Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Wednesday 23 July 2008, 7:33 AM
Microsoft's pre-modern message puts a new face on Vista
Microsoft is quite right to be envious of those clothes, and spot on when it sees its own image falling some way short. And a smart, coherent advertising campaign is an excellent way to get people to reconsider mistaken or outdated ideas: the history of marketing is full of examples where a basically sound but rather jaded entity is repositioned at the forefront of cool and new. Volkswagen, Guinness, the Labour Party: browse Soho's adland bookshops and you'll find cubic metres of glossy, expensive paper explaining how to pull that trick off.
You need engaging, intriguing adverts, which anyone with $300 million to spend can make happen. They set the tone, that you're dealing with an intelligent, interesting company that's worth listening to. They then have to deliver on that promise by linking the products with those ideas – and this is where the challenge really begins.
Microsoft's first blast is not shy of tackling that task head-on. It's there to reposition Vista. The underlying message is forthright and sane: yes, we know we said it was great when we started and yes, we know you've had problems with that. But it's grown up and so have we – so now's the time to lose those old ideas and see what it's really like.
That's clever in many different ways; the implication is that both the product and the company have addressed their shortcomings – Vista, by getting its performance and incompatibilities fixed; Microsoft, by being cool and honest enough to admit its previous over-selling – and so our ideas about them deserve to change too.
It's a shame, then, that the very first message in this opening shot is just plain wrong. The image is perfectly judged; a classic illustration of a Napoleonic-era ship in full sail across a lively sea with wind and sun behind it. But it all goes wonky in the text:"At one point, everyone thought the world was flat. Get the facts about Windows Vista."
Ah, if only. The trouble is, the flat earth belief myth is mostly that – myth. Plenty of Iron Age primitive cultures bought into that idea, but from Aristotle onwards simple observation won the day. Ships disappear beneath the horizon. Constellations change their height above the horizon as you travel north or south. People see further from mountains.
The idea of the medieval flat-earther is entirely a 19th century concoction, a combination of anti-clerical propaganda and popular fiction. Microsoft's advert – set sail for the new world, bravely ignoring everyone else's ignorance – perpetuates that myth. It's setting the scene for the entire campaign – one designed to make Microsoft seem up-to-the-minute, trustworthy and effective – by peddling an outdated chunk of propagandistic fiction.
That wouldn't matter if people still believed it, but it's a fiction past its tell-by date, one that's been substantially debunked by any number of popular science writers. Gershwin got away with it in 1937 when he wrote "They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, when he said the world was round". Today's smart cookie will be more familiar with Carl Sagan's remix: "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Oops.
PreviousComments on this post
What this ad campaign says to me very clearly is that the people in charge at Microsoft still don't believe that they made any mistake at all, or that there was "really" anything wrong with Vista at all. They still believe that it was all a problem of perception, that all those Windows users just misunderstood, or got it wrong, or made a mistake, and now they (Microsoft) are willing to give us another chance to see the error of our ways and accept the fact that Vista really is a good thing.
Regardless of how much perfume you spray on a cow patty, it still stinks.
Have you used vista since it was released ? or just hate to hate.
Over the last year its became pretty stable and has become a good OS.
Its great on newer equipment if u have older hardware than use XP of course. some of the features are annoying for advanced users that can be shut off in a few clicks and those features are in most other OS's out there. For the normal user it helps them a lot. Microsoft needed to get a new desktop OS out because of Enterprise customers that paid for SA. Their customers were worried they wouldn't get anything for the money they put out. People were also complaining that there hadn't been a new desktop OS put out by Microsoft. Bissness wise they needed too get the OS out. The Software industry always pushes out software that isn't complete than fixes it over the next year. So why should Microsoft be any different. All software from OS to video game does this now and the reality is that a software product could never be perfect. sorry if this got double posted
Yes, I have tried Vista repeatedly, and documented the success and failures in my blog. This is not on "older hardware", it is a new Fujitsu Lifebook S6510, purchased last December, nearly a year after Vista was released.
The bottom line was that Vista is slow and prone to crashing. I do not "hate to hate", or even "love to hate", I honestly wanted Vista to work properly, and I tried very hard and gave it every chance to do so. It did not, and in my experience with my hardware, it still does not.
Besides which, I think your own statement pretty well summarizes the situation. People who use their computers seriously, and depend on them, generally are not ready to accept an operating system that is, as you say, "pretty stable".
have been using it since release at beginning and used beta builds before that It's very stable and has been for months. Have it running on 3-4 laptops and close to 20 computers all used by various users. When it first got released its wasn't stable at all and had a life of about a week before it corrupted itself. 6 months after release it was OK but still crashed often after about a month to 2 of use. After the service pack i find it very stable. haven't had one machine blue screen or corrupt itself. I do have more experience with the x64 versions than i do with the 32 bit versions. From an enterprise point of view i find it stable enough to implement in a big bisness. Hardware drivers also were a big problem at the start of Vista and as with the past M$ OS releases.
