Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Sunday 23 September 2007, 11:32 PM
Ultimate Extra! Ultimate Extra! Read all about... what?
Remember when Vista was young? One of the reasons Microsoft gave for shelling out the heavy poundage on Vista Ultimate was that it would come with constantly updated, gloriously unique extras. These Ultimate Extras would include "Cutting-edge programs", "Innovative services... to help you tailor your computing experience to your digital lifestyle.... make your experience more powerful, productive and personal", and "Unique publications" which would be "premium content that focuses on your digital lifestyle".
As the Vista advertising promised: wow!
There have been just a couple of wee problems with this super-exciting proposal: almost no details of these cutting-edge, innovative and unique offerings have been provided... and, slim as those details have been - language packs! Windows DreamScene! -- they still outweigh the actual goods, as delivered.
Which appear to be zero.
You can read more on this, on antipodean blogger Long Zheng's caustic post, where he goes into far more detail than Redmond has managed.
And if you're about to ask Microsoft what actually happened, pause a second and ask yourself - should I also ask what happened to Windows Sideshow?
(Extra gnus via Techmeme and the good offices of his serene highness the Codepope)
PreviousComments on this post
As Microsoft proves, one really can fool all of the people all of the time. Do people realise the amount of amazing addons that come with a Linux distribution for free, and are constantly being updated?
Microsoft is so old school, and not in a good way, with deep grooves and loads of funky bass, but in a bad way, with superficial bizzare names of invisible, under-delivered or never-realized products and loads of funky smelling software everyone needs bleeding edge hardware just to get started.
The new school is loads of free updates, inclusive software that is easy to use, well designed and - SHOCK-HORROR! - something we need rather than something that hasn't been patented yet, necessary or not..
All they needed to do was deliver a clever, easy to use, powerful OS. If those democracy-hating commie Open Sourse people can do it, several times over, in fact: RedHat, Ubuntu, Debian, Dawin, mac osX, etc, then what is taking the richest most powerful software company in the world so long to even get half-right?
