Microsoft starts a "Get the Facts" campaign...against itself
You've got to hand it to Microsoft. It hates ANYTHING and ANYONE that gets in its way of selling its software.
Including, apparently, itself.
In a very funny turn of events, Microsoft is out preaching to the industry that XP is a bloated expense hog, while svelte Vista will cure world hunger (or, at least, cost less), as Paul Krill notes:
According to research conducted by Wipro and GCR Custom Research, total cost of ownership for Windows XP is $4,407 annually, while Vista's cost is $3,802. The $4,407 figure was derived from costs of hardware, software, IT labor, and user costs....
Peculiarly, the study actually was based on XP usage and extrapolations based on Vista capabilities because there was not a substantial base of Vista clients in use yet when the study was done early in 2007....
Reducing vulnerabilities and utilizing security policies presents savings, noted Bill Barna, principal consultant at Wipro. Security savings alone were estimated at $55. "If you can reduce the number of core vulnerabilities, you can basically have the savings flow throughout the entire security model," Barna said.
Imagine the kind of savings you could get if you just stopped using Windows altogether! Few to no security issues. Less administration. Etc.
By the way, the study claims that switching to Vista saves on hardware costs. How could this possibly be, when everything I have ever read on Vista is that it is a resource hog? You spend more on hardware with Vista, not less.
Anyway, Microsoft must really be hurting if it has to resort to beating up on its most stable product in years. It's clearly desperate to get people to move off XP (you know, the Windows OS that actually has hardware/peripheral support, a lot of software written for it, needs a lighter hardware platform, etc.). Maybe the open-source crowd should just wait for Microsoft to beat itself into oblivion.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
I understand an SP1 update to Vista is going to be released in early 2008. The question I want answered (even though I don't use Vista) is; since Microsoft is aware of all the problems with the OS, why don't they put out the update as soon as possible instead of waiting for months and months?
Vista may LOOK pretty, but if the software has so many complaints and issues about it, then it's not worth the money or the hassle.
I think Microsoft has been surprised at how many people have NOT "upgraded" to Vista that they are now bashing XP in an attempt to "convince" more people to buy Vista. They can say whatever they want about XP, but I'm completely satisfied it and have no intention to spend more money to upgrade to problem laden Vista.
Maybe Microsoft should consider making their product open source! It won't ever happen of course, but maybe that would help solve some of the issues with it.
It's not really anything new.
:-)
Of course they're trying to point out reasons why their latest OS incarnation is better than their last. This isn't bashing themselves, this is marketing the latest.
It's no different than a car salesman touting the updated features of this year's model vs last years.
In short, you're reaching and only the non-windows market (9% now?) are buying. It's cheap and worse yet it makes you look petty.
Is this what CNet has become?
As far as the idea of using Macs-- read the vulnerability reports from CERT and figure out how long it takes Apple to fix their flaws. They have no security problems accoring to your comments - get the FACTS before writing inaccurate editorials you call reporting. Didn't you learn that in college?
Additional point - what enterprise management tools does Apple have to deploy, update and manage Macs in a medium to large company. Sure lets buy everyone at Ford a MAc and then have to walk around to each of the 40,000+ desktops and install applications 1 at a time. Then you can walk around every week to every desktop and take an inventory of the software installed to be sure your company is not liable for pirated software - just in case a user installs software they brought from home.
Then there is the idea of securing the computer. How do you monitor and report for compliance of government mandated bills such as SOX and HIPPA? Not sure how to do that on a Mac? - yeah me either. What about securing data through centrally managed encryption and rights management - not sre about that either on a Mac.
It seems as though the MAc is geared very much toward the consumer market where you will get 1-10 Mac's in a house or small business. I would like to see the TCO on running a fleet of 1,000-10,000 Macs in a single envirnment. How many admins would it take, how long to roll out, how long to upgrade? How long to wait before you actually get business software written?
I say give eveyone an Etch-a-Sketch. That way they will be truly secure. No security holes, no way to steal data, to reboot - just shake it.
Install apps 1 at a time, eh? Hmm.. I guess he's never heard of Apple Remote Desktop. Reasonable licensing costs ($500 for an unlimited # of stations), ability to deploy apps to large numbers of clients quickly (how does installing MS Office to 50 Macs in 26 seconds sound? pretty good to me.), asset management reports (hw & sw installed, ability to remove apps installed, etc.). Want scheduled updates that happen automatically when the users come online? You can do that too. You can even direct them to a local updates repository if that's your bag.
I won't debate time to fix flaws with you, particularly since you cite no examples, but in my experience, Apple's mean time to fix is much shorter than Microsoft's. Witness, the number of unpatched vulnerabilities in IE 7. There's even one that dates back to June, 2006. That's over a year. Granted, that one's a low severity, but there's a "highly critical" flaw that's been unpatched since July, 2007. Over a month to patch a "highly critical" flaw? In short - pot, kettle, black.
http://secunia.com/product/12366/?task=advisories
cars, electronics, food, everything we buy. The day before say a new model of
car comes out. The salesmen would tell you that the car is the best thing
going.
The next day he will tell you it's junk and you should buy the new model.
Of course companies want you to keep buying! Duh! How else are they going
to make money?? The question should be. Do you really need the new
product?
Many times the answer will be No. So what, Microsoft wants you to buy a new
computer and use Vista. Or at least upgrade you old computer to Vista.
Makes sense! For me Vista just does not offer enough for me to spend the
money to upgrade or buy a new computer. I guess that's what many people
think right now.
Come on, Intel never compared itself to AMD in those golden days. Just to its own.
Marketing rules, ain't it so?
I wondered how resource-hungry Vista could actually result in a savings on hardware. The paper achieves that magical result by creating a category called "Hardware/software". They then estimate that Vista includes utilities for "disk maintenance, drive encryption, PC imaging, backup/restore, and anti-spyware/malware" that saves an estimated $17 per year that you no longer have to spend if you were not satisfied with those that Microsoft provides for XP, nor with the various free third-party alternatives, but are satisfied with the Microsoft versions for Vista. They then add another $17 per year savings by assuming that you will use Vista's Bitlocker Disk Encryption feature and therefore not spend an estimated $50 of your IT person's time wiping the disk when you decommission the computer after three years. I guess they assume that IT people wipe one disk at a time and spend the hour doing nothing but staring at the computer to make sure it really is wiped. And you will trust Bitlocker enough to not bother running a wipe program before recycling the old disks. That's a net amortized annual savings of $34 for software, under those assumptions.
Finally, they estimate that you will need $100 memory upgrade and no other hardware upgrade, which amortizes to an increased cost $33/yr. I guess all businesses are running XP on hardware that sufficiently exceeds XP's minimum requirements except for memory and has sufficiently new peripherals that it is already Vista ready.
By then naming the category "hardware+software" they find a net reduction in that category of $1 per year, up to $33 if you start out with enough RAM.
The rest of the savings detailed in the paper are even funnier. They include a reduction of $10/year worth of the user's time spent searching for documents that are easier to find. I wonder if this means that a large company with 10,000 employees will see $100,000 a year more profit as a result of this improvement in Vista? Or will the employees get an average of $10 a year more bonus because of the extra work they accomplish with that extra time? Or will they be that much happier because they can leave work a minute early each day that they find a document faster? The white paper does quantify the improved search feature as meaning $10 per year per employee to a company's bottom line, so it must be so. At a total savings of $605 per employee laptop per year, I can't imagine any rational executive not immediately upgrading every laptop in the company.
you can thank Microsoft and Apple for it
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by alien003
March 25, 2009 7:45 PM PDT
- Microsoft need to change, hope it will become more efficiency :)
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