Achal Kapoor – See the world through my eyes…..

I have received a mail  from Dell which I think is worth a look: 

Dear Dell Customer, As part of our ongoing commitment to customer satisfaction, Dell attempts to communicate conditions or changes to our offerings that might impact our customers. As you may know, some Dell desktops and notebooks are currently experiencing extended delivery lead times due to liquid-crystal display (LCD) supply constraints.  These shortages are currently being encountered industry-wide, and there are two primary causes for the situation:

* Industry demand for products such as flat panel monitors, LCD TVs, and notebooks is causing industry shortages on certain LCD panel sizes.

* Industry delays in new factory investments and declines in fabrication utilization rates reduced inventories further.

The combination of these two factors has resulted in an industry-wide shortage.  The shortage is currently impacting 17- and 19-inch standard LCD sizes most significantly, though it is possible that other panel sizes or resolutions may be impacted in the future.  Dell is diligently working with suppliers to improve supply and delivery lead times as quickly as possible.  It is our hope that these efforts will result in improved supply and shortened delivery lead times within the next 60 days.  Until this time, please contact your account team to investigate shorter-lead time product alternatives.Customer satisfaction has always been and continues to be Dell’s foremost concern, and we apologize for any inconvenience caused by this supply issue. 

Despite spending an estimated $6 billion developing Vista, the new Microsoft OS is causing massive pain to early adopters.

Cameras don’t work with it. Printers don’t work with it. Tuners don’t work with it. Only if you’re prepared to buy everything you plug into your laptop or desktop from scratch, should you be prepared to embark on the high-risk venture of investing in a Vista PC.

The only person, I’ve heard, with a kind word for the OS is Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics, who at the recent IEF2007 meeting, said in a panel discussion: “The killer app which comes with Vista is its ability to mix hard disc with flash. It gives instant boot. Systems may be out by the end of the year. Instant boot is worth a great deal. Otherwise there’s no motivation for corporations to move to Vista or for individuals.”

Fellow panellist, Rahul Sud, founder and CEO of Lattice Semiconductor, said: “You’re not obliged to use Vista. For me I’d stick with the previous version or, preferably, Linux.”

It seems that Vista does not have the same interfaces to peripheral hardware as XP had. Therefore new drivers need to be loaded for peripherals. Therefore a large chunk of peripherals manufacturers are not providing Vista drivers for products, hoping to force people to buy new products which do have the Vista drivers.

This smacks of sharp practice and it is remarkably stupid of Microsoft to have colluded in such a scam which is infuriating loads of people.

Compatibility, compatibility, compatibility are the three things on which IBM and Intel built their businesses. Once you rile your customers from the previous generation by making a new generation product which is incompatible, you rightly risk losing those customers.

Some people are saying, wait until 2009 before thinking about investing in a Vista computer.

By Achal Kapoor

The whole world is waiting with expectancy for the arrival of Windows Vista and its promised delights. And, in the meantime, techies speculate and debate on what to expect, what the hurdles will be, and more.

Microsoft has been promoting Windows Vista as having features that provide a unique experience. The system is aimed to be user friendly and dynamic. Microsoft has worked on Vista at two levels; they have updated existing windows features and introduced new features. Among the many features of Windows Vista are the following gleaned from published documentation, blogs, and releases by Microsoft.

1. The interface is said to be state of art and has been called Aero, authentic, energetic, reflective, and open. User friendly, the interface is touted to be cleaner, streamlined, and aesthetic.

2. The windows shell for Vista is expected to reach for new standards in operating systems. The organization, navigation, and search capabilities are all user friendly and fast. The tool bar and one click access are devised to speed up operations.

3. Instant search is expected to revolutionize the system. Search boxes are integral to many applications.

4. Desk top gadgets positioned on the right hand side of the screen will enable users to view sports scores, weather, and other interesting things while continuing to work on the main screen.

5. The Media Player is expected to have great new features like graphic interface, photo display, systematic organization, and compatibility with Xbox360 and other media players.

