Windows 7 must appeal to geeks--or else
Windows Vista has been a tragedy on many levels for Microsoft. First, it was marked with compatibility issues and annoyances with its User Access Control feature that started a firestorm of epic proportions. But once those issues improved, Microsoft ran into an even bigger issue: it wasn't able to satisfy vendors, nor was it able to satisfy the geeks.
And that's where the biggest issue with Vista really is. The technology space is looked at by many in the mainstream as a higher-level industry that simply can't be understood by the average person. Software? Hardware? Huh?
Because of that, it's the geek that filters opinions and creates a trickle-down effect in the space. Let's face it--if you don't know what you're talking about and you know that your friend does, wouldn't you take their word for it at the least or verify what they're saying at the very most?
And when you verify what they're saying, you'll probably end up researching the topic by going to the countless blog posts and articles by experts in the field to decide if your friend is correct, right?
And what do you find there? A slew of stories written by geeks, for geeks. And throughout the past year, those stories written by geeks for geeks were littered with criticisms of Vista and countless reasons why the company made mistakes. Sure, there were some sites that came to its defense, but the vast majority of journalists took the opportunity to beat up on the OS.
So how did it get to the point where the Mojave Experiment became necessary? How did it get to the point where Microsoft was forced to concede that it was losing the PR game and it needed to tell the world about it?
You can blame it on the geeks and the trickle-down effect that makes the technology industry such a unique space.
Technology's trickle-down effect is simple: a tech company screws up a product in ways that the tech-savvy crowd will notice, but the mainstream crowd won't. Once that happens, geeks start railing on the product and discuss why it's so bad. Eventually, they start complaining to their family and friends, who don't know much about it and the distaste for products starts entering the mainstream. Once that happens, those people will start talking to others and soon it becomes viral.
And that's exactly why Microsoft can't make the same mistake it made with Vista. That operating system didn't appeal to the geeks and they spent the past year telling the world about it. Once that happened, the world started believing it (regardless of whether or not it was true) and Microsoft has paid the price.
So what does it need to do with Windows 7? Make sure the geeks love it.
But making sure the geeks love it will be difficult. Microsoft isn't one of the most well-liked companies in the space and any chance to beat up on the company will make even the most objective geek happy.
Realizing that, Microsoft can't expect to quiet every critic, but it needs to be more proactive in ensuring that more geeks will be happy. First off, it needs to ensure that the geeks' desires are met as effectively as possible: the geeks want better security, more customization, and full compatibility. Secondly, it has to play the right PR game: make Windows 7 about the desires of the tech-savvy crowd and stop pretending like that crowd doesn't matter.
The one thing I don't understand about Microsoft and countless other companies in the technology industry is why they don't realize that the influential people are not the average John and Jane Doe. Instead, the technology industry is dominated by a select few who tell their friends and family why a certain product or service is useless.
And that's exactly why I don't like what I'm hearing already about Windows 7. Microsoft isn't doing enough to appeal to the geeks and it's instead tying its success to the mainstream. From a business standpoint that may make sense--the majority of people are in the mainstream--but from a strategical perspective, the company has it all wrong.
Microsoft needs to start leaking information that discusses some of the features that would make the tech-savvy crowd go wild. It doesn't have to be anything special, just enough to start building some hype. After that, it needs to give the niche press unprecedented access to Windows 7 and create a product that appeals to them. And simply by embracing the niche press, Microsoft can start rebuilding its image in that space.
The technology industry is unique because it's segmented by a perceived knowledge barrier. Because of that, a select few are looked at as the source for knowledge and thus, provide the general public with the opinions they should be formulating. Apple has realized that--just look at the press coverage--but Microsoft failed to do so with Vista and now needs to repair its image before Windows 7 throws the company into disaster mode.
Playing nicely with the mainstream means nothing in this industry unless the niche is happy. And if Microsoft wants Windows 7 to be a success, it better create a product that appeals to that niche and start playing nice with it. If it doesn't, look for Microsoft's PR troubles to continue indefinitely.
Check out Don's Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Maybe that's the problem. Windows 7 may not contain any such features.
-Don
I don't own or drive a Ferrari. That should make me the ideal person to talk about all of its features and problems by that logic. People should listen to my views and opinions based purely upon speculation, rumor, and lack of actual hands on experience.
-Don
Suppose that you heard about a sports car that cost as much as a Ferrari, but with your expert eye you noticed that its build was imprecise and not sturdy; and you checked the numbers and noticed that with that torque and weight it couldn't possibly retain a safe grip on the road at high speeds; and, after trying a friend's model just once, you heard noises that suggested the designers had taken a few too many short-cuts.
