“The PC has not changed as consumers and users have changed their habits,” he said.
“One thing the PC makers have not done over the last few years is make products that are innovative in terms of compelling features and novel form factors.”
“There’s the need for a fundamental re-think of how we make these gadgets compelling.”
see BBC – Shut Down: Does the PC have a future?
In other words, is the PC industry meeting the needs of consumers or merely pushing products? Since more ARMed smart thingies were sold this year than PCs, I would argue that the PC industry has merely been pushing products: Wintel and graphics cards, things that people can do without if they have good alternatives like ARMed smart thingies that are fast enough, small enough and cheap enough. The world does not owe Wintel a living. Wintel has to earn it. Making ever more powerful CPUs because you can and making ever more complex software because you can is not enough to earn a living. Products have to be relevant.
The OEMs have bought into Wintel as if there was no other way to go. The retailers have bought into Wintel as if there was no other way to go. Even M$ has repeated the lie that there is no other way to go so often that it has poisoned its own well. While M$ takes another year to produce a product that might interest consumers, Google and its partners are cranking out millions of systems that are meeting needs and fit in pockets.
17414
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I think you are right about this based on my own condition and what I know about my friends and co-workers. My home desktop is 4 years old now and I don’t have any thoughts about replacing it. It still does everything that I need it to do and works as well as it did when it was new.
I did go out and buy a 2TB USB drive for it since I got worried one day about losing a hard drive and a whole lot of stuff accumulated over many years with it. Now everything is backed up and new stuff gets added to the backup automatically every day at 2am using the program that came with the Seagate drive. As the article noted, that one addition keeps my investment in the desktop working.
It is clear that PCs are slipping into the “replace when worn out” category. Of course there are an awful lot of PCs out in the world and there is going to be a lot of replacing just on that sheer volume. I don’t see that they are going to be replaced by anything other than Windows PCs, though. If I were to replace my desktop some day, it would be with something that worked the same and let me use my existing applications and data.
And it would not be replaced by something as crumby as my net-book. I already bit on that bad idea.
My data and my wife’s data and all my previous employers’ data was largely accessible in GNU/Linux. Why should you let M$ hold your data hostage?
And how exactly keeping your data on a external USB drive makes it available to Microsoft?
“Why should you let M$ hold your data hostage?”
They dont. Any data that you have is readily available and/or exportable.
Keep the data in their file formats.
Sigh… Too bad I can’t upgrade them, and be forced to replace them…
oldman read the anti-trust case documents against MS.
MS has historically altered formats so the data exported can only be imported by MS.
The current very old case Novell vs MS is partly about the same thing oldman. Problem is courts take way to long to address this issue. Ie 15 years latter and the offence over data stuffing up is only getting to court now.
There are reasons why EU countries are demanding that all Office suites produce perfect ODF and other open standard formats. They are sick of MS promises like yes you can export it. Then it turns out latter it will not import back into current day MS product.
Remember governments may be pulling up 10 to 15 year old documentation at times.
Most countries national archives switched to odf many years ago. Switching the desktops is kinda the last step in the conversion.
AFAIK there are a number of programs that can read and write the Microsoft formats. This whole idea is absurd. In any case, you can always run the old product that created the file to recover it, but the new programs have always been able to read the old format.
Wahoo wrote, “you can always run the old product that created the file to recover it”.
Ever read one of M$’s EULAs? When the machine dies, the OS OEM licence dies with it. You no longer have the right to run that version of that other OS and you cannot buy a licence anywhere. Governments can last centuries and the EULA dries up sooner or later, usually inside of 10 years. Governments are crazy to rely on M$’s software and file formats.
Wahoo
“AFAIK there are a number of programs that can read and write the Microsoft formats. This whole idea is absurd. In any case, you can always run the old product that created the file to recover it, but the new programs have always been able to read the old format.”
Please go to your national achieves and go threw the briefing on data storage. You will find they convert everything to ODF and PDF.
Reason those are backwards compatible that the new programs will open the old. Microsoft Formats of excel and word in fact are not 100 able to be opened on latter machines or with other programs.
Office 2003 and before in fact start showing DEP protection errors processing some documents on newer hardware. So it not only keeping the software running to access those MS documents you have to at times keep old hardware running or run emulation of old hardware. You are nuts Wahoo with idea of running the old program. National archives know this is nuts.
