Tag Archives: Windows

The Mojave "Experiment"

When I first saw The Mojave Experiment something struck me as odd. I couldn’t put my finger on it initially, but after pondering it for a while I realized that the whole concept is completely flawed. Rather than provide a narrative here of why this is such a misleading and botched “experiment”, I’ll simply link to a blog post that someone else wrote, which sums it up:

http://wilshipley.com/blog/2008/07/mojave-experiment-bad-science-bad.html

Still Making Waves, Huh?

Today for some reason I saw lots of articles discussing Vista and its adoption (or lack thereof) by the consumer as well as the business user. It’s been almost a year since Vista was released and people who are giving it a shot only recently have kind of re-started a wave of negativity that began right around the product launch.

It is not that I expected Vista to change between January and today. But as I read these articles that have started to sprout up again I can’t help but remember the way Vista was “received” by Microsoft employees when I was on contract up there earlier this year. People often complained about having to reboot the computer when waking it from sleep because the screen stopped working. They’d complain about the performance. Others just complained because they were happy with XP. But alas – it was a corporate directive that (what was initially a select group of) employees install Vista.

The other dynamic I noticed involved Microsoft employees wanting to be supportive of the company and voluntarily installing Vista on their newer laptops. These people would invariably run in to the known issues and just accept them as part of The Microsoft Tax.

I’m quite curious to see what Microsoft does with Windows 7 and to what degree (if any) the comment “Vista will go the way of Windows ME”  will come true. How many people will just stay on XP, given what we know about Vista, and wait until 2010 when Windows 7 is targeted to be released?

VMWare Fusion on Mac

At the suggestion of my buddy Brad, I set up a Windows machine under VMWare Fusion (as opposed to Parallels, which is what I’ve used up until now). 

I am absolutely amazed. From the time I pointed VMWare’s virtual machine setup dialog to my Windows install media it took a mere 11 minutes to create the VM, install Windows XP Pro, reboot, install the VMWare drivers, and reboot again. The machine was completely ready to go in 11 minutes. So far, the machine seems *really* rock solid and responsible.

Wow. Beat that with a stick. 

October 26th: Leopard

I was delighted to finally read that the official release date for Mac OS X Leopard is Friday October 26th. The Engadget story mentions the pricing: $129 for a single license, $199 for a 5-license family pack. It then goes on (in a bit of sarcasm) and mentions how there is no upgrade pricing. Well let’s just think about that for a second.

While I too would love to get it cheaper, I think it’s important to note here that the $129 full retail price (for the version that has everything – the only version they sell) is $30 cheaper than the upgrade for Windows Vista Home Premium. I might also add that the Home Premium edition doesn’t even have all the features that Leopard does. If you want to come closer to Leopard, you’d need the Ultimate edition, whose upgrade price is a whopping $249. Almost twice as much as a full license to Leopard.

While people can (and will) always complain about pricing (even as I have done in the past regarding an Apple product), I just have to say that $129 is a pittance for a product like OS X. It’s a price that makes it an option for millions and millions of people. The family pack, which allows me to install it on up to five machines in my home is a steal at $199.

I’ve gotten free versions of Windows for the past seven or eight years because of the MSDN subscriptions that I’ve had, so I never had to look at pricing. It wasn’t until I had to buy a friend a copy of Windows Ultimate from the company store that I found out how much it was and I just couldn’t believe it. A retail price of $399.95. I was floored. That wasn’t for a family pack, mind you. That was just ONE license.