Seinfeld Pitches Windows Vista: “No Mac For You!”
Jimmy likes Elaine Benes, but The VAR Guy no longer loves Seinfeld. The reason: Apparently, Jerry has signed on to pitch Microsoft's Windows Vista, reports The Wall Street Journal. Wasn't that a Macintosh sitting on the Seinfeld apartment set for a decade?
Jimmy likes Elaine Benes, but The VAR Guy no longer loves Seinfeld. The reason: Apparently, Jerry has signed on to pitch Microsoft’s Windows Vista, reports The Wall Street Journal. Wasn’t that a Macintosh sitting on the Seinfeld apartment set for a decade? Seinfeld should keep buying relatives Wizards and stay clear of PCs.
Windows Vista is awesome- by far Microsoft’s best OS ever. I can’t understand why the anti-MS sentiment. If your an open source fan boy, use open source- Microsoft is irrelevant (as Linus Torvalds would say. If your an Apple fan boy, then you have nothing to worry about, no one is taking away your Mac anytime soon.
As for me and my business, we’ll provide whatever is best for our client, whether it is Windows Vista, Mac OSX, Linux, BSD, or Solaris (or anything else you can imagine). And in some cases, it might just be Windows XP (Though XP is getting to be more and more irrelevant as more ISV’s catch up to where they should have been 2 years ago).
@James: The VAR Guy applauds you for providing “whatever is best for our client.” The VAR Guy mixes open and closed source in his daily life. And he thinks pretty highly of Microsoft’s server software strategy. But Microsoft lost its way on the desktop in recent years, otherwise they wouldn’t be spending millions for Seinfeld punch lines.
Microsoft needs to realize Vista is the punch line, and put a better desktop product out in market.
James, I doubt that the majority of serious open-source users are driven by “anti-MS sentiment”. When Microsoft decides to spend 300 million dollar on its biggest campaign ever it’s time to be awake though, because as any dominant company Microsoft isn’t very keen on letting any one “steal” their traditional customers, which in this case also would mean letting open-source get a bigger slice of the market. This isn’t about evil or good, it’s just the way things work on the market, an imperfect creation of humans.
It’s not a fan boy contest, to the contrary it’s bloody serious business on still unequal terms. The soft-ware market has been constantly injured for decades, so obviously it’ll take time before open-source advocates can relax and only compete with the quality of their products.
Actually a strong operating system by Microsoft has a positive effect on Linux and BSD. It raises the bar of expected quality. Interestingly it’s been noted in recent times that some Linux developers aren’t looking at Microsoft any more, but now sees OSX as the competitor. I think that’s a positive sign: don’t focus to much on market share, but rather on functionality and user experience and usability. Vista might be Microsoft’s best ever, but the competitors have moved on since the times of XP and hence “best ever” might not be good enough.
@Kim: The VAR Guy likes your style. You are right… it will be great for ALL folks — particularly customers — if Microsoft delivers a high-quality desktop. True competition drives innovation and customer value.
How appropriate! A worn out comic promoting for a worn out OS 😉
Explain to a school district that has thousands of PCs that they are going to have to replace every one of them if they’re thinking about going to Vista. Tell them they have to purchase loads more RAM, monster video cards and the fastest CPU available for every PC they want to replace with Vista. It’s simply not going to happen.
Vista may be great, if you can afford the hardware upgrade, but tell any cash-strapped organization that all their existing hardware is instantly obsolete and see how they like the idea of migrating to Vista. Anyone who installs Vista on underpowered hardware is going to have a bad experience. This simply puts a solid Vista experience out of reach of many organizations.
Forcing the use of IE7 is another show-stopper for many organizations. Until “mandated” applications can be certified by organizations with stringent security policies, they will also simply have to pass on the upgrade to Vista.
It sounds like waiting for “Windows 7” may be the way to go, seeing as how Microsoft has already started pushing its next generation OS even before Vista has had its first service pack. It’s been a long wait since XP, so maybe a little longer wait isn’t such a bad thing for something more in line with the early expectations set by Microsoft. Vista just kept getting watered down until it was a shadow of what it was once touted to include.
Vista has just been a bad idea on so many levels. It proves that Microsoft has become a marketing machine first and a software company somewhere after that. It helps to have the product promised behind the hype. All sizzle amp; no steak usually leaves people hungry for more…
@Geoff: You’ve mentioned The VAR Guy’s biggest complaint about Vista … Microsoft and the PC industry mislead everyone about Vista’s hardware requirements, and early users who purchased under-powered PCs with Vista received a terrible user experience.
Neither Microsoft nor Jerry will win back those disappointed users. Instead of trying to rebuild Vista’s brand, Microsoft should start from scratch with a new name, new brand and a product that actually delivers a good user experience on a low-end PC.
Microsoft? Out of touch? Never!
Odd move I’d say. I understand Microsoft has money, but… the joke isn’t going well with many.
@VAR Guy: I’m not sure I understand your response to my post. I think what you’re saying is that you’re agreeing with me, no? I thought Jerry was shilling Vista, not the _next_ version of Windows post-Vista. Where’s the new name, brand, or product? All I see with this Seinfeld gimmick is more of the same.
Vista has turned into a mis-represented product that has damaged the relationship between Microsoft and lots of long-time, supportive users. It has also kept many other users away altogether, hoping to avoid the “bleeding edge” of MS upgrades. Trying to take these users down yet another garden path is going to be a lot harder post-Vista.
Windows 7 (or whatever moniker they hang on it) had better be a revolutionary product or Microsoft will have a lot of problems getting people on board this next train.
“Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice… won’t get fooled again!” 😉
@Geoff: Sounds like you and The VAR Guy see eye to eye.
I’m going to sum up Vista in one word… ready?
SKYLAB (1973)
It too will end up crashing somewhere in the outback of Australia.
Oh and Seinfeld isn’t going to come and tell jokes when my users are upset they can’t get work done in Vista because it’s bloody broken. Which is precisely why I don’t use Exchange for our email!