Would you buy one, or even become a frequent driver? That's why we complain about vista without using it much.
And "Yes" I have 1 system running Vista Enterprise and another running XP SP3 and the XP system is my production system while the Vista system is a test system although I do some work from it as well but only after disabling anything having to do with UAC and also exposing the REAL Administrator account since being added into the administrators group still does not give you FULL admin privileges.
On the other hand, my MacMini is awesome!
-Don
I have two identical machines except different CPU. AMD 6000+ runs Vista, AMD 4000+ runs XP - guess what, 4000+ runs a bit zippier. You can see my point. Sure, Vista crashes less; but if I restart XP once per day, it runs just fine.
-Don
Microsoft did that with Vista (e.g., WinFS, Palladium, Windows PowerShell, EFI support, etc.) and then yanked all the "good stuff" when they couldn't deliver. How about if Windows 7 just includes that stuff?
-Don
To be fair, some of this likely got put off due to potential security issues, but, yes, I for one would love to see WinFS actually go somewhere.
Also, Vista actually did introduce some great "geeky" stuff, at least for admins. It is much easier to deploy and administer than XP or 2000...
I think Windows doesn't need to wow the geeks, so much as it has to wow IT middle management and get the geeks buy-in that it's the same crap as last year and if they new how to set that up, they can do this blind. Frankly, supporting Windows is job security, and for companies, it's status quo.
I don't think people are done with delusions that Microsoft is the best product, the cheapest, or whatever. It's a product, it's good enough, and its what they know. If Microsoft can make it use less CPU, memory, and incur less disk activity so you can buy cheaper hardware and use less electricity -- well that would sell. If they listen to support people's horror stories and design products to eliminate the horrors (ever have to listen to someone drone on about a bad Exchange server migration?). They could practically leave the product alone and it would sell.
But you make a great point that scares me: Windows is what they know and they're OK with it. That's scary stuff: "good enough"? No way.
-Don
Secondly, from the past, Vista did not radically change from XP, this was the same as the Tiger/Leopard transition. We may have reached the point where the OS is mature and developed. I find Microsoft's Live Mesh project more promising than Windows 7. Although the concept of full cloud-computing is not ready due to relatively slow internet speeds and spotty reliability, I believe it is the future. From a usability standpoint, Mesh is stabler than Apple's MobileMe and with a greater vision.
I think Mesh is something to watch for more than Windows 7, especially to geeks.
-Don
I have to suspect anything you say after this statement. Vista, which took five years to ship after XP made its appearance - mostly due to bottom-up security overhauls, reworking internals to support a DRM refitting, and massive consumer-focussed eye candy and features, isn't a radical departure from Vista? It even has a new kernel version.
Care to clarify?
Not being able to use my multimedia keyboard volume to adjust the volume in Media Center is a major failure.
Windows Fetch or whatever the search piece is destroying performance on the computer is a major failure.
Apparently the driver model is so bad in Windows, that hardware developers can't provide 64 bit drivers or Vista drivers for their products.
Something as basic as the taskbar still doesn't work properly. Autohide sometimes works sometimes doesn't, sometimes gets stuck in the showing mode, sometimes won't show, etc.
Taking screenshots has become very performance intensive due to the display virtualization.
Windows system tray ballong popup madness...
Network folders still hang FOREVER if the network/server has a problem.
Still have to reboot at least once a week to deal with updates/upgrades/drivers/installs.
Rebooting can take 10 minutes from clicking shutdown til you can use the computer again.
I do use it, and I do like some of the eye candy, and the new symbolic link/junction support across network shares, but I am certainly not terribly happy with it.
I don't think it's THAT bad though. Are you just having bad luck with Vista? Sounds like it.
-Don
My volume control on my keyboard works just fine
Windows Fetch destroying performance? It rarely degrades performance at all even if it had slight impact doesn't searching for the file manually waste more time?
Windows Tray baloons these pop up rarely do people seriously get so easily annoyed these days?
My vista computer is extremely responsive and increases productivity 10 fold
10 minute reboot? I can shut down and boot vista in under a minute.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bull. 10 minutes might be an exaggeration, but I *KNOW* under a minute is.
Never happens to me.
"Not being able to use my multimedia keyboard volume to adjust the volume in Media Center is a major failure."
Funny, works for me with both keyboards that come with the PC and one I bought on my own.
"Apparently the driver model is so bad in Windows, that hardware developers can't provide 64 bit drivers or Vista drivers for their products."
