Macs and the illusion of security

[Caligastia]

Peni or ...

[MikeH]

Doesn't Vista also receive a type of security due to lack of marketshare?

Touché!

[Imran Siddiqui]

Though, amusingly enough, Vista has higher marketshare than OSX

(by a good bit too)

[-Jrabbit]

Well, duh! Although Vista's share of the corporate market is pretty embarrassing -- under 15%.

But the economy’s pinch is not solely to blame for Microsoft’s problems. The company’s Windows Vista software, hailed in 2007 as the most significant product in the company’s history, has failed to attract businesses in any meaningful way because of problems with compatibility and speed.

According to a study by Forrester Research, 86 percent of corporate PCs continue to rely on the eight-year-old Windows XP.

[ZEE]

Y'all smell that?

Oh its just the dead horse.

[Asher]

Last I heard, 25% of all PCs run Vista now. 89% run some form of Windows, and 9% run MacOS.

The last figures for this (from March 09) had Apple's OS marketshare drop slightly and Windows increase slightly, actually.

The problem is XP is actually just so good, there's little incentive to upgrade. Can you imagine Apple selling Mac OS 10.0? Anyone who ever used that would tell you how horrid it is, and that's the generation XP is from.

While Vista made many tremendous gains under the hood (especially with security), the user-facing changes are not significant. Combined with the driver teething problems these under-the-hood changes brought and Apple's effective anti-Vista campaign, sales are sluggish.

Enter Windows 7. Its code is about 95% the same as Vista's, but with a better marketing plan and driver teething done with, it's getting a lot of positive attention.

[-Jrabbit]

The figures I quoted were from a 7/27 article on Microsoft's weak quarterly report (posted a day or so after Apple's "beat expectations" numbers).

So you're saying that vista was basically a marketing effort gone bad? I agree. Seems to me that Microsoft badly underestimated their customers' willingness to reinvest in hardware (required hardware upgrade for most users) while also buying a new (fairly expensive, unproven) OS. Outside the core "gotta be current" community, most Vista sales are a residue of the forced-entry for people who needed new PCs. Many of these customers would have preferred XP, but had vista rammed down their throats.

I expect Windows 7 to be a big hit, mostly because MS is pretty damn good at learning from their mistakes, along with pent-up demand. Corporate customers (the economic recovery willing) are now ready to upgrade, having lived an extra 2-3 years with their aging hardware.

That's my naive outsider's take on it.

[-Jrabbit]

Last I heard, 25% of all PCs run Vista now.

If someone had predicted that low figure to you when Vista came out, you would have laughed in their face and called them an idiot.

[Imran Siddiqui]

He does that regardless

Anyways, I think you are correct that Vista was simply improperly marketed. There is that Mojave Project (I believe that's what its called) where people come in and play around with Vista and all of the stuff it can do, without being told its Vista (told its a new OS in the works), and then are surprised when they are informed its actually just Vista.

[-Jrabbit]

Bad PR can trump a good product, no doubt.

[Asher]

The figures I quoted were from a 7/27 article on Microsoft's weak quarterly report (posted a day or so after Apple's "beat expectations" numbers).

So you're saying that vista was basically a marketing effort gone bad? I agree.

Far more complicated than that.

Technically, about 3 years of the Vista development cycle (01-04) were completely wasted. This was due to a number of factors:
- MS' (then industry-standard) software engineering practices were failing given the complexity and number of people working on their new OS releases. They decided in '04 to "start fresh" and just ditched most of the prior work. This resulted in a compressed release cycle for Vista to make an '06 release, and as a result the effort was put in the underlying aspects of the OS and not the UI (though they still made some significant UI changes -- Aero is more important than most people may know, if only because of its underlying architecture). Side-effect of this compressed release schedule is that driver vendors didn't have too much time to make solid drivers to work with the new innards. This alone is responsible for most of Vista's bad rep, since drivers sucked.
- XP was upgraded substantially for free over its life. Windows XP in 2006 was not the same OS a Windows XP in 2001 on its launch. This was mandated by the security push which also ate into about 2 years of the Vista design cycle as engineers were pulled off Vista and onto XP SP2 to make it more bulletproof. Even though XP is really old by release date, it is not by technology standards. So the XP->Vista upgrade was mitigated by MS providing free upgrades to Windows XP (.NET support is huge, as is WPF and other technologies, not to mention the security changes in SP2).

As a result of all of these, to the mainstream user the upgrade to Vista was minor in new functionality and experiences. Windows 7 is what Windows Vista was supposed to be if they did not need to divert resources to Windows XP SP2 and if their software engineering practices didn't fail them.

They've made massive internal changes to how their OSes are developed in terms of process, in addition to internal security audits, etc to prevent the security issues of XP arising again as well as preventing another Vista-like development hell from recurring. All signs point to their new software engineering practices to be working better than expected, as Windows 7 development sailed forward at high-speeds.

So in addition to the failed marketing aspects, there's a lot more technically appealing in 7 vs Vista.

As a sidenote, even in my final year of school in my software engineering classes, we had case studies of what went wrong with "Windows Longhorn" (which became Windows Vista) development. There are already textbooks out describing the new techniques and strategies MS is using, and they've presented them at industry conferences as well. Many companies are adopting the same processes for huge, complicated software development.

[-Jrabbit]

I loved XP. But my corp career ended and my first XP laptop was a disaster.
No way was I going down the Vista path. I went back to Apple and haven't looked back.

And yes, I do have anti-virus software. No matter the OS, you're a fool if you don't.

[Traianvs]

It's a funnier word than viruses, though I believe viruses is actually correct.

Exactly, because the Latin word 'virus' as a rule is never pluralized. Therefore when referring to computer viruses it the English plural form should be used.

/nit-pick mode