Basically your logic does not fly Wahoo. The format has to be a proper spec.
Simple fact is on this topic you are idiot Wahoo never done you homework by talking to the people who deal with old software to find out the problems. If you and spent the time doing the national archives training on how todo it well you would know this.
I had to remake all a companies labels because they had used Microsoft label maker that Microsoft had discontinued. That MS Office does not read any more and it don’t run on Windows Vista or Windows 7 even in XP emulation mode. So it was run XP virtual machine as the only way to print out labels until new could be made.
The data training between national achieves is basically identical.
You are the one making completely absurd statement Wahoo.
Robert Pogson wrote: Ever read one of M$’s EULAs?
To tell the truth, no, I have not. But I have never had a PC actually “die” as you say, either. In any case it is not the operating system that is the issue here. It is the Word, Excel, and Quicken programs that read the data files and they can be moved to a new computer as I wish.
Oiaohm wrote: Microsoft Formats of excel and word in fact are not 100 able to be opened on latter machines or with other programs.
It has always worked for me and I cannot find any evidence that it has not worked for everyone else. At work where we have professional IT managers overseeing everything, I have never heard of such a thing either and there are no precautions ordered. I don’t believe you are correct here.
Last year I worked at a school that used M$ “Works”. Incompatible with everything else. No one had an installation CD for “Works” so it did not work for us. It cost about 30minutes of my time per document to convert them to an open format by typing. It was the main point of lock-in.
Wahoo the issues are vast and many with the doc and excel formats. Ok you might have been lucky.
You have admitted you have not spoken to national archives the deal in document volumes in the millions. Any 1 in a million issue national archives find Wahoo very commonly.
Classic with word excel and so on is ole embeding. This why documents from MS Works 2008 what is using Word 2007 don’t all function correctly on standard MS word 2007 or latter versions of MS Office. Problem is from the outside without processing they all look like .doc files. Basically you don’t even have to change versions for MS Office to explode in ones face Wahoo. Just have different extensions installed in MS Office will do the number on you.
There are gold standard achieve storage formats Wahoo ones that are know not to explode in ones face once you are there. PDF/A what is the archive standard version of PDF. ODF, Docbook and so on are others. All fully open spec with fully functional copies from more than 1 provider.
OOXML is fails gold standard requirements as well. There are key reason why ODF forbids inserting extensions undocumented way. Achives have had hell with these one off department addons.
Basically you would know all this if someone from your company had gone to speak to the experts in data archiving that the ones running the national archives for countries are. If you want to preserve anything into the future they are who you talk to.
Some of the hardware designs to prevent virus damage to archives is very impressive that different countries use.
“professional IT managers” does not have to equal skilled in correct data handling processes for archiving. Yes a lot of businesses get caught with this fact. You have not talked to professionals in the field of data storage Wahoo. Instead talked to a pack of people who could be incompetent due to not handling enough volume to know where the issues are.
Pogson, office formats are documented:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313105(v=office.12).aspx
Anyone can make an app to read / write these formats, if one has the necessary skills and motivation. Puty FOSS community lacks at least the latter.
When your OS dies, you can transfer your data, and keep working on with it. I can’t believe I had to say that.
If you can’t run the OS any longer, the data may be inaccessible. e.g. You are running Office XP and XP dies. Where can you buy XP any longer? Mainstream support for their XP office suite ended in 2006.
Wikipedia:“Beginning in 3/02/89, Microsoft instituted a new support lifecycle policy. Versions earlier than Office 2003 are no longer supported. For current and future versions of Office mainstream support will end five years after release, or two years after the next release, whichever time is later, and extended support will end five years after that.”
No business or government wants to run software without support. As you know, M$ is the only one who can properly support its products, because they are closed source.
Office XP runs just fine on Windows 7 (and Vista before that). My wife uses it because she doesn’t like the new Office 2010 that I use on my laptop which was provided by my employer. I can’t really blame her for that either, it took me forever to get used to the new layout.
I was going to buy the home pack for Office 2010 since that is what I use at the office, but she didn’t like it and only really uses Outlook anyway. The only use she gets out of Word is the spell checker that runs with email composing.
Lack of support after so many years is not so important in my estimation. I have never called Microsoft about a problem with word processing or a spreadsheet in 20 years of using their products. I would imagine that a business would not be using a really old version of software for anything, but individuals might do that the same way that my wife does. As long as it keeps working, what is the problem?
