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-90

Why Charge for Vista Ultimate when Microsoft's giving it away for free.

-90 points posted to Operating Systems, Sales Strategies by jmxz 12/12/07

Microsoft seems to have new program where they will give youWindows Vista Ultimate for free, in exchange for your privacy and dignity (more here). In that light, why are you guys charging extra for Ultimate? How about instead offer an option where users can also get it free in exchange for their dignity? Considering Vista users have rather little privacy anyway thanks to the clauses in the Vista License Agreement and the spyware bundled with Vista it seems they wouldn't even be giving up that much.

Idea: Offer the same Free-in-exchange-for-Privacy Vista Ultimate that Microsoft's offering.

mkmaster78
12/12/07		 demoted because that promotion is over.
aikiwolfie
12/12/07		 BAAAHAHAHAHAAA!!! They've sunk to a new low I never thought was possible!
jervis961
12/12/07		 Yup promotion closed now
jmxz
12/12/07		 @aikiwolfie: "BAAAHAHAHAHAAA!!! They've sunk to a new low I never thought was possible! "

No sinking involved. They've always encouraged giving away their software when the alternative is loss of a sale to a competitor.

Remember Bill Gates even advocated piracy of his software for people who can't afford it.
http://www.news.com/2100-1023-212942.html
Gates shed some light on his own hard-nosed business philosophy. "... but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
aikiwolfie
12/12/07		 LMAO ... Why steal when you can have Linux for free!?
winoffice
12/12/07		 I think that the program is open to individuals only - that companies cannot participate to get copies to preinstall on new PCs.
jmxz
12/12/07		 winoffice:

Yet no doubt Dell has someone there who's job it is to negotiate with Microsoft, and surely that person could request such a program. Microsoft should be agreeable because it should be a less expensive program too - since Ultimate OEM is a cheaper product than Ultimate Retail.

And if Dell can't get such a program it seem they should be rather annoyed that their supplier is undercutting them by giving away the product that Dell's trying to sell for way too much money.
cosh
12/13/07		 http://www.tmcnet.com/comsol/articles/16469-microsoft-withdraws-free-vista-of..."
cosh
12/13/07		 Heh. I signed up for Microsoft's spyware program and installed it. I can confirm that the programs wfpuser.exe, wfpservice.exe, wfpcore.exe, and wfpaseive.exe are now active, and thanks to FileMon and RegMon, I can confirm that they're spying on my files and programs. If they see the amount of unlicensed Microsoft software floating around this computer they will freak. :) Not to mention the open source software and Linux kernel code.
jervis961
12/13/07		 LOL
cosh
12/13/07		 OMG I had to purge it! It was totally out of control. It had at least a dozen different wfp*.exe programs. Within minutes six of them were running at once and there was simply not one file on the computer that they didn't examine, and it was hitting 40 to 80% CPU use most of the time. Then it started up wfpdefrag.exe, which started up Defrag.exe, which started up Dfrgfat.exe, (why was it programmed to defragment my hard disk? was it just an excuse to examine every byte on the drive?) and I didn't want it to do that, so I tried to terminate the service, but services.msc had quite literally been disabled ("You don't have the permissions to run this program at this time", or something) and other tools were failing with previously unseen runtime errors as well, and so I had to pull up Process Explorer and kill the entire process tree under wfpservice.exe. I've now purged all traces of the program, and had to reboot to get my other programs working again. I noticed it had restarted some disabled services as well. Take my advice, DON'T get involved!

In conclusion, even if Microsoft had kept the offer available, there is simply no way I would consent to that sort of torture just to get Windows Vista, which to me has a negative net worth anyway. No way, no way hosay.

Oh, and, demoting! ;)
aikiwolfie
12/14/07		 Why does Windows even have defrag? Any performance boost from de-fragmenting a hard drive, even a large one is minimal. And it ties up your PC for a year.
jmxz
12/14/07		 @aikiwolfie: Why does Windows even have defrag?

One decent explanation can be found here

http://cbbrowne.com/info/defrag.html ...
Filesystems never need "defragmentation". It's only msdos's botches that did need it, instead of organizing things correctly as they went. Besides that, fragmentation is (obviously!) good for a FS.

It keeps files fairly well separated yes, but so does any decent file system. It also leaves space for them to grow. It also uses clustering algorithms. The principal fault of msdos is choosing the first hole that will accept a file as the receptacle for it....Why msdos still insists on doing it wrong is beyond everyone.
...

