Public Works Canada solicitation about FOSS

Fri Feb 13 15:25:01 UTC 2009

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 08:49:43PM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
> The trouble is, XP isn't slower than Vista, it seems (from a lack of
> personally using either!) that the opposite is the case.
> 
> And I gather there may also be issues of Vista having a smaller set of
> built-in "stuff on the side."  I heard (and this mightn't be entirely
> true) that they were intending to drop a lot of the extras out because
> managing releases for them was proving to be a headache.
> 
> As near as I can tell, the main "more featureful" aspect of Vista is
> the presence of a whole lot more "chrome-y" things in the UI, which
> pretty much explains it being bloated and slow, despite requiring
> massively more hardware.  There will doubtless be hardware compatible
> only with Vista, but that is a sword that cuts both ways in that
> there's doubtless also plenty of XP-only hardware out there.

Well really vista is a whole lot nicer to work with than XP (and
earlier).  It has much better ability to quickly find things without
lots of scrolling and mouse clicks by having added search ability to
most parts of the interface.  Like pop open the "start" menu (no longer
labaled start in vista), type something, and you get a list of all items
in your entire menu tree that match that word.  So hit the windows key,
type putty and you get a couple of things with putty in the name in a
list, and a cursor down or two and enter, and putty is running.
windows+r and a command name was an option in the past, but only if you
knew the program name exactly and it was in your path.

> I'd be curious as to what *really* is a meaningful enhancement to the
> user in getting Vista...

Well I think the one above is huge.  Of course Microsoft apparently
didn't think advertising "It's easier and faster to use" was much of a
selling point.  Apparently "It looks pretty" was.  Of course (huge
surprise) lots of people (especially businesses) didn't thing pretty was
worth $200.

It is also much more stable than XP.  So far in close to two years, my
wife has only had a blue screen of death in the last week, and that was
due to installing a free proxy client which turned out to have a very
unstable driver and conflict very badly with AVG.  After removing that
piece of crap it went back to normal.  Can't say that for XP.

> Note that Linux can suffer from the same.  The Compiz "ray tracing
> windows on the sides of cube" thing that recent Fedora/Ubuntu releases
> have trumpeted may be *cool*, but even though there's *some* utility
> to being able to see what's going on on all the virtual consoles, it
> strikes me as a hugely expensive feature that's not valuable enough to
> warrant the bloat.

Of course only a few distributions and users think compiz is a selling
point for upgrades (which of course you rarely pay for in the linux
world).

> Historically, Microsoft has factored the cost of updates into the cost
> of selling *NEW* versions of their OSes.  Gates had a whole "there are
> no important bugs in Windows" thing some years ago that nicely
> expressed this attitude.
> 
> The cost of deploying this, for Microsoft, has gone *WAY* up, way
> faster than sales, over the last number of years.  Consider that 10
> years ago, Windows 98 was basically still a shell atop MS-DOS, and
> essentially unsecurable, as a result,  The shift to having systems
> where it's even worth *attempting* to secure them, let alone having
> more-or-less regular security updates is a really big change.

The security of windows 98 didn't really have anything to do with
running on DOS, since it was actually running its own drivers in 32bit
mode not DOS.  Any security issues were entirely a matter of crappy
coding practices and the idea of making things easy out of the box
rather than secure out of the box, so all services were enabled by
default and generally not designed to be secure, just easy to use.

> I have to "call nonsense" on most of your presumptions, not because
> you seem particularly wrong, or because they seem illogical, but
> rather because there's indication of them being untrue.
> 
> 1.  Microsoft was trying to turn the taps off on "XP, the old,
> obsolete version."  If Vista hadn't been the evident disaster it has
> been, XP would no longer be for sale.   They didn't intend there to be
> any "solid revenue stream" - they intended for people to buy Vista to
> replace it.

I suspect people just figure XP is good enough, vista requires more
resources to do the same job (it may or may not do the job better, but
it does require more computing resources to do it).  Moving to vista may
require retraining.  After all some users need training if the colour of
the screen changes.  Making the start button a round coloured thing is
just way too different for them to comprehend and adapter to without
extensive training.  This applies even more so to office 2007 which is
very very different looking (it works quite well, but sure takes a bit
of getting used to for those used to many years of pretty much the same
thing every version).

> 2.  I see nothing to quibble about surrounding amortization of sunk costs.
> 
> 3.  I see plenty enough advertising from Microsoft that it seems that
> THEY believe they need to advertise!

Apple has been growing in market share.  Microsoft has a market share
large enough that growth isn't really likely, only maintaining status
quo.

> Frequently odd, yes, but rationales can be found, and ones consistent
> with the kinds of policies we see coming out of Microsoft.

Certainly maintaining a product when you would rather spend your
development efforts making new products doesn't make sense.  Especially
when you don't get paid by the users for support, only upfront for new
releases.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
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