Quote of the week

Quote of the week

Yep - whichever way this is looked at, it's a total mess... and to be honest, I would question whether such a disastrous slowdown can actually be fixed at all without fundamentally rebuilding the whole thing.

Which has been done once already.

Of course, the solution which would be adopted in the Free Software world would be a "oh bugger, don't use the latest one whilst we fix it, the last one works just fine", but in MS-world, the last one was Windows XP, and they've very publicly made it clear that they no longer consider it worthwhile - to take all of that back would mortally wound Vista, compromise the future of the Windows platform as a whole, pretty much freeze their sales, and kill the company. So they have no choice but to continue pushing a lemon and hope that nobody notices behind all the shiny...

But as this demonstrates, people *do* notice. Shiny is good for selling stuff, but it doesn't keep people using that stuff - for that you have to provide substance; and Microsoft, by all accounts, have completely (and to be honest, unprecedentedly; sure, they've screwed up before, and nobody likes their business practices much, but this is the first time they've bet the company on a three-legged mare) dropped the ball on that. Lesser mistakes have finished greater companies.

Couldn't have come at a worse time, either. WINE is getting *really* good these days, to the point where you don't need Windows to run Office; kqemu provides virtualisation for free, for anyone, at a respectable speed; the Mac has moved (nigh seamlessly) to x86, and Parallels demonstrates the far-sightedness of that move; Ubuntu is winning lots of friends, including a company we never expected to see...