Not really. FAT is an "optimal" way of doing things, if all you have is a 5mhz 8088, less than 512k of RAM, and a 360K floppy and are only writing not more than 10-20 files, each over 18kbytes in size and will probably not delete them, ever, since when the disk becomes full, you'll pop in a fresh disk. Where you are more likely to FORMAT A: than DEL A:FOO.BAR. It is indeed silly to do this with a 500mhz PIII, 128meg of RAM and a 30gig hard drive. H*ll, it is silly with a 66mhz '486, with 16meg of RAM and a 500meg hard drive!
aikiwolfie
12/14/07		 LOL @ MS-DOS! Man that was a long time ago!
cosh
12/14/07		 It was this morning.
aikiwolfie
12/14/07		 Just out of curiosity. Does Vista still have a DOS component or has MS finally managed to hide it away under layers of GUI?
cosh
12/15/07		 I don't have Vista, but on Vista 32-bit the NTVDM is still there, as it is in XP and Windows 2003, as far as I know, so many DOS programs will still run. 64-bit versions of Windows have never included the NTVDM, even though they technically could. DOSBox is best for DOS programs under Vista and XP. DOSBox has this funny bug that irritates me that in the emulated VGA controller it uses a 9-dot-mode font in 8-dot-mode (so the letters look a bit squashed), but it works very well.

Nothing about Vista relies on any DOS components. Instead, it relies entirely on the now ferociously monstrous and dangerously bloated NT Kernel. Look forward to a completely new breed of OS out of Microsoft with a more modular Linux-like kernel in the next five years.
aikiwolfie
12/15/07		 Yeah I read they were trying to slim it down. A good move in my book.
jmxz
12/15/07		 @aikiwolfie: "LOL @ MS-DOS! Man that was a long time ago!"

Yet Dell still thinks it's MS-Dos is important to their business customers - as evidenced by them choosing FreeDOS over Ubuntu on their business systems (Latitude) .
aikiwolfie
12/15/07		 I don't actually have any experience with FreeDOS. What do people use it for?
jmxz
12/16/07		 aikiwolfie:
I can't imagine anyone uses it for very much for anything.
Yet Dell seems to recommend it over Ubuntu for business - despite not having many working drivers for it.

Check out Dell's open source for small business pages; and you see FreeDOS everywhere; and Linux nowhere.
http://www.dell.com/content/products/features.aspx/nseries_nb?c=us&cs=04&l=en...~
cosh
12/16/07		 Yeah Dell aren't great with computers really.
aikiwolfie
12/16/07		 LOL! Oh I've seen it plastered all over the place. I just don't know what you'd do with it? Cheap servers maybe? Command line fetishism?
winoffice
12/17/07		 @aikiwolfie: "BAAAHAHAHAHAAA!!! They've sunk to a new low I never thought was possible!"

It isn't funny.
aikiwolfie
12/18/07		 Yes it is :op What it says is Vista is so crap Microsoft have resorted to giving it away. And we still don't want it! I think that's hilarious!
cosh
12/18/07		 So do I. Heh heh. Like in China where they let people pirate Vista because it's the only way to make them use it.
mkmaster78
12/19/07		 @cosh No NT based Windows system has ever had DOS on it, please do not confuse MS-DOS with cmd.exe command shell. DOS can't run on NT, as it cannot read an NT partition. Also, x64 editions cannot run certain DOS features, as DOS was a 16-bit operating system. WOW (Windows On Windows) emulation for Windows only works for one step back, e.g. 32-bit windows can run 16-bit, 64-bit can run 32-bit. There is no WOWOW (Windows on Windows on Windows) emulation to allow for running multiple back steppings in architecture. (Sorry for the delay in posting, but work keeps me ever busy)

EDIT: I see that, in part i misread your comment, in that the way you were speaking, implied that DOS was somehow installed on XP. I see better that you are talking of ntvdm.exe (NT Virtual DOS Machine), so strictly speaking DOS is not installed, though parts are virtualized, in a limited sense, however this still requires WOW capabilities and as such cannot run in the x64 environments.
winoffice
12/19/07		 aikiwolfie, cosh:

No it isn't!
aikiwolfie
12/20/07		 @winoffice ... YES IT IS! Teeeheheheheheheheheheeeee MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!!

