Posts Tagged ‘microsoft’

The Difference Between an Apple and Microsoft Upgrade

Like a good little Apple fan, I went out and purchased a copy of the new Snow Leopard OS from my local Mac store yesterday. I got it home, popped open the box, popped the DVD into my MacBook, told it to upgrade and in 45 minutes or so I was playing with the new features of Snow Leopard. This really was my first operating system upgrade as an Apple fan and I have to say I was impressed. I was an Apple fan before the Leopard release, but I didn’t do an in-place upgrade for other reasons at the time.

Why is this cool or even worth noting? Because that was all I did. I didn’t look at some chart to see which copy of Snow Leopard was right for my computer. I didn’t have to double-check that I was running the 32-bit version instead of 64-bit. I didn’t run my computer and peripherals through some software to make sure they were compatible. All I cared about was that I had a MacBook running Leopard, so I purchased Snow Leopard and popped the DVD in the drive. And guess what? My computer now runs faster! In fact, I am now using something like 6 GB less disk space than before.

The other cool part was that I didn’t reinstall any software, nor did I re-activate anything. Unlike doing an upgrade with Microsoft software involved, I wasn’t treated like a pirate and required to jump through hoops to use my software again. I just loaded it again. The user experience from the store to upgrade complete was very smooth and straight-forward.

While it’s certainly true that the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard was far less of a jump than Windows XP to Vista or even Vista to 7, but it really doesn’t matter. I had to put far less care into the upgrade and just did it. And that (among a few other things) is why I do, and will continue to do for the foreseeable future, recommend Apple products to those who ask me their opinion on what computer to buy.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (4) : Aug 29th, 2009

Linux Vendors: United They Will Stand?

Ever since reading OStatic’s article about how Linux netbook returns really aren’t the problem with Linux market share, I can’t seem to quite get over the conclusion. They make an excellent point. Microsoft has lots of money and can afford to throw a lot of it at marketing. And Linux vendors? Not so much. To ‘requote’ (RQ?) Joe Brockmeier from Novell:

“If you took the marketing budgets of all the Linux vendors combined, and then doubled that figure, and then added a zero, you might start approaching what Microsoft spends on marketing Windows. Maybe.”

Wow. That’s one heck of a deficit to overcome. The funny thing about the software business is that as long as your technology is ‘good enough’, often that’s all it takes. From there it’s marketing. It’s sad, but true. It’s not that one has to match dollar-for-dollar, but that’s certainly not a difference that’s easily compensated for.

Okay, so there’s a problem. What’s the solution? Let’s read on in Brockmeier’s quote:

“The ad councils for various industries have the right idea — it’s a good idea to pool your money to grow the market when you’re jointly competing with another industry.”

This is where I have to disagree. Pooling money for marketing from Canonical, Red Hat, and Novell (and perhaps some lesser-known Linux vendors) for the benefit of whom? Linux? What Linux? Ubuntu? Red Hat? SUSE? If I were a Red Hat shareholder, I wouldn’t exactly appreciate my dollars being spent marketing ‘Linux’. While I like Linux, Red Hat needs to market Red Hat.

Is this what Linux has come to? A charity that vendors can pool their money into with the hopes of getting something out of it? Now, it is true that these vendors rely upon Linux upstream to have a product to sell, but as long as there are differences in distributions, there will be different marketing strategies. And that’s for good reason. Ubuntu is popular on desktops and laptops. Red Hat is not. In fact, Red Hat appears to not even care about the desktop market. SUSE fits somewhere in the middle there.

Can the three combine marketing strategies? Maybe. While I definitely like the idea of Linux dominating both the server and client operating system market shares, I would hate to see tension created between vendors because advertising doesn’t help out each equally. That would just serve to hurt all three. As a community, Linux vendors can’t even agree on a sound subsystem, let along a marketing strategy.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Aug 16th, 2009

Microsoft and Yahoo (Finally) Strike a Deal

The long, drawn-out game of “Deal or No Deal” between Microsoft and Yahoo! has finally come to an end. It’s been a long time coming, but the number two and three in the search engine market have finally joined forces in their fight against the dominant Google. The deal is not a buyout of Yahoo as past deals have been, but rather a sharing of technology and access to advertisers.

According to a CNN report, Yahoo will be using Microsoft’s search engine Bing underneath the hood to power its search engine while Yahoo will be focused on bringing in advertisers. Microsoft will then be sharing 88% of revenue from Yahoo’s searches and Microsoft will use existing search technology that Yahoo owns to integrate into its own platforms.

Microsoft has long been eyeing Yahoo as a take-over target, but both former CEO Jerry Yang and current CEO Carol Bartz stood against selling the company outright. Bartz reiterated her stance in May that their Yahoo’s search business was for sale for “boatloads” of money.

Yahoo has stated that the deal should increase its operating income by $500 million, allowing it to continue its other ventures without pouring money into search.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jul 29th, 2009

Have We Forgiven Microsoft for Vista or Changed Our Minds About Apple?

Have we forgotten about the Windows Vista release, or are we ready to give Microsoft another chance? Just a few short years ago, around this time, we were getting ready for the release of Windows Vista. Microsoft was hyping its new security model and consumers were busy complaining about changes they had made and how slow Windows had gotten. Meanwhile, Apple was busy with an advertising campaign slamming PCs for being virus ridden and not being “cool” among a few other things.

During the year that followed, Microsoft released Windows Vista. No matter the cause, it was a trainwreck of a release. It was too slow for consumers’ PCs, it had different locations for the same old buttons (not a bad thing, in my opinion, but people complained long and hard), and it wasn’t compatible with software that consumers were running.


Microsoft Embraces GPL?

Satan better invest in a parka and that theoretical pig better invest in a parachute in case its flight is short-lived. Microsoft today released a Linux driver for its Hyper-V virtualization layer under (here’s where it gets interesting) the GNU GPLv2. Yes, the same Microsoft who at one time told us that the GPL was “anti-American”.

By releasing the drivers under the GPL, they’ve not only validated Linux as a value-add to run on top of Hyper-V, but they’ve also validated free software as a whole by contributing the code to the community the way any other open source vendor would. Ironically, Microsoft is actually ahead of several other companies in releasing their drivers under the open source GPL license. The driver is no doubt a move to help boost its Hyper-V market share, but it’s a critical move that Microsoft needs to get customers who would have otherwise chosen a product like VMware, KVM, or Xen. Greg Kroah-Hartman from Novell says that Microsoft will be maintaining and adding new features to the code as well.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Jul 21st, 2009

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