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June 30, 2009

Windows 7, Snow Leopard, and revisionist history

Microsoft zealots ignore their platform's past in an effort to bash Apple and Mac OS X

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Last week, Microsoft revealed that Windows 7 would be priced similarly to Windows Vista. There were some discounts to be had -- a kind of "Crazy Eddy" pre-order sale for upgrade licenses -- but by and large the retail cost remained the same.

This, of course, resulted in criticism within the blogosphere. Some claimed that Microsoft didn't go far enough with its discounting -- that the company should essentially give the product away for free to Vista users (which is not going to happen) or at least be more aggressive with its stated retail pricing, which ranges from $130 to $200 depending on the Windows 7 version.

Many of these critics were Mac enthusiasts referencing Mac OS X Snow Leopard's more palatable-sounding upgrade price of $29. And they were quickly countered by the Microsoft apologists who noted how Windows 7 will at least run on some older systems, whereas Mac users with pre-Intel hardware are left out in the cold with regard to Apple's latest Mac OS X release.

[ Find out what Mac OS X Snow Leopard brings to business in InfoWorld's in-depth analysis. ]

It's this latter argument that caught my eye as being somewhat disingenuous. While it's true that Windows 7 will run on older hardware, the reason it can has more to do with the stability of the Intel (x86) platform than any altruistic impulses on Microsoft's part.

Simply put, Microsoft has never faced the kind of fundamental architectural shift that Apple was forced to navigate when it abandoned the fading PowerPC platform nearly four years ago. In fact, the closest thing to Apple's Intel migration within the Microsoft realm would be Windows NT's long-forgotten support for the MIPS R4xxx and DEC Alpha platforms. And even there, Microsoft ultimately abandoned those dead-end platforms in favor of more tightly focusing on the volume Intel architecture.

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Phansigar 30-Jun-09 4:08am
1 reply
Never attribute to evil intent what can be more simply explained by stupidity. (variously attributed) "For Windows proponents to now criticize Apple's decision to cut the cord to a dead-end CPU architecture seems a bit hypocritical." In this case, much more likely it's simple ignorance of the history of Microsoft's OSes and their supported platforms. People tend to leave history to writers, and frequently need to be reminded of it. That's not hypocritical, just human.
Randall C. Kennedy 30-Jun-09 6:44am
Yeah, but in this case the proponent in question is a veteran blogger and author of numerous books and articles on the subject. Frankly, he knows better.
DaveLindhout 30-Jun-09 8:44am
It seems to me that the softies are really ratcheting up the discussion. I don't see it as evil or stupidity as much as I see it as an act of desperation. Windows has not been this vulnerable, nor faced this much competition, in recent memory. It's like Linux is nipping away at the low end, and OS X is nipping away at the high end. And the global economy has had an overall shrinking effect that has affected everybody.

Apple and Microsoft have put a phenomenal amount of effort into their respective operating systems. Calling them service packs cheapens the quality and value of these products, which I suppose is the desired intent. Every feature is being scrutinized, every move is being criticized. This fall, both of these products will be released to the general public.

That will be the real test. The court of public opinion. I'm amazed by the percentage of the public that has little or no idea what is going on. For all the praise and vitriol we spew, it doesn't really matter. Most people are not yet involved. Come fall, we will start to see what they think. I can't wait.

EastCoatsHECIO 30-Jun-09 10:49am
Anyone remember "Vista Ready" or even "VISTA Capable?" Don't seem to ever remember a "Leopard Capable" advertisement.
bobbymyles 30-Jun-09 10:51am
1 reply
You fail to mention that the $29 updgrade price for 10.6 only applies to Apples purchased after Oct, 2007 I believe is the date, whether or not the machine is Intel or PowerPC. Otherwise the price is significantly higher.
DaveLindhout 30-Jun-09 11:13am
1 reply
Just to set the record straight, bobby... No Snow Leopard (10.6) support for PPC. $29 applies to all Leopard (10.5) users, regardless of when machine was purchased. Tiger users (10.4) can get Snow Leopard, iWorks and iLife for $169. I have not seen a Snow Leopard only price, but Leopard was $129.
bobbymyles 30-Jun-09 6:05pm
1 reply
I suggest you read this article in zdnet regarding SL's upgrade pricing: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1114
DaveLindhout 1-Jul-09 3:31am
You and Ed are drinking from the same Kool-Aid trough. zdnet's own Adrian Kingsley-Hughes refuted Ed's piece here:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=4800

My number are correct.

