I’ve seen a few articles about upgrading to Windows 8 Pro for $14.99, but, unfortunately, they are misleading. Basically you have to buy a new computer to get that price, which is a stupid thing to do. Any sane person would either use a decent flavor of Linux (Linux Mint 12, Fedora 16, or openSUSE 12.1 are the current ones I like); or a get a Mac where the price of OS upgrades are always between $40 and $50 regardless if you have a new computer or not, and you only have 1 Mac OS to choose from – which doesn’t have shitty marketing confusing consumers.
I’m of the opinion that Microsoft purposely uses misleading fucked up marketing so stupid people won’t qualm over their overpriced operating system. I think the price to make each version of a product is the same, but one is made shitty so people will buy the more expensive one. And as a lot of people believe, a high price must mean it’s the best of the best.
I do think Microsoft is slowly getting it or they wouldn’t have scaled back Windows 8 to 5 versions. However, until they finally make a decision to pull their head out of their figurative ass, they will still just flounder while Google, Apple, Linux, Macintosh, iOS, ANDROID, etc will continue to eat away at their profits. Their only lifelines are the government, which is slowly throwing out Microsoft products, and the Xbox.
What hope I had to see the Windows platform succeed is waning pretty quickly, and the only time I use a Microsoft product is at work. If anything, my life has been made better since I jumped from using a Microsoft product and a shitty looking laptop/computer.
I’ve been on a blues kick since seeing Scott Ramminger & the CrawStickers at 219. I had a great time and found another song to obsess over which is “Slip Away” by Gregg Allman. I think I’m starting to mellow because I just can’t stop listening to all of the blues artists I have on my iPod, and now I listen to all my heavy stuff while working out in the gym. Right now I can’t get enough of Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s song “Blue On Black.”
Buckcherry will be playing in Maryland, and I can’t find tickets – Ticketmaster doesn’t have the event listed, and the “sites” I did find supposedly aren’t reputable. Hopefully they’ll release their album by the end of the year because what I’ve heard sounds great.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson’s interview saddens me because he has the same flawed vision as other companies that are struggling to hold on to an antiquated business model.
”Stephenson referred to the original unlimited data plan as ’a regret’ and said he would have preferred that heavy users pay more for it rather than having light users subsidize the heavier users.”
Business-wise the unlimited data plan gave him the subscribers he needed to keep the Apple deal, and most likely added to the revenue stream AT&T needed to upgrade/add equipment for their shit network – network reliability was a major complaint from users. Plus, the point about light users is utter bullshit, and I’ll explain that later.
iMessage is a threat to their SMS/MMS business. The problem I have with big companies is that they don’t want to move forward. If AT&T kept the unlimited data plan and developed an iMessage app then they wouldn’t be whining like Metallica about MP3s. Companies like Exxon, AT&T, and Microsoft have pools of people they could pull from to help expand their market, but have chosen to be inefficient with their money and use them instead to struggle in a dynamic market that they can’t control anymore.
Getting back to the unlimited data … AT&T has to pay another company for the physical data line throughput their company uses. I wonder how upset they, as a company, would be if they had to pay for a tiered service provided by Level 3, or another backbone provider (AT&T isn’t everywhere)? I’m sure they would whine and ask for help from the government because those backbone companies would be limiting AT&T’s business, like AT&T is limiting their users.
What people also fail to see is that AT&T is to Level 3 as a cell phone user is to AT&T: a customer.
As I lead into my final thoughts, I have to start by saying I’m happy with Sprint. Not cartwheels, or throwing confetti everywhere happy, but I am happy. Compared to my time with AT&T I now have unlimited service, better network reliability, better customer support, and, best of all, my bill is significantly cheaper. Even though AT&T’s network, when working efficiently, was faster, they would need to be competitively priced and bring back the unlimited unthrottled data plan for me even to reconsider going back.
Randall Stephenson Interview
Let’s keep it simple: there’s Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, Windows 8 RT, Windows 8 with Windows 8 Pro Pack, and Windows 8 Pro with Windows 8 Media Center Pack.
We can argue about the latter 2 operating systems but it comes down to features, and the only differences between 4 of them are feature-based. Microsoft chooses to confuse things by marketing some features as an OS version and others as an addon. We can argue about delivery mechanism being a separating factor, but realistically we will see packages that will say “Windows 8 Pro with Media Center Pack.” They’ve done it for years with earlier OS’.
Like phones, OS capabilities have expanded in functionality that usually lie in the multimedia department – what OS doesn’t play a DVD or MP3s? Apparently Windows 8 won’t now, unless you buy the upgrades. If you look at the differences between Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro they’re essentially the same OS, but Windows 8 Pro has added features.
I want Microsoft to come out of the Windows Vista and Windows Vista Plus (my Windows 7 nickname) debacle, but it seems like all they’re doing is creating justifications for something.
Link to Maximum PC article …