I have had only one piece of hardware that was a problem of not having a 64-bit driver -- Microsoft's own fingerprint reader! I don't know how they expect everyone else to deliver 64bit drivers if they don't do it themselves!! That said, I got a UPEK one. So other than the MS Fingerprint reader, I have not found any hardware that didn't have a 64-bit driver, and I've found the 64bit drivers far better in quality than 32bit XP.
"Something as basic as the taskbar still doesn't work properly. Autohide sometimes works sometimes doesn't, sometimes gets stuck in the showing mode, sometimes won't show, etc."
Never seen that.
"Taking screenshots has become very performance intensive due to the display virtualization."
Huh? Are you serious?
"Network folders still hang FOREVER if the network/server has a problem."
Yeah. Add offline mode. It's just a checkbox and will keep a copy local, and do an auto-sync. IF you have the space for it...
"Still have to reboot at least once a week to deal with updates/upgrades/drivers/installs."
MS only pushes out windows updates once a month for me. MS is really odd here -- installing a video driver does not require a reboot, but an update to IE does!
"Rebooting can take 10 minutes from clicking shutdown til you can use the computer again."
I'm beginning to think to think you bought a $299 PC. MS should place HUGE requirements for system bus speed, processor speed, memory, etc in order for an OEM to ship with Windows on it. Then not need it. It is something Apple does by default, and it is a smart move. No more $299 junk PCs please...
That said, this kind of stuff happens with any OS -- Mac, Linux, Windows, or otherwise.
-Don
How's life treating you, Emperor?
You've obviously never tried keeping a local copy of a multi-terabyte NAS on your local computer, have you? Hanging network folders are still less error-prone in XP and Linux than they are in Vista. That was my primary reason for going back to XP after having run Vista for the past 3 years.
This was a UAC bug, and so far as I know it was resolved in Vista Service Pack 1.
Not convincing.
Scanning this article, nearly in vain, to find any specifics about what Microsoft should be focusing on, one finds this: "..the geeks want better security, more customization, and full compatibility..." What an oversimplification of the realities of technology, that, quite frankly, a "geek" ought to be conversant in.
The REASON so many people have had frustrating experiences with Vista, where their current printer or other hardware, including their existing computer in some cases, seem to be incompatible with, or work poorly with, Vista, is precisely BECAUSE Microsoft changed their driver model (the software that interfaces between hardware and the operating system) to enable -- you guessed it -- better SECURITY.
Microsoft isn't running a closed, controlled shop like Apple. You can conjure up the phrase "we want better security and 'full' compatibility"; you can get all huffy and dismissive, but unfortunately, you don't get to change the realities that Microsoft is dealing with in an OPEN hardware environment.
And geeks only matter - a little - when an industry is immature. It's great if you know how to change the oil on your own car, or can comment wisely about the grade of oil that you should use, but the rest of society needs to be able to just drive the thing to a dealer at prescribed intervals. If you don't serve that majority of society, and focus on that majority of society, YOU'RE wrong. Geeks schmeeks.
You're actually slightly mistaken on the driver front: MSFT separated it further from the kernel than in previous iterations, which caused all the trouble. Yes, that was a security thing, but to simply say it changed the model doesn't describe it at all.
When an industry is immature? You consider one of the most important industries in the world immature? Yikes. You need to reevaluate your understanding of this industry. Seriously.
-Don
Not close. Did you forget DMCA and DRM? That is MSFT "security". MSFT started that whole mess in the 1990's. The USA is the only country that allowed MSFT to screw it's customers over with DRM and they finally succeeded in Vista. For this reason, 80% of the world still runs XP/XP Pro and will NOT update. I won't buy my next machine with Vista loaded. XP, yes. Or pehaps even Apple - even though it may cost 2x as much for 1/2 the amount of hardware. No other country I know of has anything remotely like DMCA or DRM. Not even Canada.
If you are willing to put in the time to research and learn than the best value is to stay with Vista because Apple products tend to be more expensive but you tend to be more pleased with the product initially. No one company is perfect I like Vista myself because I have more choice in products because of it's amount of developers and it's adoption in the business community.
Do I like vista yes and no. I do not like how Microsoft is trying to run my system for me. They should give me control. I do not like all the pop up messages after restart. I think they should make it easier to add start up programs and remove start up programs which seems to be a big problem with users. If I make a choice to not use their firewall I should't get a message every time saying your computer may not be secure, I get it already. Help me do not annoy me Microsoft! If they made the system work better I wouldn't have to lower my security settings.
I like Microsoft better than Apple but only because of the developer community. I guess I am heading toward Google anyway,
Buy next year I may not need either Microsoft or Apple as more applications move online I will certainly stop using offline programs. I will at some point never be offline so who cares about these companies outdated operating systems.