I know that the new Office can open and edit the old Office XP Word files, so there is no danger of anything being lost. I have some stuff going backto the DOS days and Office 2010 can read it as well.
Wahoo wrote, “Lack of support after so many years is not so important in my estimation. I have never called Microsoft about a problem with word processing or a spreadsheet in 20 years of using their products. “, ignoring a long history of critical vulnerabilities in M$’s office suite.
see vulnerabilities
12600 hits on M$’s site. Imagine driving around town with a loaded shotgun bouncing around the back seat… It might never discharge, but then, again, … what if it did? Is any organization with 100+ clients going to want to leave the door open to an unsupported version of M$’s office suite inviting the bad guys in? I don’t think so.
And so, a big organization will update. And the client will see an increase in its productivity because of the new features. And all its old documents will continue to work just fine.
Or not… Do you recommend that my former employer update “Works”?
Ask M$.
“In Office 2007, we changed the default to disable a number of older file formats where we saw very low usage and a high security risk in our code that loads these formats. From the security standpoint, this is the right thing to do. From the data we have on file opens, very few users open files in these formats, so we decided to modify the default behavior to this safer approach.”
What part of “disable older file formats” don’t you understand?
My employer was definitely on the lower usage front. Report cards were all they used Works for and they were running XP sp1 with FAT when I arrived.
Have you checked Word recently? I just clicked on it and it claims to be able to import .WPS files which it says is the MS Works file format. I have never used Works myself since I have always had Word. My laptop came with a light version of Word and Excel that I replaced with the real MS Office 2010.
In any case, you may be right in saying that Microsoft can quit supporting old formats, specially when they decide that nobody is using them anyway as above. I don’t think that would apply to Word or Excel, though. In that regard, they are still supporting formats from the early 1980s.
As to the listed vulnerabilities with MS Office, the Google hits are, after all, things that Microsoft has fixed already, so their quitting looking for more problems after a product has been out of production for a long time is not so scary. Anything significant has likely been found and fixed by then.
Wahoo I am not talking about .wps files from the dead version of MS works that is works 4.5 and before.
I am talking about the latter MS works suite that contained modified versions of Word, Excel and Power point 2007. Where the files are .doc and .xls and fail to function.
You also have this with MS Office 2010 starter but MS has cleaned this up. So now it a document produced in MS Office 2010 full that will not open in MS Office 2010 starter due to a ole part being missing. But at least everything produced in starter will open in full. Not having the old MS work suite nightmare where items produced in full would not open in works and items produces in works would not open in full even that they were all .doc files.
Yes MS Office 2010 and they only a 100 percent one way compatibility between different mixes. Go against that direction and people may get documents they cannot open.
Yes this defect is driving some large companies to go stuff it change over to libreoffice so everyone with libreoffice has exactly the same beast.
“Pogson, office formats are documented:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313105(v=office.12).aspx
Anyone can make an app to read / write these formats, if one has the necessary skills and motivation. Puty FOSS community lacks at least the latter.”
Phenom Please go and implement find how much of a moron you are. Right we describe the data format. fine so useful. But we don’t describe what all the ole code blocks that MS office calls to process binary blobs in the format does.
So effectively you only have half the information.
Libreoffice remaps a lot of ole data processing to internal replacements.
Like in that list of yours where is “visio” Because you might have drawn up a flow chart and placed in your word document. Problem you cannot process visio the ole object disappears.
Yes Phenom it a incomplete list of information you don’t have to look hard to spot it. That particular programs from the suite are missing is a big enough hint. It gets worse the deeper you dig in. I would say only about 70 percent of what you need to fully process a MS word document is there at the most optimistic.
Oiaohm posted: Wahoo I am not talking about .wps files from the dead version of MS works that is works 4.5 and before.
AFAIK, you were not talking about anything pertinent. It was Robert Pogson who thought there was an issue with Works files and you seem to agree that they can be used by modern day Word.
Your claim as to Word and Excel files not working in just shows that you do not understand the conversation. There is no doubt that documents produced on a pro version of MS Office may not be fully accessible or even partially accessible on a lightweight free version. All that means is that you need to buy the upgrade if you want to use it.
The issue was the potential loss of documents because a new version of MS Office could not read an old format due to some purposeful action by Microsoft. That is not the case and has never been the case.