So would make sense that Microsoft would make another push at getting its newest OS out there and spend more money to do so.
On a X64 machine with 4+ gig of RAM I don't see any slow downs and haven't seen one crash yet after long time heavy usage after the SP.
and you are right a power user wouldn't ever want a system that is pretty stable, sorry for wording it that way u got me on that one.
Taking the same machines and putting XP on them there's a big difference in how they preform. I do find that its memory usage is pretty extreme and was surprised to find out that windows server 2008 had the same memory at first install. I would rather see people make the switch to Ubuntu or another Distro, But until mainstream software becomes more available for it i don't see the regular user adopting them. for the record i only use Vista Enterprise on my machines from a clean install never use a OEM install of it. All x64.
The other versions i haven't tried at more than installing a few times and wiping. So am only commenting on the enterprise edition.
Those of us who have followed Microsoft's assault on Linux over the last few years will be completely turned off by the opening statement 'Get The Facts'. Perhaps others will be too, just by the tone of the statement, authoritative, dictatorial, even belittling, as if we cannot make up our own minds. Microsoft have employed many tactics during this period to persuade us to get their version of 'The Facts'
Bad decision!
As for 'Flat World', I think much of the target audience might accept that fiction as truth. They are not so well informed.
Kiljoy, my laptop is 3 months old, took 2 minutes, plus, to boot up. Applications were so slow I would sometimes think it had died. Had problems with a new HP printer, so it didn't take me long to decide to remove it and install Linux. I'm glad for you if you haven't had any problems, as you are probably the only one, other than an MS employee, to sing its praises. As for me, I think i made the right choice. I have a faster, more secure, non-bloated OS, and I'm loving it! No regrets, and no return.
As long as M$ keeps screwing up their operating systems, I'll still have work. So in that respect ballmer's buddies are keeping me employed in a commercially funded jobs program. The more complicated it gets, the more likely it is to break down. I have to laugh, DELL has an ad just below this comment box touting expee instead of V!
We techies will end up supporting Vista in the ecosystem, like it or not. Personally, I would prefer if Microsoft invested the $300 million in making Vista better, (or at least put it on a diet) rather than trying to change our "mistaken perceptions" of it. Propaganda though is something Microsoft is adept at, and that "get the facts..." line implies Microsoft are planning the usual scare tactics behind a glossy veneer of fresh paint on rotten Windows.
I'm not sure that investing more in Vista will do it any good. We've yet to see what Windows 7 is going to look like - but that may be a sawn-off Vista with a nod to the embedded/netbook market. All of Microsoft's marketing will be aimed at keeping Vista alive when nobody much likes it now and the replacement is within sight - and that IS a marketing problem, not a technical one.
Meanwhile the company also has to refine its online/webservices message, hopefully to the point where us mere mortals can understand it, as well as decide what to do with its consumer appliances and mobile strategy.
I hope it gets its act together. It's a rare pleasure to write something positive about Microsoft (the telescopic pixel was one opportunity), and if its misfires are a brake on the whole industry, it getting stuff right is quite a boost.
Rupert you got right on the edge of what I think is a good point. Microsoft is the de facto world-wide monopoly for user operating systems, fine, I don't like it but that is the state of reality. The problem is that it seems as if they are from Mars most of the time and don't do enough to listen to their various customers that actually might be worth listening to. If they were willing to let go of their idiotic idea that "one OS to rule them all" is such a good idea, they would win a lot of friends.
There is no reason for any operating system to be so damn fat. Linux is even getting too fat in my opinion.
Why does there only have to be one version of Windows? The EULA promises absolutely NOTHING to the end-user. So if Microsoft wanted to say that for instance at the end of July 2008 they would no longer support XP but would allow their OEMs to still sell it, why not?
As far as support goes, outside of probably a hundred visits to Microsoft.com and MSDN in the last dozen years I've gotten absolutely no real answers from their support. Their first tier service is a joke.
I know it is possible to strip Windows XP Pro down to manageable size and make it run faster than it currently does. I make my living doing it every day with Windows XP Embedded. The differences from XP Pro are minuscule. Linux likewise can be stripped to the essentials if necessary.
If Microsoft took the idea of their application called the Application Compatibility Service and tied it into Windows Installer (or something like it) they could have an operating system that could be software customizable by the USER. It'd be like bolting on a turbocharger or a oil cooler or what have you in gearhead jargon.
For that matter, add something like User selectable Service/Software Profiles in addition to the Hardware Profiles nobody seems to use. Setup a menu system on boot that allows you to start up the system to run fast and tight or fat with processes to do lots of multi-media for instance. Each user on a particular system could set his own profile to operate the way he wanted it to.
