Summary: The unpleasant side of Windows, which includes expiries, lack of security (with no remedies), and even large-scale abandonments
MICROSOFT IS trying to move users not just to Vista 7 but also to Fog Computing, which gives Microsoft control of these users’ data. The Economist advertises this and it also contains this reminder that Vista 7 is not selling better than Vista. It’s just a load of hype and Microsoft’s usual game with numbers that are meaningless — or worse — highly misleading (we provided an explanation before).
And yet the migration from XP to Windows 7 has been little more than a trickle. While Microsoft may not like to admit it, the majority of Windows 7 adoptions have come from people buying new computers with the latest operating system already installed, rather than purchasing an upgrade for their tiresome Vista computers, let alone old XP workhorses.
Looking at Google News for the past week, we found nothing about “Vista” (in the headlines) and almost nothing about “Windows 7″ (and none about “Silverlight” for example), except one Microsoft booster talking about SP1 and a couple of press releases. It’s almost all silence. The marketing blitz is more or less over.
“Even users who move on to Windows XP SP3 are still exposed.”Microsoft is now officially dumping Windows XP SP2 [1, 2], which means security headachs for those who don’t move up (original here). Windows Server 2000 is named among the expired products, but it has not actually been patched for a long time. Microsoft may have already violated its agreement.
Even users who move on to Windows XP SP3 will still be exposed. There are those who resort to blaming Google for Microsoft’s incompetence here (notably InformationWeek [1, 2] and Forbes blogs). It’s an exercise in more blame-passing, making Google the “bad guy” for revealing a Windows weakness that needs fixing. Even Murdoch’s press wrote about it amid controversy.
The incident—along with another episode last week where a Google Inc. researcher went public with a security flaw in some Microsoft Corp. software before the company fixed it—have revived debate in the technology industry over how exactly people should go about disclosing security problems.
This critical security problem is actively exploited [1, 2, 3] and there is no solution to it yet. As IDG puts it (also here):
Anyone running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 needs to update their registry ASAP.
Yes, registry hacking seems to be the only solution (however temporary). Try telling one who is a computer rookie to do this (without breaking the entire operating system) or come under attack [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Yet Microsoft insists that Windows is easy to use and that registry hacking is not ever necessary.
It’s really no wonder that Google keeps raving about its abandonment of Windows (also on all desktops). This is the kind of trouble some of them have had to cope with. Windows reduces productivity and imperils actual work.
Speaking of Google, Microsoft still pretends that it invented the “background image”. We wrote about it last week, but it’s still in the news.
Microsoft took a potshot at Google’s bid to spice-up its search page by adding a feature to add background images.
Google was probably doing it better anyway (it’s not hard to just place an image from a stock that’s nice looking).
In conclusion, Windows has serious security problems that dominate the news. Other than that, Windows news seems to be about lackluster response from the public and lost market share. All Microsoft can do is point fingers at companies like Google and resort to ridicule. It’s rather pathetic. █
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