Microsoft tends to bury each customizable feature, making it difficult to make changes. There needs to be a panel that is just for customizing the system so you don't have to run 20 different places to adjust the OS. Vista is unorganized and cluttered,
Microsoft should stop trying to make money from companies by allowing them to add crapware on their OS and give them a clean usable system that is not loaded with start up programs that slow down boot times and makes the OS difficult to use for new users.
It?s been a few years, I know, but I used to work for an all?Dell-based company. The president was an accountant by trade, so he ALWAYS went with the less-expensive computer. Thus, when the time came for me to price out a new computer, the president (knowing my preference for Apples) asked me to spec out several, including both a Power Mac G5 and ?whatever Dell has that?s comparable.? Well, of course I didn?t believe Dell had *anything* that was truly ?comparable,? but I found a machine with comparable hardware and upgraded both it and the G5 to software and hardware parity. The result? The Mac was still superior (albeit sometimes only slightly) in 12 out of 16 categories, while the Dell exceeded in 2 out of 16. (The other two were an obvious tie.) But the price is what got me the first Mac in, again, an all-Dell company:
Dell Precision 650: $6,308.00
Power Macintosh G5: $4,126.00
That?s right, the G5 was almost $2,200 *less* than the Dell! Funny thing is, I was laid off a few months later (though retained for contract work) and was able to get the G5 as part of my payment. And the president? Well, he went on to buy an iMac for himself and an iBook for each of his kids, so the story has a happy ending.
And these days, Apple products aren?t even as expensive as they were, back then!
?Apple products tend to be more expensive?? Well, I suppose that?s possible, two days before the new models come out. Otherwise, what-freakin?-ever.
I beta tested Vista - pointed out all the major issues that MS denied when Vista was released and still to this day denies.
I've been support MS products for over 20 years but I'm getting more and more support jobs for MAC. I bought my first macbook product about 8 months ago. I'm not saying I like everything about OSX - but BOY IT SURE BOOTS FAST - and I mean BOOTED not just showing my main screen but I can instantly load apps - not wait another 2 minutes for all the services to load, all windows components read into memory. If my Windows computers could do that I think Windows 7 would be a HUGE success.
The only improvements that I can see making to Windows for future iterations are the following:
-WINFS (need I say more on that one),
-Give me my "up a directory" button back,
-Give me the option to truely uninstall Windows components that I don't want on my computer,
-Ditch UAC
-Make it such that the Winsxs folder doesn't break my hard drive with its bloat.
I think any new OS product needs to give all potential users (corporate, consumer, and geeks) a reason to change. IMO Microsoft?s mistake with Vista was that in their attempt to satisfy all users they have created OS bloat with little real benefit.
It may be time that operating systems do only what they need to do, establish application design standards; run large numbers of applications securely and maximize their performance; and efficiently control all the hardware resources the OS is running on. Microsoft can win that battle.
I don't think Don's completely right about geek acceptance criteria, but Mac OS X does excel in the areas you named; it is wildly customizable (though those customizations are not always exposed to the user), allows system-level automation and scripting out of the box by several methods, and runs more software than any Windows box (Mac OS X, Windows, and even Linux simultaneously via virtual machines, making it the SysAdmin's dream machine).
cliff notes... it appeals to the masses too...
The problem that I've seen in programming in general is that programers/software engineers have gotten far to reliant on an expansive amount of RAM being available and allow their coding to get sloppy, quite simply bloated. I think what has angered "the Geek" is all of the protective automation that MS has employed, it's the apparent lack of effort taken to ensure compatibility within reasonable boundaries... ie while definately still in use, I wouldn't expect a NEW OS to natively support a parallel dot matrix printer... the compatibility issues has been commented on already. What has miffed the "geek" tech community is MS putting out an operating system touted as a new spin on OS, with myriads of new features, only to find that not ONLY does it not have many of the famed new gadgets and gismos that had been marketed. Instead what the much anticipated revision in desktop processing presents is not just missing the newest wizbang gadgets and gizmos, but instead requires a service pack upgrade in record time comparitively speaking to their previous OS's.
What microsoft needs to do is quite simply, deliver what they promise.
Consider the battle EVERY IT professional in existence experiences on every single day of their life. Meeting the expectations that their customer (be it internal or external) has. The best technicians and IT managers are able to set a level of expectation that is forgiving, escapable, yet satisfying and prompt for the person(s) they are working with... or for the people receiving from their IT team. A company that doesn't do this, either ends up stealing alot of money from unfortunate idiots, or simply becomes another "once upon a time" story.
