5 posts tagged “microsoft”
I am surprised I didn't comment on Net Applications. About two months ago at the start of August, Net Applications announced that its previously reported usage share numbers were erroneous, but without going into further detail publicly. This came after they never published its June report, which would have normally been released at the start of July. I did talk about it elsewhere, but not here. After a couple of comments in various places, I forgot about it just as most others have. I didn't have reason to think about it again.
Not until Josh Marshall brought it back up.
In reporting the statistics for visitors to his website, Talking Points Memo, he repeated that dubious statistic: "about 10% of people [use] Macs". It's not his error, and the statistic is an aside to his actual point. But it shows how the internet can continue to spread questionable information, even after it has been corrected. Though in this case, the correction came eight months later. In fact, this misinformation was compounded by more misinformation for six additional months. Actually, the questionable methodology was driving reporting for years.
These reports could have driven the behavior of others. It might have induced more coverage of Macs in the regular tech press and even the general press. That might have encouraged more people to buy Macs. That might have caused Microsoft to panic and begin to hammer back with advertising. That might have even encouraged hackers and criminals to start to look for ways to attack OS X.
Now, rereading the piece written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt of CNNMoney/Fortune comes an allegation more troubling. According to Net Applications, the problems in its data come simply from sampling errors. It says that they have been undersampling international traffic, thus magnifying American trends, thus the general overreporting of usage of Apple products. Howver, in what is essentially a footnote to the piece not followed upon, a few people commenting at Geek.com allege that NetApplication adjusts the data for the benefit of its clients. This is a far more damning accusation. For rather than misakes being made, NetApplications is accused of essentially cooking the books. This is a question that needs to be looked into.
Gigaom highlights this theory for why Windows 7 is more popular than Windows Vista.
Whoever at Microsoft decided to open up the Windows 7 beta and release candidate testing program to anyone wishing to try out the new OS deserves kudos.
By opening up the testing program Microsoft has increased the number of testers and chances of finding edge case bugs. Successful open source projects highlight the benefits of a large set of users whose use uncovers bugs that formal testing did not or could not find. I know of several people who have used Windows 7 as their primary operating system for over 2 months. All six of them are quite impressed with the quality of release candidate and have preordered Windows 7. This shift from user to purchaser is also a mainstay of the open source business model. Although, one could argue that the Windows 7 model is more related to the shareware model than an open source business model. Fair enough. But I’d argue both models rely on adoption led marketing.
Except though, Windows Vista also had a public beta period where anybody could download the beta, and two release candidate versions. I know -- I downloaded, and had shipped to me the beta and the first RC version. All just as public. And all reports were that MS acted less on feedback on Seven than on Vista. Vista was plagued by a way too public viewing of its development process which saw many features jettisoned, a miscalculation of the direction of the PC industry (laptops started becoming the dominant computer during the time of development, ending the free gains in performance by ever increasing hardware specs), and essentially the consequences of breaking changes -- similar to problems that Apple suffered when Apple transitioned from "Classic" Mac OS to Mac OS X. (Remember, OS X 10.0 was so reviled, that Apple released 10.1 about six months later and for free. And most people would not consider OS X a stable platform until 10.3!)
MacDailyNews: "Apple legal forces Microsoft to stop falsely advertising MacBook Pro price."
Except, no they didn't. As of today, no advertisements were pulled. Just five minutes ago, Lisa and Jackson appeared during a break in Letterman. Never mind that the point of the ads still stand.
Though I guess we should thank Apple for the new Microsoft ad. And the continuation of the campaign until the end of time. . .
Had I known that free computers could be had, I would have actually done this blogging thing.
Though there seems to be an ethics debate over this. I wonder how critics or academy voters do this with those screener DVDs?
Thanks to a little prodding from Joel Spolsky, Moishe Lettvin tells us exactly who is to blame for the broken "power button" in Window Vista-- or, why I have to dig around through a labyrinth of switches and knobs1 in the Control Panel to get the power button to do what most of mankind has agreed that the power button should do: to turn something that is on off! I hope they got hundreds of bug reports for that idiotic design decision. I sent in my share.
Between this, and the nice steady stream of class action settlement letters I keep getting by virtue of the great hardware of the machines I purchase (come back tomorrow for that posting -- but as a preview, take a read at my earlier luck with computers), maybe I should risk it with another manufacturer.
But only if that Dodgeball kid is fired as their promotional spokesperson. He's just so smug, I'm almost inspired to write a If I Did It... book myself!
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1. I'm not kidding! It's a nine-step operation to make the off-button act right!