Wowdi 30-Jun-09 11:42am
3 replies
Microsoft has gone to great lengths to maintain application compatibility. Apple on the other hand went from the Motorola 68xxx processors to the PowerPC processors to the Intel processors and left users behind with unusable applications each time. As an example, I used Microsoft Word 5.0 on DOS in graduate school in the late 1980's. I was recently able to install and run Word 5.0 on Windows XP in order to retrieve and print my old papers from 3.5in floppy disk. Apple can't even touch that kind of compatibility.
SteveS 30-Jun-09 12:03pm
@Wowdi - Your comments would be more meaningful if you actually knew what you were talking about. For example, 680x0 to PPC, Apple provided a seamless emulator. In fact, parts of the OS were still written in 680x0 assembly. When Apple moved from OS 9 to OS X, it provided the "classic" environment. Again, another solution that allowed legacy applications to run seamlessly in the new OS. When Apple moved from PPC to Intel, it provided it's Rosetta emulator which again allowed seamless execution of PPC code on Intel based Macs. How is that leaving "users behind with unusable applications"? For that matter, when has Microsoft demonstrated the ability to make such huge architectural changes and pull the transition off seamlessly as Apple has? When Microsoft has accomplished this, then you can talk about Microsoft's efforts at backward compatibility. Microsoft's definition of backward compatibility is to just keep leaving the old cruft in your OS for as long as you have to. Apple's strategy has been more effective at moving the platform forward in a regular and consistent manner.
Ty Leav 30-Jun-09 12:04pm
1 reply
This may be a good illustration of hardware compatibility, but a poor illustration of software compatibility. Compatibility would be demonstrated by opening the Word 5.0 document in the latest version of Word. But as long as we're installing software, on the mac you could load MS Word 5.0 for DOS under Parallels. Or load MS Word 5.0 for System 7 under Sheep Shaver. (I would venture that the latest version of Pages could also open your original file, but I'll confirm this first before commenting.) Incompatibility at the document level is part of the MS business model.
Ty Leav 30-Jun-09 12:08pm
... so as not to create a compatibility issue, my comment was directed towards Wowdi (incompatible), and not SteveS (compatible)...
DaveLindhout 30-Jun-09 2:25pm
@Wowdi

Steve corrected your thoughts on the Apple migration strategy. Let me add that I had first hand experience with both the classic environment and Rosetta, and it was truly painless and worked on 100% of the equipment. Microsoft is providing similar migration options with XP Mode. Time will tell how successful that will be.

Ty explained why Microsoft has actually done you a disservice by not providing backward compatibility in Word. This would have been an easy feature to keep in all of the Office products. Microsoft didn't need to provide the ability to write in the old formats, just the ability to read them. Your life would have been much easier.

Wretched 30-Jun-09 11:46am
Yes, yes, everything Microsoft is Evil, we get it. So naturally when "Apple people" criticise Microsoft they are "enthusiasts" but when "Microsoft ppl" criticise Macs they are "apologists". How boring and predictable. A *real journalist could probably write about this without the insulting characterizations.
tcapun 30-Jun-09 12:02pm
Hey! I read that Microsoft will be releasing Security Essentials out of Beta in time for Windows 7's release.

Unless I miss my guess, that means that 28 years after MS DOS 1.0 hit the streets, Microsoft will finally have a WORKING O/S with a Malware Free operational standard.

I say Hot Frikkin' Damn, bring it on.

Goodbye to Symantec, Checkpoint, McAfee, Postini and all those other parasitic bozos.

