HP denies that they are making an OS to rival Vista, but, they do acknowledge that they are developing software that would bypass some of its functions altogether. HP formed the “customer experience” group nine months ago in an effort to give customers a quick and easy alternative to certain applications. The team is focusing on touchscreen technology where users can watch movies or view pictures.
While HP will not go as far to say that they are developing a complete OS, Business Week claims to have sources that say employees in their PC division are doing just that. A Linux based OS could be “simpler and easier for mainstream users”.
Phil McKinney, chief technology officer in HP’s PC division says the idea is a possibility, but HP is not funding a massive move away from the Windows ecosystem:
“Is HP funding a huge R&D team to go off and create an operating system? [That] makes no sense. For us it’s about innovating on top of Vista.”
Intel and Dell have also recently made strides away from Microsoft, with both promoting Linux based systems for their netbooks.
Here’s that commercial we told you about earlier – the first in the series of ads for Microsoft’s $300 million campaign to help prop up Windows Vista. I just grabbed it off my TV while watching the Giants/Redskins game.
While this ad doesn’t really tell us anything about Microsoft or its products, it does tell us that someday computers will be edible. So there’s that. Gates is kinda funny, too.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft is launching a $300 million ad campaign starting September 4th. The ads will star none other than Jerry Seinfeld, who’s reported to be receiving about $10 million. Not bad, eh?
The campaign is being developed to combat the negative image that many consumers have about Windows Vista and also to finally push back against Apple’s popular Mac vs. PC campaign.
So who will star opposite of Seinfeld in the Microsoft commercials? Bill Gates himself! While that could be seen as a bold and potentially dangerous move, the ad campaign will be the brainchild of agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the company behind Burger King ads (The King), Coke Zero (Coke wants to sue Coke Zero for taste infringement), and Virgin Atlantic Airways.
The campaign will play off the slogan “Windows, Not Walls” and push the idea of “breaking down barriers that prevent people and ideas from connecting.” That doesn’t sound all that funny, but here’s to hoping from some hilarity on September 4th.
Microsoft has a blog about Windows 7 now. It’s called E7, and it’s aimed at people like us, people who scrutinize the development (or lack thereof) of Windows to the nth degree. It’s supposed to be a conversation, right, about how they’re making Windows 7. The blog will primarily be written by two senior project managers, along with occasional input from the rest of the Windows 7 team.
Now the bad. First, it reads a little too much like a press release for my liking; there’s like three linking verbs in the whole thing. It’s like the copy staff is sitting there making every sentence sing. It just feels rigid, which is not how blogs should ideally be. Second, it’s written by two project managers, guys whose job it is to make sure Windows 7 is the best it can be, from the top down. You know what would make a more interesting blog? Just give it to the everyday engineers and make it anonymous. That way, they can rant—well this feature is a load of bunk, but they’d fire me if I ever voiced my opinion—and give us a truly unfiltered “insider’s” view of its development.
A good effort nonetheless. Hopefully it’ll still be an interesting read.
The latest upgrade to WMC, codename Fiji, is finally official. We’ll try not to harp on Microsoft to bad about the Windows Media Center TV Pack, but honestly, that’s kind of hard as the pack isn’t what it was suppose to be. Missing is the DirecTV and H.264 video compression support. More importantly though, the good folks at Redmond choose not to allow home theater PC enthusiasts install the upgrade themselves, rather opting to send packs only to OEMs.
We should point out though, that as promised, Fiji does add support for international standards such as ISDB-T, DVB-S, and DVB-T along with the US ClearQAM system. Microsoft sent out the upgrade to said OEMs mid-July but there is no telling when it will be in the builder’s new systems. We just wish that we could tell current HTPC that they too could enjoy the new features soon, but we’re sure the guys at Microsoft have a good reason why they won’t be able too at all.
A recent article in APC Magazine finds a marketing manager for HP detailing how business users are still able to order machines pre-loaded with Windows XP while making it appear that the OS sold was Windows Vista.
Jane Bradburn of HP Australia says,
“From the 30th of June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP licence. However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business licence but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today.”
