Olympic Committee Chooses XP Over Vista

Vinit writes "The popularity of Windows XP is still making things difficult for Vista. Now Vista has again suffered a major setback, with Lenovo (Olympic 2008' official sponsor) installing XP on it's machines to run the Olympic Games' vital PC-related tasks. Vista will only be used in internet lounges set up for athletes to use during the games."

Re:Hmm

[an.echte.trilingue]

I don't see this as a particular setback. It's just a good business decision: stable and tested over flashy and new. If they were going to go with Linux, they would probably choose etch over lenny.

Don't worry, Vista will supplant XP over time.

Doesn't make a difference

[mrjb]

The truth is that in the end it is still a choice between MS and MS.

The same happens with detergents- that's why Unilever and Proctor&Gamble produce a multitude of detergents. If a sufficiently large group of people have a choice between 3 detergents of the same price & quality, and 2 are Unilever, it is likely that around 2/3 of the sold detergent will be Unilever.

In this case, anything non-MS was out of the picture, so why would they complain?

Reality check time for Linux fans.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

If a company with that much cash at hand and a willingness to break rules and fight a no holds barred battle finds it this difficult to dislodge XP from the desktop, Linux fans, we have a much more formidable task ahead. When people are asking, "Will 2009 be the Year of Vista?", it is difficult to take the talk about "the year of Linux Desktop" seriously.

I don't know what would be a reasonable expectation for Linux market share at consumer level in the year 2010. 3%? 6%? 12%?

Re:Not ready for prime time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone confirm or deny this? I used to deal with the departmental software licensing, and I know that some licenses specifically allow this. However, there were a few that explicitly disallowed this in their terms. That is, once you upgraded a license, the old one was null and void and you were no longer allowed to legally install the older versions (you were supposed to have destroyed the physical media). What is the official MS stance on this issue? I'm asking in a legalistic "this is strictly what the license says" sense, not what you guys think you can get away with.

kinda lame

[wwmedia]

kinda lame this makes fronpage news when more pressing issues in china like pollution during olympic games, human rights abuse and censorship by chineese takes back seat

Re:Its not so difficult

[PinkyDead]

'fraid not.

If you look at old maps and the like you can see the origin of the possessive form of nouns.

For example, off the South East coast of Ireland is an area called St George's Channel (named presumably by the English after their lightweight pseudo-saint) - but if you look at older maps you will see it marked as 'St George his Channel' meaning the channel of Saint George. Shorten that and you end up with St George's Channel.

Likewise Bob his computer. The dog its bone etc. Obviously there's a problem with Eve - but I presume this is because she wouldn't have been entitled to own anything at the time this ended up in the language.

So I think the GP is correct - though I'm sure some grammar super-Nazi will pull me up on this.

Re:It is a natural decision.

[Billosaur]

I just started a new job and they gave me an HP laptop, which, when opened, had a nice shiny Vista logo on it. Horrified, I turned it on, only to see the reassuring opening stating I was running XP Professional. I breathed a very heavy sigh of relief. Vista is not making it into general use because companies have spent years getting all their systems converted to XP and now want to get some mileage out of it before they switch. Besides, no one wants to risk their IT department on it until they've seen what it does -- they'd rather have someone else take the risk and stand back and watch.

Re:Hmm

[mwvdlee]

Vista certainly improves on a few things. Most notably (for me), is the way the GUI is handled internally. OTOH, with these nice improvements also comes a lot of other crap that I (and many others) explicitely DON'T want. As it stands, XP can be improved upon (i.e. anything that OSX, Linux, etc. currently does better than XP), but Vista isn't the answer to that. Vista would have a better chance at adoption if Microsoft's marketing department didn't have a say over what goes in technically.

Re:It is a natural decision.

[Seakip18]

Same here. We've been trickling XP's in since SP1b was put out. We're finally taking the plunge this fall by putting XP's out on every desk. I'm not touching Vista till I get the means to support it.

On the plus side, Yea for script standardization.

Re:It is a natural decision.

[rolfc]

I have been using Vista for almost a year, and it is not ready for us.

Marketing has trumped reason at Lenovo.

[twitter]

Vista is horrible, but Lenovo's CEO wants the upgrade treadmill to work. Athletes will have to put up with it and the public will be lead to believe Vista is what makes the Olympics work. If it's really going to work, the servers are going to use gnu/linux, BSD or something else that really does the job. I'm surprised that they admitted anything was not M$'s latest and greatest. The 2008 Olympics are going down in history like 1936, a zenith of the fake and evil.

The strategy is ultimately futile and damaging. Vista is more of the same from M$, and vendors who say otherwise damage their reputations and the industry as a whole. Vista is not selling and vendors are all suffering because of it.

Love is mutually exclusive with Windows

[stewbacca]

I've never known anyone to LOVE Windows XP. They only dislike Mac OS X (or Linux, or whatever else), so they use XP. And even then, they only dislike Mac OS X because they have too much personal background and training invested in the Windows route, or they like to pirate a lot of software, or they play video games, or they are hackers. Tinkerers really dislike Mac OS X, but that doesn't mean they LOVE XP; it just means they can tinker more in XP, which gives them more satisfaction. Even my parents won't budge from Windows, even though neither of them know a damned thing about computers, even 10 years on. They don't want to switch to Macs, because they think they will have to relearn everything (which is nothing, since they know nothing about their PCs, other than they are replacing them every year and some 'friend' keeps building them new ones for a 'bargain').

People who supposedly love Windows are the same people that claim their car never breaks down, yet they have their car up on blocks and are replacing the transmission. Or, they are the old people who hang around the water cooler at work and complain about their back pain and arthritis. I hear people in the break rooms at work complaining about their recent Microsoft breakdown and they just love commiserating with each other. It is a sick, sad phenomena that is passed of as people "loving" Windows?!?!

Re:Olympic apps for Vista?

[ouder]

I wonder how much of the decision has to do with some practical issues with Vista "features." If they are hooking up equipment like timers and cameras, then the current state of Vista drivers could be a huge issue. I am definitely not a Microsoft basher, but anyone who views the situation objectively can see that there are issues of media content on Vista. A lot of Olympic workers probably move around media files. Have you ever tried to move around media files in Vista? It takes forever because of the DRM. And if they want to play their video out to a live video feed they may have to degrade its quality unless they are doing output that is certified as having proper DRM. In my opinion MS's biggest mistake in Vista was treating the recording industry as their best buddies and treating their customers as the enemy. They have managed to make Vista useless for media production or management.

Re:It is a natural decision.

[ultranova]

If all you want to do is email and surf the internet, then Vista is great.

No it isn't. If that's all you want to do, get Linux - you'll be able to keep 100+ browser windows open at once accross as many virtual desktops you want, and aren't nearly as open to worms. No need to pay for any antivirus/firewall software either.