Wahoo wrote, “There is no doubt that documents produced on a pro version of MS Office may not be fully accessible or even partially accessible on a lightweight free version. All that means is that you need to buy the upgrade if you want to use it.”
Nope. That means M$ is running your life if you let them dictate/upsell to you. You can be free of that. Just run Free Software.
The short answer here is that I do use “free software” in the sense that I did not have to pay for it. It either comes with the computer or, in the case of Office, my employer provides it to me under the volume license that they did with Microsoft.
The reality is that I would never buy it exclusively for myself, I just do not need anything that fancy. I could, if I didn’t have to be able to read and edit office stuff, get by with one of the really free products. I know that there are a number of them around and they are easy to get. They even work with Windows.
I think that businesses basically pay Microsoft because they expect a continuity of service. Documents that they archived years ago can be retrieved and used tomorrow just as easily and reliably as ones they created last week. That has been going on for more than 20 years now and that is worth a lot more to businesses than what they might save in terms of license fees when they buy a new version of Office.
If a business is crashing and is desperate to lighten the load, it is more likely that it would simply continue to use the old version of Office than to switch to something else, free or not. The costs of switching are likely to be higher than the costs of updating on any one occasion at least.
“The issue was the potential loss of documents because a new version of MS Office could not read an old format due to some purposeful action by Microsoft. That is not the case and has never been the case.”
In fact MS Works 2008 is the worst item MS ever made Wahoo. Yes newer MS Office 2010 cannot read older MS Works 2008 documents all the time. Personally I would love to smash the disks on site if I did not need them for data recovery.
Yes MS Works 2008 doc files still don’t always open on MS Office 2010 enterprise.
How not to make a light version 101. Release full version then year later after messing around with the code base decide to release the light version of this strange side fork code base that you don’t base the next version on.
That is exactly how MS Works 2008 was made. It a fork of MS Office 2007 code base.
Yes MS works 2008 contains what looks like MS word 2007 but it been messed around with.
Basically .doc files from MS Works 2008 mixed in with other documents can make you scream.
Lets just say I am little once bitten twice shy over that stunt.
“Documents that they archived years ago can be retrieved and used tomorrow just as easily and reliably as ones they created last week.”
I wish that was true. I have documents from 2009 that are pains in but. Due to one staff member in this one company using MS Works 2008 without being noticed. PDF printing hiding what was going on.
Yes a lot of businesses are not getting what they are paying for Wahoo. Basically you see someone producing a document in MS Works 2008 make it darn clear don’t put that in achieves it could drive you nuts.
Even worse MS Works 2008 is kinda viral. Install MS Office 2007 over the top of MS Works 2008 get some documents neither MS Works 2008 or Office 2007 can open alone and Office 2010 cannot open either. Now install other way is fine you end up with MS works 2008 only files. Only way to open those documents is correctly cross the versions. Ie install MS works 2008 and then install 2007.
Now I hope MS does not get a idea of a cut down version like MS works 2008 ever again. It just drives us restoring files from archives up wall. So you need MS works 2008 and MS works 2008 crossed with 2007 + MS Office 2010 enterprise to open everything in the archive. Nice is that you cannot have the crossed and the full MS Works 2008 in the same install.
As of yet libreoffice will not open all the mangled forms of the doc file that mess produces. But its getting close. Yes you have better odds getting those stuffed up files open with libreoffice than MS office 2010 enterprise.
Nice way to ruin ones archives right Wahoo. Can you now understand why some companies are not too impressed with Microsoft.
Basically Wahoo your consistence is more luck that you have not run into MS Works 2008 or other evil ways to ruin ones day.
Wahoo
“Your claim as to Word and Excel files not working in just shows that you do not understand the conversation. There is no doubt that documents produced on a pro version of MS Office may not be fully accessible or even partially accessible on a lightweight free version. All that means is that you need to buy the upgrade if you want to use it.”
Grow a brain. Person has MS Office standard installed and another has MS Office pro installed one does a key memo send to the other. One way it will work other way it might fail. So could mean loss of contract for business or disruption to business operations basically expensive error.
Problem how do you know what the other end has Wahoo. This is the same with a business internally.
You cannot reduce cost by using different versions of Office without causing incompatibilities in office data transfers.
Yes the stuff it run libreoffice starts sounding really good. Send PDF externally problems solved.
Migration to libreoffice can in fact lead to higher productivity due to doing away with version to version issues.