So the business customer gets an XP machine but it appears on the books as a Vista license. Microsoft is aiming to make Windows XP completely unavailable by January of next year, but HP is apparently “already in discussions with Microsoft about how it could push this deadline back” because the feedback that HP’s been getting from businesses is that most of them don’t have time to do compatibility testing and the cost of re-imaging all their machines is too high during the slow economy.
Apple’s success with the iPod, iPhone and Mac is finally starting to worry Microsoft, according to the company’s recently filed 10-K form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (10-K forms summarize a publicly traded corporation’s performance, as required by the SEC.)
In the filing, Microsoft says the following about a certain vertically integrated rival:
A competing vertically-integrated model, in which a single firm controls both the software and hardware elements of a product, has been successful with certain consumer products such as personal computers, mobile phones and digital music players.
That’s obviously an allusion to Apple, whose iPod is now the equivalent of Klenix or Q-Tips in terms of brand recognition; whose iPhone 3G has sold exceptionally well (despite apparent glitches and other hang-ups); and whose Mac propelled the company’s most recent, highly profitable quarter.
Nobody would argue that Linux has an appreciable market share. They could however say that they have an appreciating share. Cause in fact they do. Since Microsoft launched Vista in January 2007, U.K. preinstalls of Linux have multiplied 28 times.
But unfortunately for Linux, 28 times a little is still a little. However, consider that pre-Vista, Linux was being shipped on only .1% of PC’s. That’s nothing, but 2.8% is definitely something. Something from nothing cannot be ignored. Remember it was not too long ago Apple had a market share of nothing…
All this probably goes more to show that customers are not embracing Vista, and are instead searching for alternative options. According to market research firm, Context, 93% of PC’s still ship with Vista. But the newest evolution of Linux, Ubuntu seems to be making strides in the right direction.
Windows Vista gets a lot of stink for being too resource demanding, something this video here tries to dispel. This 12-minute video shows a Willcom D4 (1.33GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB RAM) running Vista, going through various processes in order to put the tablet to the sword, so to speak.
As you might imagine, the tablet seems to hold up pretty well, certainly useable.
That we’re still discussing “is Vista right for you,” 19 months after it first came out, must annoy Microsoft quite a bit.
Okay, here’s what happened. Microsoft took a group of 120 individuals who “were either Mac, Linux, or users of versions of Windows that came before Windows Vista” and who rated their perception of Vista at less than a five on a scale of one to ten. These people were shown a demo of what they thought was a new Windows OS called “Mojave” and this demo was individually tailored to each person based on “the experiences they seemed most interested in following a series of interviews.”
While the average rating of Vista before the demo was 4.4, the post-demo rating was 8.5, even though Mojave was actually Windows Vista. So what can we learn from all this? Vista looks nice. Problem is, none of these people had to use Vista. They were just “given a demo by a trained retail salesperson.”
While I’m never the first to jump on Vista for this or that problem (I’m guessing it’ll be a great OS in a couple years), this is pretty dumb. Larger capacity solid state disks are in the works and, being more complicated internally, will require a more sophisticated controller. You don’t think about your hard drive controller that much, and that’s probably because hard drive technology has been in the same generation for practically 20 years. And you expect a company like Microsoft to future-proof their OS so that the next wave of technology will work best on Windows — what a selling point it would be if SSDs just worked better on Vista, right?
But Vista isn’t a forward-thinking OS, it’s a retrospective OS, the last and largest in a line of dinosaurs. And Sandisk says Vista isn’t ready for the next generation of SSDs. They’re gonna get zapped on this.
Microsoft looks to be rolling out its “Vista isn’t so bad, see?” ad campaign, as this delightful little jpeg shows. You know how people used to think the world was flat, but then a bunch of explorers proved them wrong? Apparently Microsoft will try to demonstrate that Vista actually doesn’t stink on ice. Good luck with that.
Somewhat less snarky, ZDNet talks about the same ad, and explains why Microsoft has its work cut out for it self, even if Vista is now much better. (I haven’t used Vista since last summer. This MacBook uses Windows XP when it goes into BootCamp to play Team Fortress 2, which is the best PC shooter I’ve ever played. Granted, I’ve played like three my whole life, but the point stands.) Those “Get a Mac” ads Apple ran completely skewered Microsoft, and largely are responsible for the public’s “Vista is lame” perception. If Microsoft were to release a point-by-point refutation, that’d be seen as legitimizing Apple’s claims. Can’t have that, now can we?