I'm with you Bill. I've waited 28 years for you to show me the bright lights.
Mike in Seattle 30-Jun-09 12:15pm
1 reply
Revisionist history is pretending that the criticism of Apple for dropping PPC support is about anything other than the speed at which it was done. Yes, lots of products get dropped (After all, Infoworld did seem horrified when Microsoft stopped selling Windows XP after only 7 years). That's not the point. The point is... LESS THAN THREE YEARS AGO the only professional level Macintosh solution was the VERY expensive top of the line PowerMac which Apple sold through August 2006. Three years from "This is the state of the art and what professionals should buy" to "Of course they should drop support for that ancient, obsolete technology" So, which is it? Keep producing softare upgrades for 7 years after you discontinue a product (which wasn't good enough when Microsoft did it) or orphan a product 3 years after you replace it (which is apparently absolutly fine when Apple does it) Now, as for disingenuous, I believe that's best expressed by people claiming the $29 upgrade price is "the upgrade price" rather than "a limited price for a few customers". After all, it only applies to those relatively few people who bought a Macintosh that shipped with Leopard. For people who bought an Intel Mac with Tiger they've either already paid $129 toward their upgrade by buying the Leopard upgrade or they'll have to pay $180 for the "Mac Box Set" kit to get the upgrade. (or pay both the $129 PLUS the $29 to upgrade from 10.4 to 10.6) And, as covered above, anyone who bought a PowerPC Mac even less than three years ago is just toast and, apparently, should be too embarassed by having unfashionably old hardware to complain.
SteveS 30-Jun-09 1:05pm
1 reply
@Mike in Seattle, I think you're missing the point. The issue isn't that Apple is moving on quickly. The issue is that Apple is being criticized by the media for doing so, yet Microsoft has never even made an architectural transition like this. As such, until Microsoft has been through a similar transition, it's unfair to claim would or even could handle it better. When you haven't changed much over the years, making claims of backwards compatibility isn't such a bold claim.

As for the price of the Snow Leopard upgrade, the $29 price applies to all current Leopard users, in addition to those who purchased their computers that shipped with Leopard. Are XP users who purchased Vista getting a better deal with Seven? No? Then, what's your point? No matter how you slice it, Mac uses are getting a much better deal.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/06/windows-7-pricing-announce...
Mike in Seattle 30-Jun-09 1:40pm
2 replies
SteveS Wrong. The difference is that when Microsoft did it, they did it so transparently that nobody noticed. Win16 apps ran smoothly in Win32. Win32 ran smoothly in the 64-bit world. And, more parallel, the transition from real mode command line to cooperative 16-bit Windows to preemptive 32-bit Windows happened WITHOUT orphaning users. And certainly NO users ever got their platform thrown out after less than 3 years.
As for pricing: Mac OS X 10.4 (Intel) to Mac OS X 10.6 ($129+29) $158 or even more with Mac Box Set
Mac OS X 10.5 (Intel) to Mac OS X 10.6 $29
Windows XP to Windows 7 $50 (or 100 for an Active Directory domain supported corporate version)
Windows 2000 to Windows 7 $50 (or 100 for an Active Directory domain supported corporate version)
Windows Vista to Windows 7 $50 (or 100 for an Active Directory domain supported corporate version)
Now, 10.5 to 10.6 is cheap IF your Macintosh shipped with Mac OS X 10.5 and you hadn't already paid to upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5. If not, the jump to 10.6 cost you $158 overall since Apple doesn't do an upgrade price for anything but the very last version getting the point release. And, again, Mac OS X 10.0 to 10.3 CAN'T upgrade to Mac OS X 10.6. Period. They were PowerPC only (back when Intel was "evil")
DaveLindhout 30-Jun-09 2:45pm
Perception is everything Mike. Even with Windows 7, Microsoft is forcing you to make a decision between 32-bit and 64-bit. Apple has maintain 32-bit and 64-bit code within a common OS, and now Snow Leopard is bringing the kernel and drivers to 64-bit. OS X is now fully 64-bit and will allow 32-bit applications to run.

