“A lot of controversy has sprung up lately about when Vista is likely to ship. The most recent dates given by Microsoft are November this year for the business version and January 2007 for the home version. The brouhaha centers around management’s recent equivocal statements regarding these dates. At the late-July annual Financial Analysts Meeting in Redmond, the Kevin Johnson, the President of the Platforms and Services Division, said, ‘We’ll ship when it’s ready.’ This sort of statement is not at all reassuring. In fact, you could almost make a rule: if a top manager of a Fortune 50 company says he’s “almost sure” of something, that means it’s not going to happen,” Roger Kay writes for Technology Pundits.
“So, from the eagle’s eye view, I’d say the company is going to miss the dates. But let’s take a look from the snail’s eye view,” Kay writes.
Kay writes, “I’ve been testing Vista betas as they’ve come out. I’ve got the most recent, Build 5472, right here at my desk, firing away on an adjacent system. It’s running a slide show and playing music at the same time and doing a fine job. True, a couple of functions crashed when I first ran them (the slide show, the clock settings), but I’m used to these sort of mild interruptions and went right ahead (after checking the status of the Task Manager by hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del) and rebooted them with no great harm. Laugh if you will, Macheads, this system is almost ready for prime time.” Then Vista went all to hell on Kay prompting him to write, “Never in history has a Microsoft operating system been this buggy this late in the game.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’re not laughing that Windows crashes, we’re incredulous that you’re so “used to these sort of mild interruptions” that we expect to be extremely rare and don’t consider to be “mild.” Why forgive and apologize for Microsoft? You paid them money and they sold you something most of us consider to be crap; something that over the years has beaten you down into accepting substandard quality. Mac users have much higher expectations than Windows sufferers.
Related article:
PC World writer’s advice for Microsoft: ‘Stop making crap’ – July 27, 2006
Who is this guy again? Danny Kay?
I’m not gonna lie, my Mac mini does get a fair amount of application crashes
I think it’s sick and sad, that a PC user is so used to their system crashing/and not functioning properly, that they just live with it. “True, a couple of functions crashed when I first ran them…” No biggie, just another day in the life of an abused Windows users.
Yeah, “singing in the rain” sums up the whole article.
Where are MDN’s “Stockholm Syndrome” and “Defending Windows a Sign of Mental Illness” references when they’re really needed?
Running slide show and playing music all the time? Wow there’s some heavy lifting.
Billions and Billions of cash sitting in the bank.
They can afford to hire any and all of the programmers in the world.
M$ is a joke.
When was longhorn originally suppose to be released, 2003????
How many “cool new features” have been removed so far?????
This company is mismanaged.
Time to shut it down.
First!
Vista what?
Microsoft go to hell!
> I’m not gonna lie, my Mac mini does get a fair amount of application crashes
You should do some trouble-shooting, because my G4 Mac is far older than any Mac mini, and it’s as trouble-free as I can imagine using the latest Mac OS X. It’s a bit slow, so I’m overdue for an Intel upgrade soon.
The that article contains the most draining writing style that I’ve ever experienced. I’d offer suggestions, but why bother.
It reads like some rough notes from a 7th grade book review.
what does “no great harm” mean???? sounds like what a pundit would write when trying to imitate an executive of a fortune 50 company who says “almost sure.”
unless you dont know what your doing win xp rocks hard and does NOT crash.
neither does vista once they FINISH it.
til then lay off its called beta.
really are macs so 200% perfect 200% of the time?
of course not any computer crashes sometimes.
lies about vista show how scared macheads are, where is your leper now?
any way you look at it vistas not perfect YET but it WILL be.
Matt, if your Mac is crashing, you should probably run the program YASU to clear the fog. Don’t clear your cookies however.
Apologetic and truly sad! Brainwashed is putting it mildly.
I rarely get application crashes on either of my Macs (a Cube and a Powerbook), AND if I do, it is almost always Firefox or Word.
I don’t think that I have ever had an Apple app crash on me.
Compare this to my “state-of-the-art” PC with Winblows XP at work – routine crashes and freezes, especially on shut down. On freakin’ shut down!!!
Truly sad.
My wife uses M$ Office. If it’s up and running and I log into my profile it will be as good as dead when she returns to hers. Safari finds web sites that will screw it up now and then. Other than that no application crashes and never a system crash.
November is still a solid maybe for the business version. Many of the best improvements in Vista (things like the way software images are built) are on the inside (not visible to the average user) and seem more together than the interface and the consumer-oriented multimedia functions, which are still somewhat brittle.
Well, that’s OK then.
The idea that sane corporates will adopt Vista before SP1 or, more likely SP2, is unbelievably optimistic. The release of Vista in its ‘pro’ form is aimed purely at allowing business to start the testing process for a thousand ‘line of business’ applications and the testing/development process for creating software images so that Vista can be rolled out to the variety of business desktops that have been installed during late-2005 and 2006.
The other purpose of releasing Vista in 2006 in some form is so that corporates who were strong-armed into buying Software Assurance plans can acquire Vista licenses before their two-year option plan expires, thus providing relief for Microsoft from the prospect of the CIOs of maybe 100-200 major corporates storming Redmond with burning pitchforks.
In reality though, this ‘pro’ release is nothing more than a corporate ‘beta’ program especially if the interface is ‘brittle’.
If all of this is true, Dell and HP are in for a rough ride.
In over 3 years, my 700 iBook has never had a system crash. Safari once every couple of months.
I last restarted it about 3 months ago on for a software install.
My Windows friends can’t believe I don’t have to restart whenever I change computer locations. They all do.
Without defending or deriding the preceding comment, I find it horribly painful to even read comments by the majority of these “PC zealots”.
What kind of Mac mini? Intel?
In my experience, if you’ve got a flaky system, best to backup your documents, do a erase and install of 10.4.7 and get the absolute latest versions of your applications (check macupdate.com). That should do it. From then on, keep your software up-to-date and run Cocktail pilot or YASU once a month or so.
Vista’s CLOCK program crashed? Come on…Can anyone honestly say that has EVER happened to them?
Well for Microsoft…i guess that’s about “as ready for prime time” as it gets…
Ah, Stockholm syndrome.
Sorry – there is no way I would get used to “these occasional crashes and rebooting, etc.” I run a big ol G5 and push the crap out of it on a daily basis with , right now, 17 apps open and ready to use with a click on the doc. If they crashed on occassion, I’d first rebuild the whole drive and reinstall stuff and then go ballistic on Apple or Adobe or MS to find out why. Man – is that really what windows users put up with? I wouldn’t know as I have been using Macs since day 1.
“any way you look at it vistas not perfect YET but it WILL be”
When, service pack 6?
matt has a problem with cheap RAM and he won’t face up to it.
Don’t keep posting the same old shit and don’t
lie matt, get your sorry ass to a genius bar and get some approved RAM in that mini.
>any way you look at it vistas not perfect YET but it WILL be.>
Yeah, yeah. There’s going to be a second coming someday too.
Hey M_S:
You are shouting, and what’s worse, you are trolling. Go back to your pitiful Windoze existence. Admin: please keep an eye on this one.