(no subject)

[furrbear]

Even though it's "officially" no longer a retail product,

Windows XP Still Outselling Windows Vista

"While Microsoft excitedly tries to sway public opinion by touting that Windows Vista License sales top 180 Million units, Hewlett-Packard (HP) was busy smacking Microsoft down — reportedly shipping PCs with a Vista Business license but with Windows XP pre-loaded in the majority of business computers sold since the June 30 Windows XP execution date established by Microsoft — casting a lot of doubt over how many copies of Vista have actually been sold."

Comments

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

Aw, yes, the "This is just Microsoft bashing" canard.

To quote Peter Gutmann, who says it better than I can:

"It's bad-technology bashing. If this had been done by Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, Alan Cox, or Theo de Raadt, I'd have said the same thing about it. As far as I'm concerned computers are tools to get a job done and not a platform for religious wars, and if something's bad I'll say so regardless of who's doing it. In fact Vista overall has some really nice new technology and features built into it, it's just this one aspect of Vista that's troublesome. And just for the record I run various versions of Windows on … [counting] … seven of my machines (the rest are a mixture of Linux, FreeBSD, and occasionally Solaris and QNX), so I'd be a rather unlikely Microsoft detractor if I have their software all over my machines."

My personal count is nine machines, and I'll add Tru64 Unix and VMS and remove QNX from the OS mix. I'm presently evaluating Server 2008 configured as a desktop OS - I have no use for Aero's bling. If I can, I intend to skip Vista much like Windows ME.

But maybe Microsoft can address this better than most:

“No amount of coordination will be successful unless it's designed with the needs of the customer in mind. Microsoft believes that a good user experience is a requirement for adoption” — Microsoft.

“I'm not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers, both business and home, the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems our customers face are” — Jim Allchin, Platform Products and Services Group, Microsoft.

You're doing fine with Vista and like it? Fine. Congratulations.

I'm a Software Engineer/Computer Scientist by training. There's a lot I like in the new Windows 6 kernel, but beyond Gutmann's Content Protection analysis, with which I concur, there are other things that trouble me. Vista's Aero UI shows many many traits of, what is known colloquially as, The Second System Effect.

First introduced in 1975 by OS/360 project manager Frederick P. Brooks in his seminal collection The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, the Second System Effect states that the second system an engineer designs is the most dangerous system he will ever design, since he will tend to incorporate all of the additions he originated but did not add (due to the inherent time constraints) to the first system. Thus, when embarking upon a second system an engineer should be mindful that he is susceptible to over-engineering it.

Instead of cleaning up code and programming out bugs, an entire new team was tasked with creating a "Brand new platform". From software reliability and security standpoints, that's a troubling development.

The purpose to all this discussion? Hopefully to learn from past mistakes and not make them in the future.