Your pricing arguments will go by the wayside as soon as special pricing expires, which will be 3 months before Windows 7 is actually released. At that point Windows 7 upgrade prices will range between $120 and $220. Full price will range from $200 to $320. Pricing will tilt in Apple's favor at that point. Stock up now, but your limited to 25.

Swordmaker 30-Jun-09 11:56pm
Mike, Your comments about the upgrade costs for OS X.6 Snow Leopard are twaddle. Your exercise in Microsoft talking points about a "complicated, unfair, upgrade pricing", designed to raise resentment in early intel Mac purchasers, is simply not valid.

I did not buy my five license family pack of Leopard ($189) on the day it was released because it was a stepping stone for the upgrade to Snow Leopard. I bought it to use. I think all of the others who purchase upgrades bought it to use as well. Your incorporating the cost of Leopard upgrades cost into the cost of Snow Leopard is FUD.

I use Leopard on my six year old PowerMac Tower G5 (which shipped with OS X.2.7 Jaguar and OS 9.2), my three year old Macbook Pro (which shipped with OS X.4.8 Tiger), my oldest daughter's four year old 20" G5 iMac, my youngest daughter's nine year old Dual 500 G4 PowerMac (shipped with MacOS 9.0.4), and my new 24" Intel iMac. Notice that there was no impediment to upgrading although it took some circumlocutions to get Leopard onto the dual 500.

By the time I upgrade to a $49 five license family pack of OS X.6 Snow Leopard, I will have gotten 23 months of superb performance and productivity from my purchase of OS X.5 Leopard. I consider it completely amortized, having gotten full value for my investment. Therefore it cannot be considered in the cost of the upgrade to Snow Leopard.

I will also point out that those who bought G5 towers three years ago have NOT been thrown under the bus. Apple is working on OS X.5 upgrades and improvements at the same time as they are finishing the release candidate of Snow Leopard. They are still releasing updates to OS X.4 even though OS X.5 has been out for 21 months. They will support the G5s for some time yet.

