Redmond runs everything!

MS is very much focussed on the US market; one of the many reasons it’s struggling now.

The world’s a lot more joined up these days and we (here in the UK), can see the 2nd rate consideration we are shown. This is not the best PR, for a company being attacked on all fronts by increasingly smart rivals.

So the EU will have to wait for Windows 7 EU Second Edition, and there was me desperately looking for an excuse to stall Windows 7 as I did with vista. Looks like 2010 will be another XP trouble free year (well almost).

Do you think it is any better for the rest of Europe? We generally have to pay higher prices than the UK for hardware and software (Microsoft isn’t the only culprit herE).

I recently bought an iPod in the UK, because it was around 20% cheaper than in Germany. Adobe software is around 30-40% more than the UK.

Microsoft are no better or worse than any of the others, but the UK is getting a much better deal from them than other, non-English speaking countries in Europe!

Is it just me, or is there anybody else who doesn’t actually give a flying f*ck about all this?

Pricing and editions of Windows 7 will no doubt be sorted by the time October comes around and all this will be yet just another storm in a tea cup. But I guess it keeps tech journalists employed writing column inches, so it can’t be all bad

Somehow I just KNEW that an Open Sauce Fanatic would find it ‘appropriate’ to comment on an exclusively Microsoft/Windows article. Sad, really…

Actually, “the open sourceror”’s comment is appropriate, and it is likewise relevant to mention mac OS, although anyone who can use it on their computer already knows about it. With FOSS, if no-one cares (which I wouldn’t expect) you can educate yourself and do the caring yourself, in ways you simply can’t using microsoft’s offerings. That said, internal documentation for linux (i.e. not on the internet) and driver support in some areas (particularly wifi, I’ve found) lag behind MS windows. So in some ways, you pays your money, and takes your choice.

@Jon

I think you’re missing the point. If you’re playing games and they work on your current version of Windows then you’ll probably not bother upgrading to the newer version of Windows. If you were running OS X you’d find that 9 out of the top 10 games are available for your platform despite the FUD suggesting they’re not. Linux may not have support from games, but then who cares? How many people play games professionally anyway? Very few to be honest.

The article talks about how Microsoft’s own customers are being snubbed by the company and perhaps those customers should look elsewhere for their next move, particularly if it’s productivity that is important to them. There is very little that most users do on a day-to-day basis that requires Windows-specific software which cannot easily be replaced by either OS X native versions from the same software houses or alternatives from the OSS world for Linux (or indeed for Windows or OS X).

Win7 was promising so much not long ago, but today is looking more and more like it will be another stillborn OS, due in no small part to things like dropping original plans for an entirely new OS from kernel up (in favour of simply rebranding/relaunching Vista) to these latest plans to cripple uptake in the EU/UK. Why won’t they just grow some balls, drop the ancient legacy support and build a modern OS for the 21st century? The other players in the market are leaving them in the dust, but the market really needs Microsoft, even if you hate them, to keep it moving forward and improving.

Why would anyone care so much about IE in a OS. This demonstrates the pointlessness of IT sometimes in relation to silly topics such as this one. Microsoft has already stated that upgrading is not a good idea but I am assuming that they mean from Vista although it might be possible from XP too and more likely. Do a clean build they have said. So that means backing up your data and then installing your new OS and applications (some of which cannot be guaranteed to work) and then your settings and configuration.

I means what makes anyone want to move to Windows 7 anyway. Wait until you need a new machine and it is pre loaded with Windows 7 at some future date. Stick to XP, everyone still is and its not as if no one will release a driver for its printers etc. It still gets patched, it still works well, can handle anything you throw at it and 3 GB RAM is more than enough for 80% of users. Only the gaming crowd and people with money to burn on 64 bit Windows 7 uber edition which has some features people might like such as a backup feature.

Its just the same old same old from Microsoft. I know that lots of people make a living from spouting the media nonsense but come on, this is just going around in circles.

Matt: “JohnAHind, what are you going to sue for?”

If, as PC Pro implied, they send me an upgrade version rather than full retail as advertised. As I said, I do not care if IE is included or not since I will be using Firefox and, as you point out IE is free anyway. But Microsoft promised us full retail versions for the price of upgrades, and just because they *could* now ship upgrades does not mean that it would be legal for them to break an existing contract to do so (as PC Pro implied they might).

All of this is an American thing not exclusively a Microsoft thing. Lovely people but their culture and education is totally parochial and insular – the same as Britain 100 years ago when it too had an empire.

@John WIlliams – you’re right. I once drove from Florida to South Carolina. After a few hours I stopped at a garage in Georgia just over the Florida / Georgia border. I was talking to the guy serving and he claimed to never have left Georgia and was very proud of it too. I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say that I think the Garage was 10 miles from the border.

Now you can go back to dissing Microsoft – sorry for off topic.

In response to Pete Best’s statement ‘Why would anyone bother upgrading to Windows 7 anyway?’, I would say that there are many good resons for doing so. I used to run an Acer Ferrari and an Advent 9315 on Xp and Vista respectively. Both machines are used heavily and are always multi-tasking. Xp crashed or crawled to a stop regulary, and Vista was a complete disaster requiring a complete rebuild every three months or so despite oodles of RAM.

For the past 5 months I have been beta testing Windows 7 Ultimate on both machines. Apart from improved speed and many built in improvement features, neither machine has ever crashed and throughput remains high despite being left on for weeks at a time. Networking works as it should and computing has once again become a joy.
I am totally sold on Windows 7 and have preordered the commercial release.

This is the first operating system from MS that I can really say does work without grief. It might be argued that MS ought really to have offered it for free to all those who went through the pain of Vista. But I have no doubt that even if this does not happen, Windows 7 is going to be a huge success. Thank you MIcrosoft, and well done. Oh, I am a European customer.

I have worked in high tech all my life and have had an awful lot to do with US suppliers. Basically, their market is so huge that filling a few orders from international customers is a pain as it also means setting up a small support department as well. In Europe it is common practice for most suppliers to run retail and trade price lists. Trade customers get the discount because they do the support. In the US the manufacturer only has a retail price because they do their own support. Most people in that company will claim to be unaware of any other pricing structure. ‘If you wanna buy then you pay the price’ and this goes for overseas trade customers and anybody else as well.

The result of all this is that UK suppliers have to purchase their stocks at US end user prices and the end user price does not include support for user variants and so on.

Cry as you might, the only way to solve this problem is to get off our collective butts and make and patent some competitive products. This seems unlikely as our wonderful government is quite happy to specify MS software for much of our education and government works. They even support MS when they endow some of our universities with super new buildings and bursaries. What a cheap way to get the UK’s best ideas away from these shores at the speed of an email. If the UK government is that daft then MS reasons the UK people must be daft enough to let MS screw them all possible ways and so that is exactly what they are doing.