22 October 2009

Windows 7 set to break retail records -outrageous!

Why outrageous? Well, in the midst of this article: Windows 7 set to break retail records | Technology | guardian.co.uk is the clue: "Vista came in for heavy criticism when it was plagued with problems soon after its launch, but signs are encouraging for Windows 7 so far.
Reviews have been largely positive, and high street retailers say they anticipate strong sales of the software."
Basically the Windows product is not good software and the outrageous thing is that customers have to pay even more money to Microsoft to get a better version: MICROSOFT SHOULD BE GIVING THIS TO VISTA CUSTOMERS !
My operating system (Ubuntu) automatically offers upgrades every six months along with odds and ends of little fixes as and when. That's the way it should be.
Break the Microsoft quasi-monopoly: it's bad software and it's bad for document interchangeability.

4 comments:

Davey K said...

Hmmm.... very true.

I'd like to hear more about how you're getting with Ubuntu.

Dave

Joe said...

Ubunutu rocks. Except when it doesn't and takes hours to fix.

Doug said...

You be a software hippy if you want to: the rest of us will pay for something that actually works without a gigabyte of geekiness.

Andii said...

I've been using Ubuntu for about 5 years. It does what I need and there's a good help site for when I want to do something a bit 'geeky' -because (Doug) I actually don't really do geeky very well'. Ubuntu works, and often better than Windows (part of the point of my post -as I say there's an injustice that you are asked to pay, in effect, to fix M$ generated 'bugs'): falls over far less often and, as I say, auto-updates. Plus no extra money for anti-virus or for updating your office software (all comes included).

If by 'hippy' you mean that there is a bit of anti-capitalism in my OS choice, well yes. But think on: if M$ is capitalism then it's the worst sort. The kind of capitalism that is extolled is the sort where there is lots of competition ... hmmmm ... !!! If we want that kind of situation, then we want open standards that are widely adopted. Now what does that suggest about M$'s awkwardness in adopting international standards for e-documents? (Such that they didn't plan for it in their software -see http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Microsoft-Office-to-get-a-dose-of-OpenDocument/0,130061733,139255766,00.htm) It's no trivial matter: proprietary standards are anathema to academic and other publicly critical archiving ...
Check out http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/renewed-wish-for-open-document.html

"Spend and tax" not "tax and spend"

 I got a response from my MP which got me kind of mad. You'll see why as I reproduce it here. Apologies for the strange changes in types...