VirtualLarry
No Lifer
- Aug 25, 2001
- 56,536
- 10,164
- 126
LOL. I believe it. The "uptake" of XP into the corp desktop sector has been absolutely abysmal for MS. Gee, I wonder why... and for some reason, most of the other people just keep parroting MS's marketing materials, even in spite of evidence to the contrary.Originally posted by: JackNaylorPE
When I want to look at what is stable, I look at what the Fortune 500 IT guys are doing and for the most part they still weren't doin XP as of earlier this year when the lst study was published. XP sales were so bad in the corporate sector that to keep wall street happy, MS redefined a Win2k sale as a purchase of a WinXP with a "free Win2k downgrade".
That IS true, by and large. MS is trying to force them to adopt XP, though, by yanking W2K SP5. As a big fan of W2K personally, I think that "really sucks".Originally posted by: JackNaylorPE
The fact remains if XP were faster / better / more secure than previous OS's (as actually deployed, not as it comes from MS), IT directors throughout the Fortune 1000 would be all done putting it in place by now.
If it ain't broke, why "fix" it, and the fact that, under the hood, W2K and XP are so similar, and run apps with similar stability and feature-sets, and can use the same hardware and drivers for the most part - well, there's NO compelling reason to move to XP from W2K, that I can see. Worse yet, with XP SP2, there are a HUGE number of compatibility issues with apps, worse yet for the in-house developed ones.Originally posted by: JackNaylorPE
No one in a corporate environment asks the boss for budget increases to "upgrade" existing box to XP because it will have a positive ROI. The reason is ina work environment you have to priduce more than a subjective result, you gotta have facts and figures. They are goinna have to show a "facts and figures" return on that investment and it is obvious that such will not materialize. If it did, it would be being done wholesale across the country.
Most of the much-vaunted "security improvements" in XP SP2, were aimed solely at the home user ("Security Center", firewall enabled by default, etc.). In a locked-down corp. environment, the desktop user isn't the one in charge of administering the firewall and the AV software. XP SP2 is mostly just one huge ball of potential incompatibilities, for the corporate crowd. Why do you think that MS is trying so very hard, to be allowed to override the administrative upgrade policies on many corporate networks, by pushing through SP2 via Windows auto-update, etc. It's disturbing. Who owns the computers? The company, or MS?
Yes, XP SP2's system binaries were also compiled with "software DEP" enabled, which is effectively no different than using the "/GS" switch in Visual C. In fact, there is absolutely no reason why MS couldn't have done the exact same thing for W2K SP5, and offered similar security "improvements" for the corporate crowd that is still on W2K.
That's one thing that the MS fans seem to selectively ignore, in their attempts to tout MS's "latest and greatest". The truth is, tested code is trusted code. Statistically, empirically, this is so. It seems almost conspiratorial, in a way, that MS is encouraging a rate of change, that by and large has NOT been accepted by their corporate customers, that ensures that customers are always running software with a new crop of bugs in it - providing a constant need to upgrade, in an apparent (but ultimately futile) quest to free themselves from the bugs. It's like running on a treadmill, and the entity controlling the treadmill, keeps on changing the scenery, in order to make it seem like you're getting somewhere, but you're really just standing still, stuck in the same place all the time.Originally posted by: JackNaylorPE
1. The more time a company has had to deal with fixing things, the more stable the platform will be.
That I actually strongely disagree with, but that's another discussion for another time. I do think that is the "style of computing" that MS is espousing though, as though their OSes and technology are somehow the ultimate pinnacle, when the cruel reality is, they are quite limited in capabilities, in fact even to the point of being "crippled", compared to what could be done with the personal-computer systems of today, in terms of actually empowering the user, instead of serving as a vehicle for the delivery of new GUI-toy widgets, kind of like those things that they put in the crib of a preschool child to play with, that have lots of pretty colors and make noises when manipulated. Yes Windows' users - you are still "in the crib" as far as computing experiences go. Time to learn how to stand up and climb out of it.Originally posted by: JackNaylorPE
3. It's all "been done" . All the encessary or useful computing taks have already been developed.