just would like to see them slow down, get it right, give us good stuff...don't think that's too much to ask for.
Well, the problem is everybody's definition of "right" is different in this case. People say Vista, Windows, etc, is plagued with bugs, and yet they can hardly name a single one.
AS to my comment "programs we can't live without" whats not to get??? Write a new "Word" or whatever, so cool, so easy, so chock full of USEFUL stuff without the fluff. .. and we'd buy it!!
I'm still not quite sure what you mean... Programs we cannot live without? do you mean, like, they should write more "killer apps"? like how back in the day Excel was a killer app and completely obliterated Lotus 1-2-3; or how word smashed Wordperfect? Basically, Office has been pretty well unchanged for quite some time; for the main reason that they really can't add anything that the average person will even come close to needing. (In fact, I'd go so far as to say this has been the case, at least for word, since version 6. And as a matter of fact; if you think about it, when you think about word processing on a windows PC Microsoft Word is one of the first programs you consider; Of course, nearly any text editing that the average person will do can easily be done in Wordpad, so really Word isn't all that necessary.
Now Excel, this can be a different story; it's a spreadsheet, but most people use it for keeping track of lists of data; some for budgets, etc. There are of course free alternatives to this, but still, companies by Excel for their employees; because it's "the standard" so to speak.
Access, well, that's another can of worms right there; Access is really just a "front-end" to the freely available JET database engine; really they would have to release a new version with every release of the Engine, as well; if nothing else but to take advantage of the new features they added.
Powerpoint... well, personally I've always hated powerpoint. From what I can tell it's pretty well unchanged.
When it comes to office I would have to agree; they really have sort of started releasing incremental upgrades that don't provide anything of value. Of course they don't, by any means, force users to upgrade; several of my PCs, for example, still have Word 6.0 installed, and I'm able to transfer documents between it and my newer Word Versions. Same goes for excel. Really, it's a matter of preference.
Upgrade for upgrades sake is crap... upgrade because it's SUPERIOR..... now THATS another story!!
I see what you mean. Essentially, this sort of thinking was present with the release of windows 3.1; "why upgrade to 3.1? I'm perfectly happy with 3.0!" Now, obviously, a case could be made that it, as well as many other perceived "OS updates" such as Windows 98 and 98SE, should have been provided free to previous windows owners. But the problem with that is, then MS is doing it for no reason. Sure; they will have a pleased customer base; but, consider that there is no reason really to keep your customers happy if you aren't going to be able to sell another product to them. If a user needs to be given something free in order to be happy with it then your marketing strategy is already flawed.
Many people say that MS is only focussed on changing the UI; of things you can see. People constantly ask for MS to rewrite the core routines to be "more robust" Without realizing that that is kind of why they have an entire team of programmers devoted to the kernel. The thing is that MS has a very good reason to focus on the UI.
Let's Consider, for a moment, something people used to complain about incessantly; how none of the built-in applets have changed since windows 3.1 (with windows 7 this is different since they've all been completely revamped; Wordpad is more like a Word 2007 lite). What these people don't realize is that with the release of windows 2000, The Windows Calculator Applet's arithmetic engine was completely thrown away and rewritten from scratch. This was done after people kept writing ha-ha articles about how Calc couldn't do decimal arithmetic correctly, that for example computing 10.21 - 10.2 resulted in 0.0100000000000016.
Today, Calc's internal computations are done with infinite precision for basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) and 32 digits of precision for advanced operations (square root, transcendental operators).
Try it: 1 / 3 * 10000000000 - 3333333333 =. The result is one third exactly. Type 1/x - 3 = and you get zero back. (Of course, if you don't believe that, then repeat the sequence "* 10000000000 - 3333333333 =" until you're bored and notice that the answer always comes back as 0.33333333333333333333333333333333. If it were fixed-precision, then the 3's would eventually stop coming.)
Thirty-two positions of precision for inexact results not good enough? The Power Calculator PowerToy uses the same arithmetic engine as Calc and lets you crank the precision to an unimaginable 512 digits.
Anyway, my point is that - whether you like it or not - if you don't change the UI, nobody notices. That's why so much effort is spent on new UI.
Would you really buy a version of windows XP that looked exactly the same as always but that MS purported to have "completely rewritten from scratch"? Even though it did the exact same thing as the previous version? Would you buy it if it cost the same amount as Vista? Some people would, obviously, it's certainly good for those XP devotees. But; what if it could only run special "made for Special XP" programs, and was unable to run any older Programs? such is the catch-22; in order to <really> "optimize windows XP to death" they would need to strip out the entire application compatibility library and all the apphacks, (this should speed things up a lot!) remove the NTVDM while their at it, since that's just backward compatibility.
"But!" every says... "Vista is essentially that "special XP" you speak of! my <insert old windows 95 game here> no longer works!
ahh, but you see, in many cases that "windows 95" game only worked on windows 95 because MS literally devoted a team of programmers to figuring out why it <didn't> work. One such program was Doom; of course it wasn't actually a windows application, but Running DOOM under windows 95 was on their "priority" list. here's the thing though; ID software probably didn't care wether Doom ran on Windows 95. And really, I don't blame them. People have already paid them for the game; they'd released several patches, they figured the customer got way more then they paid for. Doom95 was essentially a port done by MS to work on windows 95. Now, Microsoft obviously wasn't concerned that the customers who bought doom were being treated unfairly by ID software; but rather that they can increase their chances of those people buying windows 95 if they can get Doom running on it; so one might proclaim it was purely in "self-interest". But, really; what self-respecting company is going to go to all that effort out of the goodness of their heart? Even Open Source programmers heartily avoid the big issues and go make yet another reversi clone for yet another desktop environment that emulates both windows and mac and yet manages to get the worst of both. (xfce being a notable exception).
I perform mot of my programming in Visual Basic 6.0; this was released by MS in 1998; over 10 years ago. Sure, I have visual studio 2008, but Microsoft completely broke with tradition and rewrote the entire language for .NET, so I cannot even open my VB6 projects in it.
Visual Basic 6, as far as Microsoft is concerned, is no longer supported.
The programs it creates are essentially designed for windows 98.To get things like XP and Vista themes, Aero glass, etc, just takes a bit of work and some reading of the documentation on the new OS features.
I imagine this sort of thing holds true with their other software packages as well, but probably to a far lesser degree; unlike the VB6 to .NET switch, you can still, for example, open your Excel 2000 files with excel 2008; and, I doubt any of the features of excel 2008 really warrant a switch anyway.
Basically, what I mean is, don't blame the vendor when people decide to upgrade for upgrades sake.
And- Service packs are a completely different concept altogether. you propose that they not release the OS at all and some how have these "hotfixes" implemented in the release version; well, unfortunately, that simply isn't the way it works. Microsoft Windows is not exactly a trivial source code management project and with any project of any non-trivial size there are going to be bugs. The only way those bugs can ever be found is by deploying the application. if, in practice, issues are encountered they are patched. And these patches are released nearly instantaneously through windows update. the interesting thing is, only about 10% of all windows update "security vulnerabilities" affect the average user; many of them are fairly specific and deal with server configurations or IIS. That, and they are offered free anyway, so you can't really complain. NT 3.51 had 6 different service packs before NT4 was released, IIRC; so obviously they have managed to reduce the number of SP's they release, if nothing else.
