Microsoft Responds to DOT Ban on Vista, Office, IE 218
roscoetoon writes "From the blog of Mary Jo Foley: What's Microsoft's response to the DOT's charges? A corporate spokeswoman sent this statement, via e-mail: (caution: microbrain double-speak ahead) ... "We respect the customer's decision. As with any of our other Federal customers, it's our job to help DOT maximize the value of its Enterprise Agreement through the adoption of our technology. We are engaged with large, strategic customers across government at every level, and are working closely with them on these products through their participation in our Technical Adoption Programs.""
Dramatic improvements? (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Q: When did MS start using truly independent analysts? Would that part of the statement be necessary if they had no reputation for using paid shills?
FTFA: "As DOT goes through the natural process of exploring the new capabilities of these products we expect they will continue to embrace Windows and Office as the departmental standard of DOT.
Q: Doesn't she mean that "they will eventually be forced to once again drink the koolaid?"
FTFA: "Overall our government customers are excited about the technology as well as our product pipeline.
Q: Does anyone else remember that old Chinese curse? "May your life be exciting!"
FTFA: Just last week more than 500 Public Sector CIOs from across the country joined us for our annual US Public Sector CIO Summit.
- 500 guests for free food and drink and hopefully cheaper software != 500 new customers.
FTFA: The Summit offered these CIOs to see firsthand how Microsoft is working to be a strategic partner to government and educational institutions of every size."
- They obviously didn't spend much time on all the govt. agencies, schools, even countries that are not interested in using MS products anymore. A sales pitch is a sales pitch. I hope they got some good swag!
Translation... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dramatic improvements? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Translation... (Score:5, Insightful)
"it's our job to help DOT maximize the value of its Enterprise Agreement through the adoption of our technology. We are engaged with large, strategic customers across government at every level,"
really means:
It's our job to sabotage this in any way possible, but we haven't adopted a strategy just yet. If necessary we will go to your boss, or your boss's boss, including, if necessary our many opportunities to influence the law in our favor.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB11732819538882956
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
See above for my comments on stability and usability. Also, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and to a lesser extent, AIX are all very real competition.
Now you're just trolling. In what market of any consequence (or inconsequence for that matter) are Solaris and AIX (AIX, for fuck's sake) competitors for Windows Vista ?
Think about this for a moment: Sun Microsystems banned word processors and presentation programs in many of their divisions in 2000. They told employees to use text editors and use HTML if they needed formatting. They saw a 30% rise in productivity. Office suites reduce productivity because the users are fooling around with presentation when they should be tinking about content.
Link ?
Embarassed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Even Intel is waiting on Vista SP1 (Score:2, Insightful)
Intel has been around longer than Micro$loth. Intel has been truly technologically innovative at several times --- something Micro$loth has never really accomplished often. M$ is desperate to have its buggy bloatware bundled on all new x86/x64 platforms from major vendors, and has been trying hard to distance itself from specific hardware platforms via MSIL produced by its latest compilers such as VB and C#. All Intel/AMD need to due to put a major hurt on M$ is to release a new CPU spec that offers significant performance/feature improvements but does not cater to M$'s MSIL scheme. In other words, it is possible to design a CPU/GPU combo that works best when apps deal with it at the bare metal level as opposed to some crappy, contrived M$ level. I wonder if some flavor of Linux will get big enough to cause development of such a non-x86 chip set that is nonetheless capable of emulating x86 processors at reasonable speed.
If Intel/AMD could convince the Dells, HPs/Compaqs, Gateways of the world that they have a free OS & major app solution that does not involve Micro$loth, but produces as good or better real world business results using FOSS, M$ would be SOL. That would be a Good Thing(tm)!
It is easy to design good hardware that M$ buggy bloatware won't work with well, but that supports Linux/Unix extremely well -- just optimize the CPU/GPU in a way that
Re:Watch out (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have been waiting for this to happen since I used Word 5.5 on DOS. With every release, M$ have been promising "this time, we did it right", and Word 2003 just doesn't cut it. Most of the time when I open a
So far, nothing to write home about.
Re:Astroturf? (Score:2, Insightful)
Since the modding is definatley pro-MS on
Re:Translation... (Score:4, Insightful)
As with any of our other Federal customers, it's our job to help DOT maximize the value of its Enterprise Agreement through the adoption of our technology.
Means:
What do we care? They have an Enterprise agreement, which means they're paying us the same annual fee whether they decide to take advantage of their upgrade rights or not. Eventually they'll get onboard and move to Vista and Office 2007, and after that they'll move to whatever we ship next.
Standard operating procedure... (Score:3, Insightful)
Government geels in decisiomaking capacity don't get into beta programs and it's easier to ban a software package than learn how to support it.
Re:The first suspicion..... (Score:3, Insightful)
MS really doesn't dare call such a bluff. The reverse is also true: Don't threaten MS with a Linux switch unless you're prepared to follow through with it.
At least temporaraly (Score:4, Insightful)
As for home use, I looked at the upgrade path. I ran the checkout program provided by Microsoft. It tells me: Both printers not supported, both scanners not supported, my external hard drive (160GB) not supported, and elements of my LAN not supported.
In follow up, I have tracked down that for 1 scanner and both printers, the vender (HP) has ALREADY declared they will NOT be releasing updated drivers. The other scanner, I have to upgrade the software for (Nikon). The other items I have no word on yet.
Also, I have a Laptop with 2GB of memory and that isn't enough to run Vista well? WTF? And looking at the new feature list from MS. I don't want them wasting all that memory on the file search process. Nor do I want the DRM, so what exactly is Vista giving me besides grief?