VirtualLarry
No Lifer
- Aug 25, 2001
- 56,570
- 10,198
- 126
That's odd then. Why does XP Pro include it? MS documented that as an improvement that was going to be in both XP and Server 2003. link
To those who still depend on the relative security (because of non-routability), and higher wire-level performance of that protocol for a workgroup LAN, dropping support for a protocol that their custom apps may use and therefore require, IS a serious degradation of service for that portion of the customer base. But MS, in their tremendous zeal to push sales of their newest, latest, but not greatest OS codebase, doesn't care about customer needs like that. Even though the W2K protocol driver can be installed, and is the recommended workaround for this issue.
Just because MS claims something is obsolete, doesn't make it so. Look at the uprising of VB6 programmers against MS, because they are dropping "classic" VB, and forcing programmers to move to VB.Net.
To be fair, EFS != NTFS. I didn't mention EFS. But you bring up a good point, MS made some changes in terms of key recovery agents, between W2K and XP.
Not OS features. Those are bundled applications. Some of those changes also include degraded functionality for custom apps written to the originally-specified MS internet APIs.
I actually wasn't comparing SP2. In fact I totally ignored it in that response, I was comparing W2K SP4 to XP SP1. So it was a bit incomplete, sorry. XP SP2 should be treated as an entirely seperate OS from XP Gold/XP SP1, IMHO. (And also in the opinion of many corp. IT depts. too, apparently.)
And that's a crying shame; that's the exact sort of marketing over engineering issue, that caused us to be stuck with thermal-throttling P4 CPUs. (On the hardware side.)
Thank, that's what I was referring to. For the record, it is listed in the "Services" MMC panel, exactly as I mentioned, as a service with a friendlyname of "Volume Shadow Copy". I wasn't wrong.
My apologies, see my post above to smilin.
If you want the 'security' of non-routability, don't connect your computer to the outside world. In other words, don't use a router. Given the speeds of (most of) today's networks, the performance losses are negligible. And if someone has hard coded an app to use NetBEUI, that's just asinine, I'm sorry. The world is using TCP/IP, this is not some Microsoft conspiracy.
I've not heard of such an uprising. Then again, I'm not a programmer.
True, but that's not what I was referring to.
Agreed, but I don't see any purpose in comparing 2000 SP4 to XP SP1, since it is foolish to run any other version of XP besides SP2.
It really isn't as much of a marketing issue as you make it out to be. But even if it is, Microsoft is a company in business to make money. And in the software business, money is made with new products. That's just the reality of the industry. Windows 2000 will still have a great deal of support available for the next five years. Microsoft also historically supports their products far longer than most of their competitors. Windows NT 4 just hit EOL at the end of 2004. 10 years is an incredible amount of time to support a product, especially considering there were two other server operating systems supported during a portion of that time. When all is said and done in 2010, 2000 will also have been supported for 10 years, and there is likely to be two additional server OSs being supported during that period as well.
VirtualLarry
No Lifer
- Aug 25, 2001
- 56,570
- 10,198
- 126
Before the "rise of Microsoft" in the software industry, and forced/planned obsolecence, many companies continued to support their apps (and OSes, what few that there were on PCs before MS), for a long time. (Although, I conceed, IBM was likely the inventor of "planned obsolecence", I don't blame MS for starting it.)
I find that last statement a bit hard to swallow, knowing my history of the PC industry. I'm not sure how true the first is either, seeing as how MS canned SP5 during the "mainstream support" period for W2K.
True, although the codebases of many of the subsystems and components were similar. Although NT4 did live a rather long life, and perhaps would have lived longer, had MS released SP7 rather than can it, as they susequently did likewise with W2K and SP5.
The hypothetical adage, that software companies produce what their customers demand, is untrue. MS is a shining example of the canonical counter-example: MS dictates to their customers, what their demands should look like, because that's what the software that they have produced looks like. And with their market power, they can get away with that. Such raw... arrogance.. was unheard of in the software sector before the rise of Microsoft. That much I know. (And the pinnacle of that was evident during the anti-trust trial, with MS presenting a doctored/forged videotape to the court.)
Maybe this issue of having delineations between the code changes, marked as "releases", will go away, once MS moves more fully into software-as-a-service, and there is no such thing as the "next upgrade", but only a continual stream of "dribble upgrade" patches. (To use a term coined by, I think, PC Magazine.) But the lack of "release" upgrades, could hurt MS in terms of usable PR, and thus lose the confidence of their investors, so they have to slap a new GUI over the core every few years and put out a different-looking box now and again.
have fun trying to connect to a w2k or 98 computer.
MrChad
Lifer
- Aug 22, 2001
- 13,507
- 3
- 81
There's another old adage that says You can't please all of the people all of the time. You can only hope to please some of the people some of the time. I think it's foolish to claim that Microsoft "forces" features down users' throats. Microsoft interacts a great deal with their business customers, their developers and the academic community. Customers have broad and vague concerns like "I don't want my computer to crash" or "My grandmother should be able to use a computer", and Microsoft (like any other software company) engineers a particular solution to address those needs.
Since they are in a somewhat unique position in the software industry of being the dominant player for so many types of software (namely operating systems, office suites and web browsers), these implementations of solutions are bound to fail the needs of some groups out there. It's extremely difficult for a company with such a broad customer base and such a broad-ranging product to achieve high levels of total customer satisfaction. I'm sure that the legal sector probably wishes Word did things one way, while the publishing industry wishes it worked a different way. You can try and make it as accomodating as possible, but you're not going to please everybody.
You point out that this trend of software companies pushing "random" or "unwanted" features and changes began around the same time as Microsoft's rise in the market. But haven't computers and software become much less specialized and much more generally purposed as well? So many different businesses and individuals use the same software packages to satisfy many different needs. These software packages can try to be all things to all people, but they will never satisfy that goal. As a trade-off, we have some semblance of standards that allow the systems to interoperate and all people to easily communicate ideas and data with each other.
