98 on ME
machines and PC sales slumped significantly.
Mirosoft release Windows XP in both Home Edition and Professional
Edition to get revenue from corporate customers, doubling or tripling
the cost of the support plans and telling customers that if they
didn't upgrade they would be on their own and would be left vulnerable
to viruses and other attacks. CEOs didn't like those tactics and many
ordered the CIO and/or CTO to have a plan to Migrate to Linux before
the next release of Windows in case Microsoft tried such strong-arm
tactics again.
Microsoft made huge vaporware promises for Longhorn to prevent a mass-
migration to Linux, promising a better file-system, faster context
switching, better security, and better damage control. As Microsoft
began to remove features to meet the 2007 release date, Longhorn was
looking more like a "Bum Steer". Longhorn was renamed Vista, and the
promotions featured the "Oh Wow" 3D graphics desktop, which turned out
to be a "mirage" because most of the machines sold with Vista didn't
have the right kind of graphics cards to run the Aero interface.
Worse, performance of Vista was dismal. It needed 4 times more memory
and 5 times faster dual-core CPU to achieve the same performance as
XP.
Microsoft knows that Vista has not done well. They know how many
units were sold to OEMs, but they also know how many Vista systems
were registered via WGA and how many were registered as XP systems.
Furthermore, they have been made acutely aware of the dramatic drop in
Vista compatible PC prices.
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