linuxjournal.com — I've been tracking the evolution of Microsoft FUD for nearly 10 years now. But even I was impressed when I came across Microsoft's latest effort in this department: it's truly a masterpiece of its kind. It's a white paper from IDC, "sponsored" by Microsoft, on "The Economic Impact of Microsoft Windows Vista".
Sep 19, 2006 View in Crawl 4
estvirSep 20, 2006
Symantec's reports ? People actually believe that FUD (Yes, this is real FUD unlike this article).Most of those reports were debunked and deemed to be Symantec just scaring people about Vista to try and keep their company alive.
krinthekuzSep 20, 2006
remember though, that each OS has zealots/fanboys/payrollers which are a gross minority but are the source of the vast majority of all FUD. the majority of people (of all OSes) are just users who are pretty disinterested. so please don't label all of us linux users as zealots.
finiteSep 20, 2006
High-quality software is bad for the economy, boycott open source !But, seriously, creating 100,000 new jobs does kinda imply that this has got to be the buggiest operating system in history, doesn't it? Or what else could that even mean?
gmorganSep 20, 2006
The OS is as it is for a reason. When users don't take the time or effort to learn it is indeed their fault. Saying Linux has no advantages over Windows is like saying a manual gearbox gives no advantage over automatics. Automatics are inefficient, unresponsive and don't give you anywhere near the top possible speed out of the car but damn are they easy to drive.
gmorganSep 20, 2006
WinFS is built on top of NTFS. It is simply a relational database with entries for every file on the system. So there will be no need to reformat the drive, it will just be the case of installing a SQL service into the OS and indexing the entire HDD which may take longer than a reformat but is not dangerous in anyway.
gmorganSep 20, 2006
By this sort of thinking if Vista at €200 is worth €40B to the economy then Vista at €300 will be worth €60B to the economy.
svpirateSep 20, 2006
Not true. Biased reporting of favourable facts about your product compared to unfavourable facts about others can be defined as FUD, and as such the information is true but is manipulated to spread FUD about other products against which you are competing. Take this hypothetical example:You make UberBleach. Your competitor makes HyperBleach. UberBleach smells less pleasent than the pleasent pine smell of HyperBleach and riquires the user to wear gloves, which HyperBleach doesn't. However, UberBleach is laboratory tested and proven to kill 20% more germs than HyperBleach. A FUD laden advert would simply state:"UberBleach - kills 20% more germs than our leading competitor."Thus you have created FUD about HyperBleach becuase Hygine is something a lot of people are sensetive about, ergo you picked the best selling point and ONLY mentioned that. People now want UberBleach becuase HyperBleach does't work as well. You fail to mention, however, your new product is nasty to use, and the competitors is more friendly... (I'm not drawing any parallels with OSs there - honest!)Microsoft in particular has been guilty of this kind of bending the truth in their FUD for many years. A lot of their case studies against OSS have used facts and figures that have been pretty fairly drawn up, but they gloss over the stuff that they don't like about their stuff or the stuff they think other people will prefer in the OSS stuff. I can't produce proofs or examples, but I am sure anyone who has read the articles about Cost of Ownership etc. comparing Linux to Windows 2003 Server (which I looked over 2 years back) will tell you that they kinda failed to mention a few thingsthat I felt were important.FUD can be true, just be awware that it is also HEAVILY biased.
justathoughtSep 20, 2006
Yes indeed. The link was generously provided in the comments:<a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window</a>
uownedgeSep 20, 2006
I don't like it when I see Microsoft pushing "fuzzy" information, or pushing their products in a negative way, but I do like to see that they have some interest in advertising still. Remember when Windows 95 came out? (A lot of you probably don't, actually, but I know some of you do). There were commercials on TV for it. While they weren't the best commercials ever, they utilized a catchy tune, and advertised without any kind of mud slinging or false advertising. It was good, straight up stuff. "Here's our new stuff! Check it out! It's cool!". And back then, it was cool. It was very cool.Now, as far as the Apple commercials go, I don't really agree that it's the best way of advertising, but in a sense, it's not nearly that bad either. They are pushing the benefits of their product, while poking fun at their competitor. They've done in a way that is not completely subtle, but they don't come out screaming "WINDOWS SUX LOL!" either. Microsoft, who is already on top, needs to push more towards "Here are the improvements" type marketing, and less on the "Our product is the best, and the only way", etc. So many Windows users and admins are so furstrated and fed up with Windows. They need to see the positive, and maybe something new in terms of marketing. It's great that they want to push their OS, and they should, but they need to be very careful in the way they choose to do so...and sometimes, when you're on top, you just can't win.
jacks0nSep 23, 2006
they don't realise they are. as sad as it is, from talking to most of my friends, they think windows are part of computers. as if you don't have choice. becides, I've found in terms of buying a pre-built PC, it's cheaper to buy a dell and wack something else on it. Even with the price for windows included.