Sunday, October 19, 2008

Mojave & Life Without Walls

Microsoft has had a lot of new ad campaigns coming out recently: The Mojave Experiment and their Life Without Walls campaign. As a user of Windows Operating Systems since Windows 95, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft games I can say that their claim to "life without walls" and how great "Mojave" (aka Vista) is does have some truth behind it. However, the only way that they can even make this claim is because Microsoft products hold the vast majority of the technology market. Other Operating Systems such as Mac OSX and Linux could have held that top spot had they advertised the way Microsoft did.
The Mojave experiment was meant to show that Vista is Great after it fell on its face initially. My issue is that Microsoft has a professional user sit down and "show" the operating system to the viewer, so this reviewer does not even get to try to use the machine themself!Also this machine is probably tricked out to the max and has hardware and the drivers for that hardware made specifically for Vista. Another thing that I have a problem with is that they never told users to bring along some of the peripherals that they frequently use with their computer like an ipod, mp3 player, camera, etc. to plug in and see if it works. What Microsoft also does not tell us is that often the user profiles on Vista machines will become corrupt and unusable even in SafeMode! Bye Bye music, homework, saved games, movies, tv series, etc. In my tech support job I see people bringing in machines on a regular basis with corrupt user profiles. What really floors me is that manufactures still think that they can let a computer running Vista gimp along with less than 2GB of RAM! that really is special! I know that when Vista computers have this RAM deficit they tend to take forever to open any program....even something simple like solitaire. I think these people are inept computer users to begin with. Furthermore, they then try to tell us in their new ad campaign that Microsoft is "life without walls".
"Life without Walls" is a great gimmick, too bad most of the WORLD uses Microsoft products, no wonder there are no walls. However, to a person that knows how to program they run into walls all of the time because if a program is broken and they know how to fix it they can't! This is because Microsoft's code is not Opensource like that of Linux. Their "life without walls" campaign is nothing more than a gimmick that they can play to because they own the market more or less. My question is why won't my old games work in windows when I turn on compatiblity mode? Instead I end up using DOSbox as I have some older games that I still find enjoyable to play because they are clever...sadly I don't have a computer with an OS older than Xp on it. The whole life without walls is looking like there are more and more walls going up the more that I think about it. Oh yes, yet another walls is when we try to go between Microsoft Office versions, I want to know why the converter for .docx documents to .doc is not a necessary Windows Update? Wouldn't it make sense then users don't have to go mucking around to find the converter when they discover that they need it...and some users don't even know that a converter exists! Yeah, Life without Walls my butt!
I can only hope that Windows 7 is better (v6.1)....

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