Microsoft does something right!

[KdL]

ya it looks real nice, the flip screen... where you can see all the programs/stuff you have open as small folders and shit..the gadgets/gizmos...w/e looks superduper

[Iceman]

And thats where they get you. With the bells and whistles. That technology has been around in Linux (with a cube that represents your different desktops and you can spin the cube to move between open programs/apps). Microsoft has always been very effective at marketing their product while stealing ideas from others and passing it off as their own.

[[MXG]Deimos]

Every company incorporates competitors ideas in to their products and thus making their product more competitive. If they didn't then you would have a whole bunch of products that do different things but none that do everything and that would suck in the market place. I know everytime I sit down to help a customer design a product the first thing I do is market research. I go out and look at other products and figure out what they do well and what they do horribly. Take the things that they do well at and attempt improve on them while adding unique features. The things that make Vista better aren't just visible they are also under the hood, ie memory management is very good, the fact that the os now uses the actual cpu clock time for interrupts instead of an abitrary number and the seperation of sounds in the sound panel. Yeah some of those thigns have already been done in other os's but I don't plan to switch to them so how is that argument relative.

[Iceman]

See that's the problem. Microsoft is trying to do everything and they can not. You are going to do a few thing very well or a lot of things so-so. This is why their products actually are inferior to most of their competitor's competing products. The one thing that gets Microsoft over is marketing to the upper management guys who dont know enough technically to make the correct decision for the best product.

Here are some examples of products that were better than Microsoft's products (in my opinion) that lost out due to companies thinking that an all Microsoft solution was better for TCO.

WordPerfect blew Word out of the water
Lotus 123 blew Excel out of the water
Groupwise and Lotus Domino far exceeds Exchange/Outlook
Novell's eDirectory leaves Active directory in the dust
Novell's ZENWorks kills Microsoft's SMS


I will probably load Vista on my laptop and see what it has to offer just to be fair. Were it not for gaming, I would be using my Linux box most of the time.

[Clizown]

Firefox > IE

[[MXG]Deimos]

Groupwise and Lotus Domino far exceeds Exchange/Outlook

I have to disagree with this. I had to deal with Lotus Gotes for 6 years @ CheckFree and it was ass. The only thing it did better than exchange was calendaring. I would take exchange to gotes everyday hands down. Hell I would take pop3 mail to gotes every day hands down. I get what you're saying, but I still feel I would rather pay for one product versus 3-4 products if I was going to pay for something.

[KdL]

Firefox > IE

win.

[Iceman]

Firefox > IE

I forgot about that Clown. Dont know how I cold have left out the obvious.

I hope that Vista does a better job with its TCP/IP implementation and make it more efficient.

[[MXG]Deimos]

The only thing I haven't liked is the intranet speeds. I have hacked that though and it works great now. As for the network stack I have seen a marked improvement in my actual download speeds. If this was just a blip I would have caused it coincidence, but it has been consistent.