Microsoft is said to have spent a cool $300 million on this ad campaign, so it’ll be fascinating to see what the Admen have come up with. We regularly throw around award-winning ideas in our chat room, and we’d cost much less than $300 million.
Bill Veghte from the Windows group at Microsoft sent out a nice big memo to those who still haven’t installed Vista in their enterprises and are waiting for some real improvement before they even consider it. His advice?
Windows Vista offers significant advances in security and productivity and we recommend that enterprises that have not yet deployed it should absolutely evaluate its benefits. If you looked at Windows Vista previously and had concerns, the combination of Service Pack 1 and improvements made by our partners probably fixed many of the issues you were worried about and we encourage you to take a second look.
Translation: Spend more man-hours poring over our software. We’ll wait! Read More
According to the NYT Intel will not upgrade their 80,000 employee computers to Vista, at least according to an internal that is making everyone in the IT industry giggle like little girls. The IT staff at Intel found “no compelling case” for adopting Vista and that it will still use Vista in test scenarios in some departments.
What does this mean? Well, it will definitely mean a Microsoft stock hit as Wall Street panics on the news. It also means expect an update “Business Vista” coming soon with special business features like using the XP theme right out of the box.
Since about 2002, the Department of Justice has had a special “Technical Committee” overseeing the development of Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The committee’s main job was to monitor the implementation of the Microsoft-owned middleware products that get (or used to get) installed by default on new computers like Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, MSN Messenger, and Windows Media Player.
The monitoring process was supposed to end last November but, according to Microsoft Watch, “Google (and some other Microsoft competitors) requested an extension, and U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly gave it to them: two more years of government oversight.”
Dell, in its infinite wisdom, will charge customers $20 to $50 to downgrade from Vista to XP. Only buyers of low-end Vostro PCs have to worry, though.
This is all because of Microsoft’s self-imposed June 30 end-of-life for Windows XP.
Says the shrill ComputerWorld:
Adding Vista Business to a Vostro 1000 notebook, for example, costs an additional $99 above the price with the default operating system, Vista Home Basic. However, selecting the downgrade option — Windows XP pre-installed and Vista Business installation media in the box — costs $149. That’s a $50 downgrade surcharge.
Shocking! We should be rocking the Drudge Siren for this.
Or, as John Biggs would say, get a Mac. No more downgrading nastiness.
The Pepper Pad 3, apparently not to be confused with the already-available Pepper Pad 3, has been spotted by AVING. This new version of the…um…board-like, lap-based, net surfing apparatus will feature Intel’s Atom processor and, according to AVING, “a 7-inch wide VGA touchscreen” and a Linux-based operating system.
Cameron over at TweakTown.com got Windows Vista Ultimate up and running on the new Asus Eee 1000H. The Windows Experience rating is a lowly 1.0, held back by the graphics card, but the system seems to otherwise work. The installation apparently only took about 30 minutes. Bonus points for using AC/DC in the video.
Heads up, Mac users who want to use Linux for some reason. The latest version of Parallels Desktop, the virtualization software that lets you run inferior operating systems on your Mac, now supports Parallel Tools when running Linux, including Ubuntu 8. Throw in enhanced 3D graphic support in Vista and you’ve got your self a Grade A point update.
InfoWorld has a somewhat long-ish article about how to beat the drop-dead date for Windows XP sales, which Microsoft has set as June 30th of this year. That’s in less than a month! What to do?! Well, here are a couple of options.
First, June 30th is the last date that Windows XP can be sold. However, retailers and manufacturers can still sell copies of XP to the public and/or load copies of XP onto computers after that date, they just won’t be able to buy more copies of XP from Microsoft once stock runs out. So you’ll probably see retail stores and PC makers buying up copies of XP this month, lots and lots of copies.
Second, manufacturers have the option to provide downgrade rights to customers who buy new computers that would normally be pre-loaded with Vista. Dell is apparently offering downgrade rights until January 31st of next year and HP will be offering downgrade rights until July 30, 2009. So for many custom-built PCs, you’ll have the option of loading them up with XP instead of Vista.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that 
