Interviews - Q&A: Microsoft responds to Apple's Windows 7 jibes
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Apple had a lot to say about Windows 7 at this week's WDDC. We get a response from Microsoft's Windows product manager.
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Re: Interviews - Q&A: Microsoft responds to Apple's Windows 7 jibes
I particularly like his politician-esque answer to the question about W7 being a Service Pack for Vista :P
Re: Interviews - Q&A: Microsoft responds to Apple's Windows 7 jibes
Fair play to him for not taking the bait and joining the mud flinging match with apple! Having used windows 7 for over a month now i have to say it is an impressive bit of kit! :)
Re: Interviews - Q&A: Microsoft responds to Apple's Windows 7 jibes
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Originally Posted by
shaithis
I particularly like his politician-esque answer to the question about W7 being a Service Pack for Vista :P
Exactly what I'd expect him to say, and in my experience pretty much spot on. I don't want to open the W7 == Vista SP can of worms again, I'm happy to go along with Microsoft's claims that Vista was a lot more stable and secure than XP, and no-one's ever denied that Windows 7 is built on the foundations of Vista.
Ultimately, MS are never going to come out and say "yes, sorry, Windows 7 is really just a big Vista service pack", are they? I've used Vista, Vista SP1, and Windows 7: the changes from Vista SP1 -> Windows 7 are *much* more significant than Vista -> Vista SP1... ;)
Re: Interviews - Q&A: Microsoft responds to Apple's Windows 7 jibes
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Originally Posted by
Andehh
Fair play to him for not taking the bait and joining the mud flinging match with apple! Having used windows 7 for over a month now i have to say it is an impressive bit of kit! :)
Use both in anger. Its a clear decision.
Win7 has been performing so well on my primary laptop, i'm thinking of putting it on my desktop (production)..... The RC1 on a very important production machine.
I'll probably be going straight to it, before any SPs come out too.... first time since win2k!
Re: Interviews - Q&A: Microsoft responds to Apple's Windows 7 jibes
I think he gave a pretty good answer to th question about Apple's growth, the thing is, and what i think he should have picked up on - though wisely not rising to the bait, is that a lot of those iphone and ipod touch users are Windows users too. It's a bit like Honda telling Ford that they've increased their userbase by 200 million people by selling lawnmowers - well that's a lot of converted people, but how many of them have Fords in their garages?
1.2 billion users is - well, it's one in five people on the planet, including all the people who don't own a computer due to poverty or whatever reason. That's a pretty hard growth to increase, clearly the more people you "convert" the harder it gets (there are a finite number of people on the planet after all). I wouldn't expect Microsoft's userbase to expand or decrease that much, 75 million customers, even if they were 75 million that smashed their Vista computers to bits to buy a Mac, is around 6%. A sizeable fraction, but not something MS should be worried about - there will always be plenty of Windows users and businesses (especially) to buy Windows.
Windows 7 is a lot different to Windows Vista, the install has been simplified quite a lot (it took 20 mins on my laptop), the desktop has been radically re-vamped and it seems very stable. Certainly it's no more of a service pack than Snow Leopard is (if you remember, Snow Leopard was developed with basically zero new features but a major overhaul of the underlying software).
The 64 bit question, also, was fair enough. Why should Windows suddenly only release a 64 bit operating system? The fact remains that a lot of users still have very capable 32-bit processors and are likely to want to install Windows 7. Apple has the benefit of forcing hardware, which in some ways is good - the main benefit being that they know exactly what hardware people have and develop accordingly. With Windows they've got to cope with a heck of a lot more variations and legacy users which makes things difficult.
It was a pretty politician-esque interview, but i think he did a fairly good job of taking the moral high ground.
Re: Interviews - Q&A: Microsoft responds to Apple's Windows 7 jibes
Questions 5 and 6 - PCs does NOT have an apostrophe in it, unless you are describing a component or a feature of the PC.
E.g
The PC's motherboard - correct
We use PCs! - correct
PC's are great because of the PCs interface. WRONG AND WRONG.
</grammar police>
Re: Interviews - Q&A: Microsoft responds to Apple's Windows 7 jibes
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Originally Posted by
Whiternoise
The 64 bit question, also, was fair enough. Why should Windows suddenly only release a 64 bit operating system? The fact remains that a lot of users still have very capable 32-bit processors and are likely to want to install Windows 7.
True this. Our office is full of mid-range P4s that *should* (given enough RAM) run Windows 7 beautifully for office apps. Windows has *always* been an OS restrained primarily by RAM, rather than CPU (I currently have a 300MHz Celeron doing projection duties in our meeting room - with 256MB it's running Windows XP SP3 very smoothly).
Once I've done a some important backups, I'm likely to try the RC on my old office PC at home - an Athlon XP 2600+. I'll probably do a brief review in the forums when I have ;)
Re: Interviews - Q&A: Microsoft responds to Apple's Windows 7 jibes
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"We have not announced what our plans for launch are yet, but always seek to offer our customers a competitive price based on all associated costs, including any additional hardware requirements
To me that says it's going to be a lot more expensive OS X as Apple aren't famed for cheap hardware. Or have I read it wrong?