6. The internet explorer, aimed to be genx, is expected to have a new user interface, tabled browsing, search box, easy printing, tabs, zoom, and other on tab functions. The system hopes to have advanced security protection and improved web standards support.

7. State of art back up and restore functions will enable users to schedule back ups of files. The system is designed such that back ups are incremental and only new material is backed up saving space as well as making the system easy to use. The “complete PC backup” will create an image on the entire system onto the hard disk or a DVD. In case there is a break down the “complete pc backup” will recreate the entire system.

8. Outlook express has a new avatar, Windows Mail. And, according to those in the know the system is reliable and can actually filter junk mail.

9. Updates of software and security systems in the new system will be through a control panel. There will be no need for any web applications.

10. In Windows Vista parents can have greater say in what the children can use and access. This system is designed to protect kids from exposure to violence and porn.

11. Windows vista has features that will enable computer access through handhelds and mobiles even if the computer if off.

12. Vista has multiple language speech recognition which will allow dictation and activation of commands.

13. Gaming with Vista has raised expectations of avid gamers. New graphics, better display features, and ease of use means faster gaming and more thrills.”

14. The photo gallery in vista has great new applications. It will function as a photo and movie library and be compatible with all kinds of devices. In windows vista this will tag and rate photos, make adjustments in color and exposure, create effects and burn slideshows to DVDs.

15. The Vista DVD maker will create DVDs from existing content.

16. The system permits sharing of files and applications. Vista’s Windows Meeting space promoted P2P applications.

17. Vista is designed to think. Super Fetch a memory management strategy studies user usage and retains pages in accordance to popularity. High priority content is retained in memory by detection of troublesome memory usage patterns.

18. Windows Vista is expected to have a ready boost, a flash device that extends disk caching capabilities. This will enable use of USB 2.0 flash drives, SD cards, or compact flash cards. This innovation is expected to lend a performance level that is 8-10 times higher than at present.

19. A touch screen is expected to be a part of Vista.

20. Disk partitions in Vista are designed to prevent data loss.

21. The task manager as well as task scheduler in Vista is being revamped to provide better computing.

22. Extensive focus is on security which has been a problem with Microsoft operating systems. In Vista the aim is to provide security at all levels of operation and the system includes an advance security firewall, a defender, as well as a phishing filter among other security measures. The innovations are all set to give a new definition to windows security.

23. Vista’s premier interface, Windows Aero will lend 3D graphics, great animation, visual effects, and translucence to videos, games, and other applications that have graphics.

24. The Vista developer technologies are many and are expected to include .Net framework version 3.0, a new user interface system among others.

25. Vista based on a new interface will support many features like WIM image format, group policy settings, and network file systems, that will ease the working of businesses

While techies and others are waiting to see how Vista functions, in actuality there are several concerns surfacing regarding costs, user account control, hardware requirements, digital rights management, security, and the similarities to the Mac OS X.

Microsoft will continue to prioritize security and ease of use in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 and will seek to improve Web development with current standards compatibility, according to the company.

At Microsoft’s Mix ‘07 conference in Las Vegas this week, IE platform architect Chris Wilson recapped Microsoft’s development priorities in the making of Internet Explorer (IE) 7 and outlined some of its goals for the next version of its browser.

Wilson said Microsoft intends to create a follow-on version, IE 8, within two years of IE 7’s release, which came out in October.

The priorities Microsoft set for IE 7, Wilson said, are the same for IE 8: strong security, ease of use and Web development improvements.

“It’s clear we have a lot to do with the Web developer platform,” he said addressing an audience of mostly Web developers at Mix.

Specifically, he said Microsoft will invest more in layout and adhering to the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.1 specifications. He also said Microsoft wants to make its browser object model more interoperable “to make it easier to work with other browsers and allow more flexible programming patterns.”

In addition, he said the Ajax Web programming style needs more client-side application programming interfaces to allow developers to create more powerful applications.

