Couldn’t Help But Notice (122007)
J. Nicholas Hoover at Information Week has shocking news about Vista adoption:
Last October, a Gartner survey found that 64% of companies planned to begin moving from Windows XP to Windows Vista by the winter of 2008. One year later, that number stands at a measly 9%.
….. That 64% deployment barrier now isn’t expected to be reached until early 2009, just around the time Microsoft stops making Windows XP Professional available to white box PC vendors. And Windows “7,” the version after Vista, is due either late 2009 or some time in 2010, depending on who you ask and what tea leaves you read.
Has there even been a large-scale product rollout, especially to an existing user base, that has been so thoroughly rejected? How many years of this will companies put up with this before searching for an alternative? Or is Microsoft’s hold on the corporate market so strong that it can screw up indefinitely?
As I’ve noted for over a year (here, here, here [second-last item], and here [final item]), Microsoft is so dominant in such an important area of the economy that its failure to get Vista and related items right could in and of itself slow down productivity improvement and hurt economic growth.
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USA Today’s piece on congressional and presidential approval ratings had this odd assertion:
Although just 30% of those polled give Democrats in Congress good marks, they favor the party by a 53%-40% margin in next year’s elections. That represents a silver lining for Democrats, who achieved only a fraction of their ambitious agenda after taking over Congress.
It’s even odder that the 53%-40% cited isn’t in the survey detail anywhere, and the article has no external link.
I think I know why: 26% give Republicans in Congress good marks, which was “somehow” not mentioned in the article. So the Dems lead the GOP by only 4 points (30-26) in the survey metric. So I would suggest that writer Richard Wolf USAT felt like he had to go out and find a more impressive difference. 13 points is a lot better than 4. No bias there, eh?
After the budget bluster of the past week, I would not be surprised to see that 4-point difference evaporate, with more Nutrootsters disapproving of Dems.
Expanded upon in this entry at NewsBusters.org.
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Michelle’s right. This is incandescent stupidity.
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Eliot Spitzer’s free-fall in “Troopergate” continues (HT Instapundit).
Troopergate? Given the history of that term, whoever is responsible for making the New York version of the name stick is an evil genius.
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Paul Weyrich notes that we badly need blue-collar workers:
We must change the stigma we have placed on noncollegiate work. We again need to make workers who lay the tracks, who pave the roads, who collect the garbage, become proud Americans.
There is no way these folks shouldn’t be as proud as those who go to college. Granted they will never have a degree to hang on the wall. But they will be able to support their families in fine fashion.
Blue-collar jobs that pay very well are going begging. How can that be? The problem is that we need educated and creative blue-collar workers, not the scandalous percentage of functional illiterates our education system is producing. He’s also right that the condescension on the part of people who work in an office towards people who don’t (even if they are functionally illiterate) has got to end.