mlewis 30-Jun-09 12:16pm
"...is being played out on a larger stage, in front of an industry press hungry for story ideas." Who's hungry for a story idea? This is stretched so far is's transparent. To be honest, it cuts both ways: The bottom line: Nothing fuels the Mac zealot fires like a good Windows-bashing angle. I work with them all and in someway or another, they all are great and suck at the same time.
jayweiss 30-Jun-09 12:29pm
Hold on there Wowdi... Apple has done everything it could to provide an upgrade path for its users every time it has migrated either hardware or OS. Apple has changed architecture THREE time in it's history. Migrating from 68xxx to PowerPC, from PowerPC to Intel, and from "Mac OS" to "Mac OS X". In ALL cases Apple provided compatibility for the old architectures (hardware or OS). When Apple moved from 68xxx to PowerPC they provided a 68xxx emulator to allow 68xxx program to continue to run on the new PowerPC hardware. This support existed until the migration to Mac OS X over a decade later. The same thing happened with the migration from PowerPC to Intel processors. Apple provided the Rosetta cross-compiler which allowed PowerPC applications to run on Intel machines. Rosetta is still there under Snow Leopard. Apple even allowed Mac OS X users to continue to use the older "Mac OS" operating system and applications under the "Classic" environment on PowerPC machines. I can even run an original 68xxx Mac OS on an Intel processor using a third-party emulator. Yes, you can run a very old version of Word on Windows XP. That is because the underlying architecture and APIs of the OS haven't significantly changed since the 1980s. It shows you how outdated that OS really is. Try doing that under Vista or Windows 7. You couldn't!!!
Bill Snyder 30-Jun-09 1:12pm
Not to bash Apple, but I do think that Microsoft's general commitment to backwards compatibility is a point in its favor. Of course, it's also one of the reasons Windows is so bloated, but on the whole, I think many users prefer being able to run older applications on older machines.
gratefulEd 30-Jun-09 2:49pm
Most of you windows apologists are pretty new to the game if you think their track record is better, 3.11 to 95 to 98 to 2000 had massive backwards compatibility problems that cost enterprise customers millions. As explained ALL of Apple's major OS updates have been smooth as silk and I fully understand that many of the new benefits are Intel specific and would dog it to death if you tried to emulate. How can you measure backwards comp. with XP anyway? It is over ten years old itself so of course it runs old programs. Vista HAD to be backwards compatible with XP as it was a beta that was shipped (so was XP) and even if it is so backwards comp. the majority of users have not switched. Like most Windoids I too am living in the past and am running 10.4 on my PPC hardware because it works fine, yet it even runs the brand new Safari 4 that was released a couple weeks ago. OS bells and whistles have become pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Though I guess if yours gets viruses etc. then you might need an upgrade (will that even help you guys?) but no desktop user needs 64 bit memory space or most of the other convenience crap. As one "left behind" I could care less and rest assured I have a vastly more mature, stable and virus free system that runs all the apps I will need until I upgrade to intel than you poor windoids do with XP.
Alphaman 30-Jun-09 3:42pm
1 reply
The author wrote "Microsoft even ported Windows NT to the much maligned PowerPC chip at one point in its history (though it never shipped the PowerPC version)". This is not entirely accurate, as a PowerPC version of NT was available starting with NT 3.51, although this version was only available from IBM on a separate CD. Starting with NT 4.0, PowerPC support was shipped from Microsoft. Support from Microsoft ended with SP5, IIRC. I'm sitting here looking at a Microsoft NT 4.0 CD with Intel, Alpha, MIPS, and PPC binaries on it... ah, those were the days! The author's right on everything else -- Microsoft's track record on backwards compatibility is abysmal. Their goal seems to be to make as much different in a new release as possible, so they can sell more books, more training, more classes, and more new software. This is their business model -- always has been -- and it generates a lot of revenue for MS and their application providers. If you're looking for backwards compatibility, you can always get OpenOffice or NeoOffice, both of which can open the aforementioned WinWord v5 or Excel v4 documents. Or check out OpenVMS -- it can run VAX/VMS v1.0 or OpenVMS Alpha binaries on an OpenVMS v8.3 Intel Itanium! That's backwards compatibility!!
Randall C. Kennedy 30-Jun-09 4:08pm
FYI, the line about "never shipped" was added by my editor. Not sure why since I very well know it shipped - hell, the article I referenced in one of the links describes a new (at the time) PPC-based NT system. Go figure.
MaxDaemon 1-Jul-09 8:43am
1 reply
Something that tends to be forgotten in this entire debacle/debate is that Apple is a hardware company getting some godawful price for their computers and providing a relatively inexpensive upgrade path for the software that runs on their hardware. Microsoft is a software company that beyond the kickbacks from vendors and Intel doesn't make any money on hardware, but still has to support thousands of different brands and different configurations - something that Apple never even has to consider. From that thought, you'd think the price would be even higher than it is. Apples to Apples? Apples to oranges? Hmm ..
DaveLindhout 2-Jul-09 3:25am
Max, it's amazing the difference perspective give to a situation. I don't see Apple's prices excessively high. Apple doesn't play in the bargain basement, lost leader space, but when you comparable features, Apple's prices are reasonable. Compare Dell's all in one unit to an iMac and you'll see that Apple is quite a bit cheaper. Same goes for the Dell Studio and the Mac Mini.

I don't give Microsoft near as much credit as you do. I think Microsoft has developed one piece of software and the thousands of hardware manufacturers have had to come up with drivers to incorporate their products into the operating environment. One of the biggest sources of instability in the Windows environment is getting all the device drivers to play nice with one another. Part of Apple's reliability is due to the fact that they control both hardware and software.

DA50000 1-Jul-09 9:57pm
1 reply
Thanks for not including your Republican Sore Losermen diatribe rants in this article, Randall. (see his last to see what I mean) That was really degrading to Infoworld and the subjects we want to see discussed here. I was pretty leery of reading anything from you again and was expecting the worst. Thanks for being more professional this time.
Randall C. Kennedy 1-Jul-09 10:16pm
Anytime, my pinko commie friend...

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