And finally, I can't understand your conspiracy theories about W2K SP5. Why was XP SP2 produced? Do you think Microsoft wanted to pull so many developers off of Longhorn to develop software that they would give away for free? They did it because their customers demanded that they do it. Don't you think that if it were more beneficial to their business and customers as a whole, they would have developed W2K SP5? Software companies (not just Microsoft) make claims about releases and updates all the time that they don't always follow through on. Markets change and priorities change; the best you can do is try and satisfy the broadest range of customers possible. Attempting anything beyond that will only lead to failure.
VirtualLarry
No Lifer
- Aug 25, 2001
- 56,570
- 10,198
- 126
I was actually referring to a curious lack of features, and all the while that their users have been demanding the features for years, MS has constantly touted the corporate line that the customers see no need for those features.
Specifically, I can think of the tabbed browsing support issue for IE, of which there clearly is a demand, due to multiple third-party solutions that add that feature, along with the popularity of non-IE browsers that also impliment that feature. Yet MS repeatedly tries to claim that none of their customers have ever wanted such a thing.
I can also think of other things, such as back in the VC6 days, when developers were having a heck of a time getting the standard STL libs to work on VC6, because MS intentionally left out features from the C++ standards, and turned around and made the claim that they didn't believe that their (developer) customers wanted those features. WHich was complete and total horse-puckey, and everyone in the industry knew it, and knew how poor VC6's C++ compliance was, compared to all of it's competitors. But MS had the dominant market position, and they simply didn't want to spend the extra development dollars to impliment those features that their customers were asking for, and at the same time effectively limited VC6 from being a "pure" generic/OO C++ development tool, to more of a Windows app/GUI development tool. In short, almost a dumbed-down toy like VB mostly was. It's all about re-enforcing MS's monopolies, not about delivering the features that the customers want, because some of those features might allow the customer to have some "wiggle room", to escape MS's monopolistic grasp. (Eg. proper template metaprogramming support in VC6, would have allowed for the development of some truely powerful and cross-platform features, not tied down to Windows. I'm not saying that VC6 is purely tied down to windows, but by discouraging programmers from being able to truely utilize STL, generics, and template metaprogramming to enhance their productivity, they instead fall back to things like MFC's container classes, just to save time and not have to re-invent the wheel. Well, or spend extra money for RogueWave or something.)
I'm not even going to get into how MS's compromise between end-users and techies, has resulted in a middle-ground of software features and interfaces, that please neither group. Computers should adapt to the user, not the other way around. MS has this whole idea of "one size fits all" software, exactly backwards. It really has set the general computing world backwards quite a few years.
Actually, I was referring to the concept of "forced upgrades", which didn't really come into vogue until MS became a powerful player and started introducing that marketing tactic. Most of the time, software companies continued to support old versions for some time, and were actually forced to innovate, in terms of delivering new features, in order to lure customers into upgrading. Not by radically changing something-or-other, and using monopoly power to essentially kill off the ability of older software to interoperate with the current state-of-the-art. Thus currently, users are faced with a decision to upgrade, or face "interoperability extinction".
Funny, if MS truely wanted people to "easily communicate" with each other, then perhaps they should fully and freely document their protocols and file-formats, for all to use an impliment, rather than constantly change them in cleverly arbitrary ways, to retain their proprietary lock-in of user's data and communications ability, in order to keep their strongly in the MS product camp. You're right about MS pushing for "one size fits all" software, in order to market it to the greatest number of users. The result is that both end-users, and techies alike, tend to hate the compromises that MS was forced to make to market the product to both groups. I think I expounded on this in more depth before on a different thread.
Do you think that service packs are free software? No, they have been already effectively paid for in advance.
They are collections of patches and bugfixes, to correct defects in software that the customer already paid for, under the expectation that it would operate properly to specifications. If it does not, it should be fixed.
Not if it would have benefited MS more, to not release the full service-pack. MS always places their financial needs above the needs of their customers. If customers could continue to use their NT4 servers to continue to do the tasks that they currently do (speaking about the transition between NT4 and W2K here), then if MS enabled that, then MS would be cutting into their own potential profits, so instead, they can support for NT4, and change protocols just enough, to lock out NT4. (Such as requiring a W2K Server machine, in order to be an ActiveDirectory PDC, for a mixed forest of NT4 and W2K servers. Among other things.)
Well, except that satisfying the broadest range of customers, generally means taking compromises in terms of satisfying customers the best way possible, so in that sense, MS is already planning on partially-failing to accomodate a user's needs, in a calculated attempt to gain the most profit, from the greatest portion of the market/user-base for their products.
You can expect tabbed browsing to 'feature' in the upcoming IE7 for XP SP2 and Server 2003 SP1.
However we all know that the ONLY reason for IE7 before the launch of Longhorn is that people were starting to migrate to these third party browsers over the ancient and insecure IE6.
The fact that MS were losing market share, albeit only a tiny percentage, was enough to get them off their a$$es and start coding a new browser under the 'Its what our customers want' adage.
Fact is, without Firefox, Opera and the like stealing the limelight, IE7 would be debuting in Longhorn and not before, regardless of 'What our customers want'.
TRENDING THREADS
-
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)- Started by DisEnchantment
- Replies: 23K
-
Discussion Intel Meteor, Arrow, Lunar & Panther Lakes Discussion Threads
- Started by Tigerick
- Replies: 18K
-
-
Discussion Speculation: Zen 4 (EPYC 4 "Genoa", Ryzen 7000, etc.)- Started by Vattila
- Replies: 13K
-
Facebook
Twitter