“There’s work in the standardization bodies to do local storage and get better security models,” Wilson said, adding that Microsoft is working with the W3C on standardizing HTML version 5 and XHTML version 1 and 1.1.

He said adherence to standards is increasingly important to Web site developers but Microsoft is in a “challenging” position as it introduces more standards compliance.

Because previous versions of Internet Explorer strayed from standards, new versions of Internet Explorer, such as IE 7, have caused some Web sites to not work for end users, he said.

“Web development compatibility is really crucial for building applications and…for us to deploy browsers (but) it has to be an evolutionary step,” he said, noting that half a billion people use some version of Internet Explorer. “If we say, ‘Here is your new browser–it’s standards compatible,’ we actually disrupt the existing ecosystem and it doesn’t actually make it better for anyone.”

By Achal Kapoor

Microsoft has to do more if it wants to boost Windows Vista sales in Asia’s emerging markets as affordability is still an issue, an analyst says.

According to a statement Thursday on Microsoft’s first-quarter earnings for fiscal 2007, Allan Krans, an analyst at research house Technology Business Research (TBR), noted that while enhancements included in Vista offer security and functionality improvements, the operating system also requires a heavier hardware configuration compared with Windows XP.

Although the costs of a dual-core processor, added memory, and graphics processors may not be prohibitive for users in the Americas or Europe, any additional cost on a PC can have a substantial impact in emerging geographies like China, Krans said.

“As a result, TBR believes many Chinese consumers may have chosen either pirated versions of Vista that sell for as little as US$1, or free versions of Linux that are offered free of charge,” the analyst added. “Although Vista contains enhanced antipiracy technology, press reports indicate that illegal copies of Vista were readily available in China, and piracy remains quite prevalent in the country.”

Recently, a Japanese press report indicated that Microsoft had only sold 244 legitimate copies of Windows Vista in China in the first two weeks following its release–a claim that Microsoft has denied, according to a CNET News.com blog post.

When contacted by ZDNet Asia, a Microsoft spokesperson declined to reveal Vista shipment figures in the Asia-Pacific region.

TBR’s Krans noted that Microsoft did take action to improve sales in the emerging geographies during the first quarter. For example, the software giant announced a joint development agreement with Lenovo aimed specifically at the Asia-Pacific region, as well as a software bundle that includes a US$3 base-level OS and productivity software suite aimed at governments and educational institutions in select developing geographies.

Called the Microsoft Student Innovation Suite, the software bundle includes Windows XP Starter Edition, Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, Microsoft Math 3.0, Learning Essentials 2.0 for Microsoft Office, and Windows Live Mail desktop.

Krans said: “While this initiative may well expand the company’s installed base in China and other critical economies, Microsoft will not generate significant revenue or profitability by selling a low-end US$3 software bundle.”

“TBR believes Microsoft is still facing the challenge of establishing a business model to harness the growth in Asia-Pacific PC sales, and funneling that growth through to the company’s bottom line,” the analyst added.

Microsoft’s Student Innovation Suite is part of the company’s Unlimited Potential program, which aims to help close the digital divide by creating new products and programs that will help bring social and economic opportunity to the estimated five billion people who are not yet realizing the benefits of technology.

Under the Unlimited Potential program, Microsoft said it will establish an employability portal in India by the end of 2007. The portal will aid the country’s nearly 400,000 engineering students, who graduate each year, to improve their technology, business and communication skills through online training and verification.

The software giant also recently announced an alliance with the Asian Development Bank to enhance the competitiveness and sustainable economic development of the Asia-Pacific region by supporting and building technological and innovation capacity; promoting the development of applied research and entrepreneurship; and improving the efficiency, transparency and accountability of public administration at the national and local levels.

By Achal Kapoor

Is Microsoft’s new Vista operating system the troubled successor to Windows XP that many people seem to believe it is? Probably not, though after running my Expand All Folders Stress Test, I have my own complaint.

