OK. I am back! After having to pass my first Oracle certification. Anyway, back to the topic today. It’s Vista time again.
Windows Vista has less than 1% of the market share according to a market research report released on Thursday. Aliso Viejo-based Net Applications Inc, the company tracking the operating system market share, gives the figures below for each OS in the market for the month of February.
- Windows XP: 84.33%
- Windows 2000: 4.75%
- Mac OS X - PowerPC: 4.29%
- Mac OS X - Intel: 2.09%
- Windows 98: 1.50%
- Windows Vista: 0.93%
- Linux: 0.42%
Windows Vista 0.93% market share is a vast improvement over January’s 0.18%. Despite Microsoft’s intention to spend half a billion dollars marketing Vista, conversions from XP won’t be the norm until 2009. The primary reason to stay in Windows XP is the lack of needs. Most killer applications reside on the Internet these days.
Continue reading ‘Reality Check: How Is Windows Vista Doing?’
Microsoft marketing power is once again proven phenomena. The video shows you what a Vista ad looks like when presented on five 40″ LCD displays in JFK airport. The ads is undeniably “clear” and gives tons of “Wow”.
If you do not have enough “Wow”, Microsoft has much more - 100 of them to make you speechless. The top five:
- It makes using your PC a breeze
- Because all of your music is just a remote control click away
- It’s the safest version of Windows ever
- See your world in a whole new light
- It can find your stuff
PC World recently gave 15 reasons to go ahead upgrading to Vista and only 6 reasons to wait. I have to say there are valid reasons to stay despite only six against fifteen.
If you are still clueless about the question, you need not worry after the introduction of Windows Anytime Upgrade. With the customer upgrade system for Vista in place, switching between Vista editions is just a change of activation key plus maybe a small download.
As of today, there will be five versions of Vista - Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate. If you look at the differences between the editions, it is obvious that most of the features in the higher editions aren’t needed in everyday computing. Microsoft is noble to let us start off with a basic version and then gradually upgrade as needed.
How does it work? One way it will work is the DVD or the PC that you buy comes with a complete set of Vista OS files. Features from higher editions will be automatically disabled by the OS upon checking the activation key. This approach exposes Vista to cracker’s attacks.
The other way, most probably Microsoft preferred way, is the upgrade software only get authorized by Microsoft server to download additional OS files unique to the edition you purchase.
During Bill Gate’s keynote at CES 2007, there was a show of hottest new PCs built for Windows Vista. These PCs are not just ready for Vista they are built for Vista. As part of the “Wow” campaign, Microsoft has unveiled details of these PCs on the updated Windows Vista website.
Among them are HP TouchSmart PC, Toshiba Portege R400 and OQO model 02, representing desktop, laptop and ultra mobile PC market segment. Let’s look at each of them in iTechNote way.
HP TouchSmart PC is built to serve as a family’s social hub. With large 19-inch touch screen and space saving design, nobody in your family should complain it is difficult to use. HP chooses Windows Vista Home Premium to power the device. A family’s social hub essentially acts like a BBS in the old days but now in a family.
The Digital Decade, as addressed by Bill Gates on October 2001 is a vision of making PC the platform to supersede TV. In the Digital Decade, you’ll no longer think of the PC as a tool you use only to carry out specific tasks, it will become something you come to rely on all the time.
How true is the above statement in the beginning of 2007? As Bill Gates addressed the crowds in CES 2007 in Las Vegas, “Over 40 percent of U.S. homes now have multiple personal computers. And if you look at young people, the new generation, they actually spend more time on their Windows PC than they spend watching TV. Now that’s a pretty dramatic change.” In other words, the market is ready for Digital Decade.
The hurdles of realizing Digital Decade had always been PC was not the focal point of a family - it was television. PC was first for scientific calculations and later business spreadsheets. When multimedia finally arrived with the launch of Intel Pentium processor, there was not much to play except encyclopedia contents.
Microsoft Windows Vista is not as secure as what Microsoft claims. According to a report in New York Times on Christmas day, a number of flaws have been discovered on the brand new OS.
On Dec. 15, a Russian programmer posted a description (in Russian) of a flaw that makes it possible to increase a user’s privileges on all of the company’s recent operating systems, including Vista. The flaw affects csrss.exe, which is the main executable for the Microsoft Client/Server Runtime Server.
Furthermore, computer security company Determina notified Microsoft on Dec. 20 of five more vulnerabilities it had identified — four affecting Vista and earlier versions of Windows, and one affecting Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail server.
Microsoft security guru Michael Howard put the sign (the title) on his door on commemorating the completion of Windows Vista. Last week, Microsoft’s shares closed above $29 for the first time since November 2004. The market looks ready to embrace the day for Vista - Jan 30, 2007.
Vista has improved reliability and security, protected mode IE, Aero glass UI and media centricity together with gratuitous UI changes, degraded performance on older machines, new compatibility issues and high cost of migration. Despite mixed views from market watchers, Microsoft remains bullish about its latest operating system.
“Our market is so much larger now than five years ago when we introduced Windows XP. We expect Vista to be the fastest-adopted OS in our history,” said Mike Sievert, Corporate Vice-president for Windows Client Marketing.
Continue reading ‘eXPired: This office is certified XP-free’
Update: In an interview with the IDG News Service, Bill Hilf, general manager for platform strategy at Microsoft, spoke about both Sun and Novell deals and about how the company regards open-source software.
Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer signified the collaboration agreements between Microsoft and Novell as a clever deal to bridge Microsoft community and open source community. He said “we don’t license our intellectual property to Linux because of the way the Linux licensing, GPL framework works, that’s not really a possibility”.
As in the case of national politics, there is always going to be about 20% hard supporter for Microsoft and Linux respectively. There are 5% or so not buying in any of them and the rest or 55% a bit “opportunistic” because they believe the cost is the same no matter which one they choose - the difference is only in the cost component.
These 55% demand interoperability between Microsoft products and the open source products. However, Microsoft wants to be paid so badly for its intellectual property (IP) which takes years and millions of dollars to build that it avoids the issue for years.
Update: Microsoft has launched Express Vista Upgrade voucher scheme in an attempt to minimize the impacts of Vista delay. Major PC vendors including Dell, HP and Lenovo are offering various deals related to the scheme. However, if you do not want the hassle of dealing with OS upgrade yourself, stay tune and wait.
A new PC that carries the Windows Vista Capable PC logo can run Windows Vista. To get the best Vista experience you will need a Windows Vista Premium Ready PC. Such a PC includes at least:
- 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor.
- 1 GB of system memory.
- Support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum), Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel.
- 40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
- DVD-ROM Drive.
- Audio output capability.
- Internet access capability.
However, Dell CEO Kevin Rollins suggested otherwise on Thursday, 26 Oct at a speech at Shanghai’s Jiaotong University. “I think they tell you maybe 1 gig of memory is OK. No, two gigs of memory would be great.”
Microsoft Excel is a powerful business tool with many advanced charting, graphing, and algorithmic/statistical capabilities, making it a favorite among business users. It has been estimated that 50% of the world’s business logic is contained within Excel spreadsheets.
Traditional data integration into Excel usually takes the form of
- Hand entry of data from a paper source
- Data imported from another file (database, spreadsheet, delimited text file, etc.)
- Date pulled by an intermediate program from another source (Visual Basic, macro, etc.)