Microsoft Comparison Of Vista
To date, Windows 10 has been offered as a free upgrade to Windows 7 and 8.x users running the Home, Pro or Ultimate editions. In comparison, earlier versions of the Windows operating system had to be purchased, so you would expect a free product to be installed more often than a paid-for equivalent.
Microsoft Comparison Of Vista
It's tough to get a direct comparison, but because everyone loves comparisons, Microsoft sold 20 million copies of Windows Vista in the first month it went on sale. Earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the Windows installed base would be around 1 billion users by the end of the company's 2008 fiscal year, which comes to a close next June. And as of last week, it had sold 88 million copies of Vista.
I guess it all got stuck here. My contact at MS says that the problem seem to be related with how GDI+ uses WIC. WIC alone works as expected. MSPaint in Win7 uses GDI+ which is why it fails in the same way as our .NET app. Unfortunately, the guy at MS is not part of the GDI+ team so he can't help anymore. Now I have to register a new case with microsoft support channel and hope they concider it to be a bug so they won't charge me for it. Would you believe it!
Mr O'Byrne argued that he had been "disappointed with the lack of promotional support" from Microsoft. Despite Mr Gates' promises that the "wow is now" on Vista's launch, the buzz around the new product pales in comparison with the 1995 launch of Windows 95, which used the Rolling Stones song "Start Me Up" to great effect.
In my opinion, the new Office 2007 user interface is one of the most innovative things to come out of Redmond in years. It's nothing less than the death of the main menu as a keystone GUI metaphor. This is a big deal. Historically, where Office goes, everyone else follows. It's already starting to trickle down: IE7 does not show its main menu by default, and neither does Vista. You have to press Alt to expose the menu. The main menu has been demoted to a sort of configuration panel for advanced users; for everyone else, there's the Ribbon and toolbar buttons.GUIs are characterized by their WIMP characteristics: Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointing device. Office 2007's Ribbon is a compelling argument in favor of abandoning the creaky old main menu GUI metaphor. I'd also argue that Office, in every new version, has further de-emphasized the highly problematic MDI windowing standard. Even without the vagaries of MDI, I spend far more time wrangling windows than I should. That's why I work with maximized windows 99% of the time (albeit across multiple monitors). So I'm inclined to think that windows themselves aren't all that useful as a GUI construct either, either. So, if Office 2007 drops the W and M from WIMP, what are we left with?IP. Icons and Pointing Devices.It's a radical change, right? Perhaps, until you consider the world's most popular GUI environment, the web browser, has no Menus or Windows. It's nothing but Icons and Pointing Devices. And yet people seem to adapt to the web much more readily than traditional WIMP apps. If anything, Office 2007's UI overhaul brings it in line with the rest of world that lives in your web browser.Still, it's impressive that Microsoft was willing to make such a large change to their flagship application. Vista, in comparison, makes almost no changes to the core Windows GUI. Jensen Harris' blog documents exactly how Microsoft arrived here:The Why of the New UI (Part 1)
Ye Olde Museum Of Office Past (Why the UI, Part 2)
Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)
New Rectangles to the Rescue? (Why the UI, Part 4)
Tipping the Scale (Why the UI, Part 5)
Inside Deep Thought (Why the UI, Part 6)
No Distaste for Paste (Why the UI, Part 7)
Grading On the Curve (Why the UI, Part 8)
There are dozens of related articles in Jensen's Office 2007 UI bible, but these background articles are essential.Kudos to Microsoft on the UI changes in Office 2007. It's the first version of Office worth upgrading to.
And if that was the comparison we were actually discussing it might be relevant.There is a difference between being stupid and choosing not to invest time and energy in something.Indeed, and a great many computer users (which means many millions of Microsoft customers) choose not to invest time and energy into understanding how a computer works. Microsoft has no problem with this, but it does mean they need to ensure that when those users buy a "PC with Windows" they don't get "a PC that could run Windows, but right now it's booted into BeOS". Because Microsoft (not Be Inc, not the guy on Slashdot promoting BeOS) ends up with a lot of the support costs if that happens.If it's "elitist" to believe that some people don't care about computers then I guess I'm an "elitist" by your definition, but I caution you that this is an unusual definition which is likely to cause you problems. Oh, but it does... Posted Dec 19, 2010 11:37 UTC (Sun) by Jan_Zerebecki (guest, #70319) [Link]
Since this is MS doing the reporting, it's not going to contain the information, but I do wonder what the rates for Linux and Mac OS X look like compared to these. Does anybody do the same type of thing for those OSes? Could the data compare so there is a fair comparison?
Any conclusions in terms of caparison will be inconclusive since it does not take the user context into consideration. People that are still running Windows XP might just be people that are not tech savvy and barely can keep a computer running as is. If you could get results from Windows XP and Windows 7 machines owned and used by the same person, that would be a different story. Or you need to conduct some comparisons in a controlled lab environment.
Microsoft looks strong in comparison to the industry, sector and the S&P 500. The big stand-out is the huge discount in Microsoft according to P/E ratio comparisons. The stock is trading for a 40% discount to the S&P 500 even though Microsoft's growth rate is expected to be nearly 30% higher next year. Another major positive is the PEG Ratio. Microsoft's is 1.5; this is about a 50% discount to the average PEG ratio of stocks in the S&P 500 and Technology sector specifically.