Sorry sometimes I can't help my self. You just have to see it from our point of view win. Take Bill Gates. He goes and says stupid things like "you can't expect people to do professional work for free". And then he goes and does it anyway because nobody will use his OS otherwise.

Personally from my point of view Microsoft look like they are panicking. They can't fathom why people would want Linux over Vista with all it's apparent faults and pit falls. It just does not compute in their square business model. And unfortunately for Microsoft the market is becoming more rounded. Their is once again more choice. Like there was when Amiga and Commodore and Atari were all doing their best to compete. It's no longer a two horse race. There's a viable third candidate.

But none the less demand for Linux is growing. As a fringe OS relegated to the server side of the industry it's certainly been punching well above it's weight recently and only looks set to continue growing in popularity. And Microsoft,unwilling to change are being forced to fit their square business model into a rounded market.
cosh
12/20/07		 Yeah that's true. Microsoft can't fathom why Linux is growing in popularity. Personally I find it a whole lot more fiddly than Windows, and it never seems to run as quick.

Is the problem one of trust perhaps? If Linux could suit all my needs I would use it because I simply don't trust Microsoft. But I use Windows (2003) as the main OS because I need to run Windows programs that are still far from usable under WINE. I expect the vast majority of people who use Linux also have Windows. At the moment it takes a brave soul to abandon Windows completely simply because Microsoft are doing a really good job of making Windows software unportable whereas the open source community have worked really hard to make all programs extremely portable.
aikiwolfie
12/20/07		 I think the problem is one of greed and trust. With every new version of Windows it gets more and more expensive. And then we are inevitably let down as things don't work as promised and the OS doesn't live up to the hype. I think people are also sick of upgrading their entire OS and applications packages. And with Vista you had to upgrade your perfectly decent hardware too. The cost of running a Windows PC is a joke.

Windows 95 was the turning point I think. The problems with 95 left a lot of people feeling very bitter. It's an experience Microsoft has never really recovered from. Not since Windows 95 has a Microsoft OS ever seen that degree of hype. People queued up over night, some camped out for days when Windows 95 was originally released. I can't remember any reports like that since for 98, ME, 2000, XP or Vista.
jmxz
12/20/07		 @aikiwolfie: "Windows 95 was the turning point...left a lot of people feeling very bitter...Not since Windows 95 has a Microsoft OS ever seen that degree of hype. People queued up over night, some camped out for days when Windows 95 was originally released."

Interesting observation. A couple different possible angles on this one, tho....

Bitter? I thought Win95 was their last major step forward where they finally caught up with the rest of the world.. Win95 was when they first implemented preemptive multitasking (where 2 applications can run at once without having to explicitly yield the CPU). Win95 was the was the first one that let people use "long" (255 character instead of 8) file names. Win95 was when they got TCP/IP to work. Win95 was when they got IE to work. Win95 was the first to correctly use the "protected mode" of CPUs which supports virtual memory and where one processes' address space can't walk over another's; and supports safe multi-tasking.

I'm not that close to it; but it feels to me that since Win95 people have been mostly paying for bug fixes in those features; and that's why I'd say no release since then has compared.
cosh
12/20/07		 Actually NT 3.1 introduced the 32-bit protected mode and pre-emptive multi-tasking.

Of course Microsoft, being Microsoft, got the Windows 95 developers to implement it all over again in a completely different way instead of just using the NT kernel.
aikiwolfie
12/20/07		 Yeah but the vast majority of users don't even know that stuff exists. All they know is what the Microsoft PR machines puts out and promises in the press and media. But I'd agree that we've just been paying for bug fixes since 95.
cosh
12/20/07		 I don't.
winoffice
12/22/07		 @aikiwolfie: NO IT ISN'T!

You said: "Teeeheheheheheheheheheeeee MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!!"

Sorry if this offends you but I ask you not to post such savage laughs again.
aikiwolfie
12/23/07		 Teeheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheeeeee!!!! ... *pause for breath* ...
AAAAAAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAAAAA!!!! ... *pause for breath* ...
MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAAAAAAAAA!!!! ... *pause for breath* ...

I personally find it hilarious winoffice. No amount of you telling me it's not is going to change that.
winoffice
12/23/07		 GGGGGGGGGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!

I am furious when reading through your savage cackles aikiwolfie.
cosh
12/24/07		 Wow hardxcore. Don't bait winoffice any more aikiwolfie, I think he might crash.
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