While the Microsoft representative makes some accurate statements, some of them are a bit misleading and deflect blame, and some of them indicate that Microsoft may not really understand its competitors.
For instance:
- "bad drivers from GPU companies and printer companies for the majority of Vista’s early stability problems"
Even if technically true, bad drivers are never completely a 3rd party's fault. Microsoft should have had a keen interest in helping hardware vendors write good drivers. Microsoft also designed the driver interfaces!
- "assailed OEM system builders for including bad, buggy, or just plain useless apps on their machines in exchange for a few bucks on the back end"
Again, probably true, but this isn't new to Vista. It may even have been made worse by Vista; if machine sales were lousy due to Vista, OEMs had to make a buck any way they could.
- "he conceded that Apple appeals to more and more consumers because the hardware is slick, the price is OK, and Apple doesn’t annoy its customers (or allow third parties to)"
Somewhat true statements about Apple, though Apple has annoyed its customers, and 3rd parties such as Adobe have incredibly obnoxious customer-annoying things even in their Mac software.
But I think Microsoft needs to identify more significant reasons for Apple's appeal. What about Apple being "cool", or offering integrated solutions that Just Work, or having an OS that is far more compelling (so much so that people hack hardware just to use it)?
I ask because my Sony Vaio doesn't like USB devices. And, it's slower than my previous XP laptop even though it has over 2x as much DRAM, said DRAM is faster, and each of its processors is faster than the single processor in the XP laptop that it replaced.
In the past, replacing an old machine running a previous microsoft os with a new machine running a new microsoft OS left you with a faster system. Sure, the old OS may have run even faster on the new hardware, but new on new was faster than old on old.
Vista broke that. Even with hardware that is arguably 2x more powerful, vista is slower than XP. (And yes, I killed the background indexing job that never went into background and never finished.)
For instance:
- "bad drivers from GPU companies and printer companies for the majority of Vista’s early stability problems"
Even if technically true, bad drivers are never completely a 3rd party's fault. Microsoft should have had a keen interest in helping hardware vendors write good drivers. Microsoft also designed the driver interfaces!
- "assailed OEM system builders for including bad, buggy, or just plain useless apps on their machines in exchange for a few bucks on the back end"
Again, probably true, but this isn't new to Vista. It may even have been made worse by Vista; if machine sales were lousy due to Vista, OEMs had to make a buck any way they could.
- "he conceded that Apple appeals to more and more consumers because the hardware is slick, the price is OK, and Apple doesn’t annoy its customers (or allow third parties to)"
Somewhat true statements about Apple, though Apple has annoyed its customers, and 3rd parties such as Adobe have incredibly obnoxious customer-annoying things even in their Mac software.
But I think Microsoft needs to identify more significant reasons for Apple's appeal. What about Apple being "cool", or offering integrated solutions that Just Work, or having an OS that is far more compelling (so much so that people hack hardware just to use it)?