If you want an education in how little you need to allow Windows to continue to work, boot up as an Admin on the computer. Start Task Manager and click on the Performance tab and watch the CPU Usage and PF Usage. Now go into Control Panel\Administrator's Tools\Services and start stopping services. (DO NOT DISABLE THEM, Just Click STOP.) Don't bother trying to stop the Telephony service. You'll find that there is a tremendous amount of culling you can do before the system just crashes.
As an experiement I did just that. The services I still have running are: DCOM Server Process Launcher, Event Log, Logical Disk Manager, Plug and Play, Protected Storage, Remote Procedures Call, Security Accounts Manager and that's it. Some services will not shutdown. Look at the Processes tab and I have only 14 processes running including System Idle, currently running at 98 %.
RAM went from 270 MB to 224 MB, not much of a savings BUT it didn't crash, its still running! CPU Usage never peaked up above 10% and its running at less than 2% most of the time.
I went ahead and loaded StarOffice 8 and its running fine (along with its embedded JAVA engine) and during the entire time I had Thunderbird running non-stop. Now the RAM count is up to 239 MB.
I closed Tbird and StarOffice and the RAM in use dropped to 204 MB.
I will grant that this sort of process/service killing also has side-effects like NO network service or server file sharing, etc. but it does make the box run faster and leaner.
There is no reason to run Terminal Services if you don't want to. I went so far as to rip it out of the OS on my home desktop because I considered it a freaking huge security hole.
If I don't want multi-media, let me the user turn it off in pieces or in total. If I don't want dot.Net let me have it NOT install for my Software User Profile.
If I could have gotten that functionality with Vista I wouldn't have minded paying twice as much as XP Pro. When I tried out the Beta, it was obvious that Vista was a skunk. Why pay twice for half as much?
P.S. One benefit to all of this is that when I shut down WMI, it also shutdown the Firewall AND the Network Interface making the Windows XP Pro system probably more secure that it ever was before!
(BTW, I'm thinking about implementing that service shutdown functionality into a software tool. Should be easy to program in dotNet. Have a menu box open on boot into logon, select which software settings you want and kill the services and processes you don't want in sets, maybe have 4 or 5 profiles to choose from.)
This is one of the great mysteries of life. I know that from time to time, Microsoft has looked at exposing the capability of sensibly managing services on XP, with the intent of making it easy for users to customise it. I've seen plenty of examples of cut-down XPs prepared for USB keys by third parties, so what you describe is both safe and useful.
I don't know why that never officially happened -- doubtless there were commercial reasons, but they remain completely opaque from outside the Redmond castle walls. If I had to guess, I'd say that it was to avoid threatening CE: if so, it's a real shame. A properly componentised XP would be such a useful thing to have right now, for MS and its OEMS, given the way the market is developing.
Then again, Microsoft has never subscribed to the idea that less is more.
I don't know if it its really manageable by a typical user but most of the services could certainly be started manually using a Just-in-time strategy or some sort of a user application. The trick would be to clearly identify all of the dependencies for a particular service and start them in the proper order.
The setting "Manual" is supposed to be a sort of JIT mode for the services. A lot of services once started, do not shut them selves off when no longer needed. Other services do shut themselves off but they also will start even when you have them disabled! If the OS thinks it needs it it will override the Disabled setting and run a service anyway. WGA immediately comes to mind!
As to your comment about componentised XP, that's what XP Embedded is. The problem is that it takes either a very beefy, high speed workstation to do the OS compiles or a really decent CPU with a moderate SQL Server in another box. In either case the system uses a SQL database and VB scripts(!!!) doing the queries. Currently the workstation is a Core 2 Duo running XP Pro with 3 GB ram and another XP Pro system with an Athalon 2000XP, 2 GB of ram, running SQL Server 2005. A typical compile takes about 3 minutes, which doesn't sound very bad at all, but you might have to re-compile 20 to 30 times a day when you're trying to squeeze out the most you can out of the smallest image possible or jam as much functionality as possible onto a 1 GB flash drive.
Microsoft could offer a Windows XP Embedded Express like its VS2005/8 software tools and that would be extremely attractive and probably would generate a lot of interest in Windows with costing them too much. Yes you can get the XP Embedded evaluation kit, but the images generated suicide in 90 to 180 days and the tool itself shuts off in 120 days (or at least the one I first tried years ago).
One of the features of Vista is user-space drivers. This conceivably would be a way to activate and use a piece of hardware or a software application without exposing the OS kernel directly to the user environment. It would also be a very interesting way to "customize" the computer. It would be much more than just grafting on a Gnome or KDE GUI onto a Windows desktop for instance.