Re: Interviews - Q&A: Microsoft responds to Apple's Windows 7 jibes
There were a few other gems that Laurence missed out on.
Quicktimes long fabled GPU acceleration arrives only with Snow Leopard & only for GeForce 9400m GPU's!
http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html
Windows has had GPU acceleration since Windows XP & in Vista/Seven, look how many years it took Apple just to get this working not to mention third party players have access to DXVA and you can download a free player like MPC-HC and have H.264 GPU decoding on Win XP, oh and Win7 comes with native DXVA enabled H.264 codec & can play back Apple H.264 mov files better than Quicktime ever could.
Apple touted OpenCL but it only works on two ATI GPU's and only a handful of Nvidia ones (see specs link) under Snow Leopard, DXCS works on any DX10, DX10.1 and DX11 GPU for Windows Vista/Seven not to mention it is again limited to Snow Leopard and the first OpenCL demos were ironically done on Windows and Linux, there will be more WinXP OpenCL users then there are on OSX.
Lastly their os is not a pure 64-bit OS like Windows or Linux it is still 32-bit in parts, during the keynote they stated that most but not all of the libraries are now 64-bit.
All hype and more bending of the truth from Apple, kudous to Hexus for taking them to task on it, most sites do not anymore and blindly go with the hype but there was a time when Apples feet used to held to the fire for its infamous photoshop bakeoffs.
Re: Interviews - Q&A: Microsoft responds to Apple's Windows 7 jibes
Didn't Apple put in a chip on their motherboards for h.264 decoding a while ago?
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Originally Posted by
scaryjim
True this. Our office is full of mid-range P4s that *should* (given enough RAM) run Windows 7 beautifully for office apps. Windows has *always* been an OS restrained primarily by RAM, rather than CPU (I currently have a 300MHz Celeron doing projection duties in our meeting room - with 256MB it's running Windows XP SP3 very smoothly).
Once I've done a some important backups, I'm likely to try the RC on my old office PC at home - an Athlon XP 2600+. I'll probably do a brief review in the forums when I have ;)
Also worth remembering that Windows 7 was designed with portability in mind too - the start menu was, of course, specifically designed so that it would work well on touch screens (the large square icons) as well as desktop computers.
Some of the last 32-bits (the extreme line for instance, back when Intel was competing with the behemoth that was the FX-60) to come out of Intel are more than powerful enough to run Windows 7 with enough RAM bolted in. If it can run on a netbook, i see no reason why it shouldn't run on most XP systems.
Re: Interviews - Q&A: Microsoft responds to Apple's Windows 7 jibes
I'm glad he answered those questions without rising to Apple's flamebait. I mean really that is what it is. If I started insulting a platform, person or company on this board in that manner I would expect to get banned. It's just plain trolling.
I have some really Applephile friends, one in paticular has a MB, iMac 24", iPhone and iPod Nano and works administrating around 40+ Macs. Even he finds their recent attacks and attack ads offensive to his intelligence.
I really don't see why they can't sell Macs on their own merits. Unfortunatly these days they barely have time to talk about the benefits of the Mac ecosystem for Windows bashing.
Re: Interviews - Q&A: Microsoft responds to Apple's Windows 7 jibes
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Originally Posted by
GheeTsar
To me that says it's going to be a lot more expensive OS X as Apple aren't famed for cheap hardware. Or have I read it wrong?
Of course it will be. I bet you won't pick up an upgrade of Windows 7 for less than £70, full version will be anything upto £200....
The only place you may find the price lower is in the EU and thats because the EU parliment is making it less tempting to purchase Windows 7 and Microsoft will need to play a different game there.
Re: Interviews - Q&A: Microsoft responds to Apple's Windows 7 jibes
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Originally Posted by
scaryjim
True this. Our office is full of mid-range P4s that *should* (given enough RAM) run Windows 7 beautifully for office apps. Windows has *always* been an OS restrained primarily by RAM, rather than CPU (I currently have a 300MHz Celeron doing projection duties in our meeting room - with 256MB it's running Windows XP SP3 very smoothly).
Once I've done a some important backups, I'm likely to try the RC on my old office PC at home - an Athlon XP 2600+. I'll probably do a brief review in the forums when I have ;)
I've got Win7RC running under VMware running on an Ubuntu 8.04 laptop. The VM has 1GB RAM and a single core of the 2.16GHz dual that I've got, and it runs pretty sweetly. In fact, even with McAfee (Beta) it's way faster than an equivalent XP Pro VM (same virtual hardware and same platform).
Personally, if Microsoft don't completely f--- up the Win7 pricing then they can put me down for a copy to replace my current WindowsXP-Pro desktop. Heck, £150-200 for the full-fat Ultimate would be sweet. I might even swing for a new mobo and processor to replace the Athlon XP3700 I've got at the moment - being flash with the cash! ;)
As others have said, it's nice to see Microsoft being 'bigger' and taking the high ground when Apple starting slinging mud. That said I'm predisposed against Apple because of their "our way, or the highway" attitude - and yes I do have a couple of iPods. :surrender: Oh, and I'm less than impressed that Apple wimped out of putting ZFS in the Server edition of Snow Leopard.
Bob
