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Windows VISTA review by Scot Finnie

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JavaJones:
Frankly I just don't think they want the mass market. They *like* being a "premium" hardware and software provider. They've built the majority of their marketing around it and it allows them to charge very tasty prices. It'd be like Porsche manufacturing a mass-market car for the $15,000 price range. It's just not what they do nor what they want to do. It would dilute their brand. And yes Porsche, like Apple (remember the clones?), have tried that before and it didn't work out too well. So neither company is about to try to tackle the respective mass-market leaders of their product niches.

The Apple situation reminds me of Nintendo a lot actually. Ever since the Nintendo 64, and now more than ever, I have been of the opinion that they should just go 3rd party and not make hardware anymore; at least not home consoles - they still do very well with hand-helds. The reasoning for this is that almost everyone thinks of Nintendo consoles now as a 2nd console, something *additional* that they have to buy. As a result a lot of people simply don't bother. Sure there are exclusive games for Nintendo consoles (mostly Nintendo games), but are they worth buying a whole 'nother console? How much more likely would people be to purchase a Nintendo game if they could play it on their own console of choice? Now Nintendo would argue that if they went 3rd party they wouldn't have control over the hardware and wouldn't be able to customize it to their needs. However both the XBox 360 and PS3 are by Nintendo's own admission going to be more powerful than the "Wii"/Revolution, so clearly going 3rd party would only increase their capabilities. Now they would say the ease of development is not there with either platform. Fair enough, make a custom development environment at far less cost than creating your own entire custom console, and make it super easy to develop with. It'll probably be slower than the native IDE for a given console but Nintendo is already clearly willing to accept less performance for ease of use and development. What about their innovative remote control pointer for the Wii? There is absolutely no reason that could not be done as an addon peripheral for any other console. They do get 100% of sales on their own titles now, which would be less if they went 3rd party because they'd have to pay the console manufacturer a percentage, but on the other hand being Nintendo I'm quite sure they could negotiate a very sweet deal with whichever manufacturer they chose to support. I think if you totalled up the cost of designing, developing, producing and marketing hardware and the slightly lower per-game profits due to royalty percentages and then measured it against the increased profit on peripheral sales (the Wii controller could fetch a handsome price on its own, and it can't be that expensive to make) and the increased market share due to lower barrier of entry in not having to buy a whole different system, you'd see Nintendo gome out ahead in the end, possibly by a lot. All this makes it quite clear to me that Nintendo *and its fans* would be better off if they went 3rd party. And yet they don't...

Anyway it's also very, very true that Apple has enjoyed a lot of its higher reliability reputation (which has been decreasingly so ever since Win2k was released) due to their relatively small level of hardware diversity as compared to x86 PC's. People complain about issues with Windows, about one or another unusual or obscure device not working, but we can't forget that it's really something of a triumph that Windows works so *well* on such an enormous variety of hardware. There are 2 completely different CPU manufacturers, something like 5-7 motherboard chipset manufacturers, with about 30-50 different motherboard manufacturers, many of whom create their own BIOS's and custom drivers for their hardware. Then there's 4 or 5 major graphics chip manufacturers, each of which sell to a hundred or so resellers who create their own designs and often their own driver variants. There are 5 or so audio card manufacturers, not to mention onboard. There are 20 or 30 network product manufacturers, etc, etc. On the Apple side there's AirPort, now 2 CPU manufacturers (IBM and Intel), a single manufacturer for all/most motherboards and a single provider for BIOS and drivers (Apple), and then a very small range of approved/workable hardware upgrades like graphics cards. It would really be pretty shameful if they weren't able to get more stability than Windows. Given that XP is in my experience about as stable as OS X, I'd say MS is doing pretty darn good. :D

Ultimately I think if anything Apple will simply pursue better virtualization and/or dual-boot technology and eventually buying Apple hardware will be a no-risk proposition because you'll be able to run Windows on it completely seamlessly. People will be able to make the transition to OS X less painfully by not having to leave behind everything they already use, and that will actually increase Apple sales and OS X uptake. It reduces the barriet to entry, just like if Nintendo went 3rd party. And *that* makes good business sense.

- Oshyan

Darwin:
Thanks for your comments, Carol and Oshyan. I'm sure you're both right and OS X will remain a closed access OS (i.e. the price of admission is buying Apple branded hardware). C'est la vie... I've an iBook running OS X and three notebooks running XP Home, XP Pro and Win2k respectively and I have to agree with Oshyan: it's pretty amazing that Windows is as stable as it is. I also must confess to not having yet been won over by OS X. I guess I am too rooted in the Windows camp, which is funny as I started out on Macs and *hated* Windows when it first appeared. That changed for me with 3.11 for WorkGroups - I couldn't believe how much I could configure it and add to it! Anyway, I see strengths and weaknesses in both approaches.

mouser:
great points javajones -
wouldn't it be fascinating to listen in on some of the marketing debates about these issues at the high level of apple, nintendo, etc. really would be interesting to hear the different arguments and see the data they have for or against these decisions.

zridling:
The thing I don't like about Scot Finnie is that he's now a Mac-head and he finds fault with everything Windows, or namely, Microsoft. He spent years writing about Windows independently with little notice, and once he switched to Mac last year and started criticizing Microsoft nonstop, he's a hero on their side. I'm not buying his sincerity. When you review his past newsletters, you get an edgy and negative tone throughout toward anything Microsoft, and now PC.

That Scot Finnie can't understand how to use Vista's User Account Control dialog is suddenly everyone else's problem. Hey Scot guess what, it's more complicated than Apple's drag-n-drop installations. But remember, if we wanted an Apple, we'd shell out the high price for one. More than one tech writer has been exposed for publishing articles about Vista's "mistakes" when they weren't using something right (like resizing columns). And frankly, I don't want my computer dumbed-down too much, although Office 2007's interface has done that. It's elegant, but hard on power users to find where the old stuff is.

I think that between the User Account Control and Office 2007's Ribbon, Microsoft will need an SP1 to undo what consumers won't buy or tolerate, especially businesses. WinXP is pretty solid, well-tweaked, and fully supported, raising the bar high for broad Vista adoption before 2008, imo. (Either that, or there's a major business opportunity for the first company to devise software that simplifies and works around Vista's UAC.)

JavaJones:
Yes indeed mouser, I'd love to hear such discussions inside the company. However I do think it comes down to ego and "staying the course" probably more than we'd like to think. CEO's go on "gut feeling" an awful lot and they're just as susceptible to bias as anyone so there's nothing to say that "gut feeling" is right. If you think about it CEO's probably make about as many good decisions as the average person would if put in their place. Flipping a coin might even do about as good. :p

- Oshyan

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