Vista was released in January, after years of delay; “The Wow Starts Now” proclaimed Microsoft’s ads. Upon introduction, Vista got its share of favorable reviews, but there has since been a lot of griping. A reviewer for one big tech Web site ran Vista for a month and pronounced it not ready for the market, although he was immediately flamed by readers as a “Linux fanboy.” A common theme on other tech sites is that too many programs from XP aren’t properly working yet on Vista.

Hence the I-told-you-so comments last week, when Dell announced it would be allowing all its customers to request Windows XP instead of Vista. Some analysts said it was yet more evidence of Vista not catching on, though Dell said it did the same thing during the 2001-2002 transition from Windows 2000 to XP.

Microsoft says there are actually fewer transition issues with Vista than there were at this point with XP. But it admits there is a perception that the opposite is the case. One reason, it says, is that there are so many outlets — blogs and the like — for people who have had a problem with Vista to vent their frustrations, even if that problem isn’t representative of what the average user experiences.

It’s true that Microsoft is blasted for things for which, say, Apple gets a free pass. MacInTouch, a Web site for Apple buffs, has a page listing dozens of compatibility issues with the Mac Tiger operating-system upgrade from 2005. None of those hiccups kept anyone on the site from showering flower petals on Tiger; the same list about Windows would have lead for calls for Bill Gates’s head.

Having said all that, permit me my own bit of venting after spending some time with Vista.

My complaint, like many involving computers, involves something not many others would care about: the apparent inability of Windows to handle very large folders, like those containing thousands of subfolders with tens of thousands of files and hundreds of gigabytes of information.

There is a shortcut in Windows Explorer that lets you expand all subfolders within a folder with a single keystroke, meaning you can then scroll up and down and see everything in the main folder, even items hidden in a sub-sub-sub directory. (This is my preferred way to tend to my music collection.)

The trick works fine for folders of modest size. But on big ones, Windows XP simply chokes. The screen freezes up, the disk drive spins endlessly, Windows Task Manager says the application is “Not Responding.”

This has been the source of considerable personal annoyance over the years, so much so that checking to see if Microsoft had fixed the problem with Vista was the first thing I did.

At first, Vista looked promising. On my command, Windows Explorer started expanding folders. But while the process started fast, it gradually slowed. By the time it got to the Zs — or 3,597 folders later — six minutes had gone by.

At that point, I could scroll up and down in my expanded list of folders, but slowly. The hourglass cursor wouldn’t go away, and I could hear the disk drive spinning, meaning Vista was still on the case. It would take another 10 minutes for both to stop.

Being the curious sort, I wondered what my experience would be like on a Macintosh. With my home network, I copied the big folder over to a borrowed Apple and used the comparable “Expand All” feature in the Mac Finder. This is when the wow really started: All 3,600 subfolders popped open in 30 seconds.

Both the PC and Mac were recent models with powerful CPUs and plenty of memory. But maybe the Apple just had a faster disk drive. So I used the network to “mount” the PC disk drive on the Mac, without actually copying the folder, and tried the procedure again.

This time, the Mac was dealing with data physically stored on the PC, and it was needing to first go through Windows to get access to them. Even then, it did its folder expansion trick in a little over a minute and a half. So, in working with files and folders, one of a computer’s most basic tasks, the Mac could do in 30 seconds what took Vista at least six minutes for, and which XP couldn’t do at all.

Once you start looking for these Windows vs. Mac speed differences, it’s easy to find other examples. For instance, I could shut down and then restart the Mac in the time it took either version of Windows just to switch off.

After I described my experience to them, Microsoft said I would have had better luck viewing my files in its Media Player software. As for why its file system simply wasn’t more robust in the first place, it said it put its development resources in areas that affect the most people.

Despite all this, I remain a not terribly unhappy Vista upgrade user. A combination of entropy and familiarity keeps me from bolting. I also have a belief that I’d be sure to find something with the Mac to complain about as well.

Vista will slowly get better and go on to dominate computing, just like its predecessors. That’s one eternal verity. Mac owners feeling aggrieved about same is another.

Email me at kapoorachal@gmail.com