While unfortunate, the comment regarding the masses is absolutely true. Human tendency is to spread the discord and disapproval. VERY few people are fair enough to share good experiences as quickly as a bad one. Why do I say this? Easy... please the techs, the geeks, the monitored tanned paragons of opinion, know how and it-should've-been-done-this-way... my guess is you won't hear much. That is unless Vista has been such a catastrophic experience that the masses cry out in jubilation when a product is everything they wished for... I doubt it.
Where does this leave Microsoft? Beats me...
Glynn
Microsoft was bashed for years about not having good enough security now that they do they get bashed again?
How is Ubuntu any better when they have the same problem.
Except you have to type a password everytime even on your administrator account
Microsoft can't appeal to every one so they choose the majority.
Microsoft was bashed for years about not having good enough security now that they do they get bashed again?
How is Ubuntu any better when they have the same problem.
Except you have to type a password everytime even on your administrator account
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ballmer, is that you? Trust me when I tell you that M$ isn't being bashed for having good enough security, that's just delusional.
And what "same problem" do you claim Ubuntu has? You lost us there. "... type a password everytime even on your administrator account"??? I guess you never heard of the Unix OS before (Linux is based on that), maybe you should look it up. It's been around long before winblows, supporting networking and multiple users since 1970. Oh, and no one in their right mind runs around as "root" in *nix, unlike idiotic winblows users who have little choice if they actually want to do anything with Gate's box (oh, you thought *YOU* owned your computer? Interesting ...)
You must be Ballmer. No one else is that delusionally insane. Go throw a chair around the room and leave operating systems to the grownups.
The problem there is that the not tech majority typically uses little to no logic when choosing what will be the success... Mob mentality simply follows the option that the most people happen to choose first... that company gets the break and get the opportunity to "polish" their product... unless of course that that first choice was SO bad that the masses reject it.
quote: Microsoft can't appeal to every one so they choose the majority
heh ... but as mentioned in the article ... the majority is listening to their geek/tech friends...
MS went WAY too far in trying to protect the user from themselves in Vista.
Even when you are in the Administrators Group you are still not given full Admin privs. That is relegated to the Built-in but not exposed (by default) Administrator account.
UAC has got to go...period.
Also allow a user to become a REAL Administrator not the psuedo Administrator that Vista does.
I believe on the Home Editions, you just need to enable and use the real ?Administrator? user account rather than one you created during installation. As I recall UAC was disabled for the built-in ?Administrator? by default. Don?t have a home edition installed to check.
You can shut it off for your entire system by running ?msconfig.exe?, click on the Tools tab, then select the option ?Disable UAC?, and then click the ?Launch? button. You will need to reboot.
Personally though, I think it's a really stupid idea to turn UAC off for the whole system. UAC exists to protect users who don't know enough about Windows to turn it off on their own. If you can't even attempt to disable UAC on your own, than you are probably the type of person it was designed to protect. Sadly, the folks that don?t really need it to protect themselves are also the ones least likely to turn it off.
There may be some things wrong with Vista, but UAC is not one of them. I?d blame Home Edition and its lack of anything to replace Group Policy?s ability to actually control how a lot of the system will behave. Not that most users who have ever had 2000/XP Professional or Vista Business/Enterprise/Ultimate have even heard of Group Policy.
Anyways I don't see why it's a bad issue for win7 -- personally I'd like a setup of all the live products on the win7 desktop; although I don't want them to remove WMM. I wouldn't say they messed vista to such a great degree -- there was NO fuss made about leopard's processor requirements was there?
Business has been slow to upgrade to Vista, but they were also slow to upgrade to WindowsXP.
All Windows 7 needs to be is a more polished version of Vista. It doesn't need any huge new features.
Although I am going to purchase a Lenovo Netbook when they are available in October since it has Windows XP Home that I can upgrade to Pro.
Like the article states "it has to appeal to the geeks too" or who are they going to turn to? Geek Squad? I wouldn't let one of those no-brains touch anything I own, I value it too much.
People turn to the experienced IT geeks for advice and support, and normally if you don't take the advice then you are on your own or you can find some "neighborhood expert".
If windows 7 is anything like Vista then I will most certainly evolve into Linux as it has come a long way and so have the applications.
- by fdunn3 September 24, 2008 4:52 PM PDT
- To Kaedrin: I have turned UAC off from the get go. I have also enabled the REAL admin acct BUT...
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
Showing 1 of 2 pages (61 Comments)Also if you're too ignorant to know it you can't use a local admin to logon to active directory.
I am using Vista Enterprise and like I said in a comment above it's OK for home use but for the enterprise it sucks.