DoNews.com of China just ran an interesting story (in Mandarin) that the “nearly perfect” pirated copies of Windows Vista is being sold in China. One can notice that the CD front cover of a pirated copy showed in the picture above was labeled as “Vista简体中文专业版”. Moreover, by installing this crack version, one can use it without the time limit. In other word, an user who use the crack version will not necessarily to complete the process of registration in the time frame of the 30 days as prerequisite by Microsoft.

It seems that Microsoft need to put in more effort as well as taking a much harsher steps in their antipiracy tactics.

Source: http://www.donews.com/Content/200701/cad7354b915e4f72931c30a7737278c2.shtm

Source: http://tech.tom.com/2007-01-26/005D/02466584_02.html

Microsoft has launched Windows Vista in China earlier than the expected date, i.e. 30th this month. According to an article on Tom.com, the series of Windows Vista products have been marketed by a well-known online portal in China, i.e. 8844.com. When I visited the 8844.com as mentioned just now, this site has marketed these two products, which are Windows Vista Ultimate Chinese (中文旗舰版) and Windows Vista Home Basic Chinese. The listed price is in the range of ￥1530.00 to ￥2760.00. For the Windows Vista Home basic, the site even offered the service of delivery as this product has been marketed by them since 22th this month.

Meanwhile, there is widely reported by a blog that the black market Vista copies already in the China’s market. I’m not sure whether the early launched of Windows Vista by Microsoft is acted as a tactical move to reduce the software piracy and ensure that Microsoft’s customers in China will receive the product quality that they expected. Or this may considered as a good product strategy as Microsoft “quietly” launched the products in order to create the buying awareness. Despite the people in China, or I should say the people no matter where they live, they know the benefits of buying a genuine copy of Windows Vista, some simply can’t afford to that price. I’ve been thinking for some time now that the price really could be a serious shortcoming for a certain number of good products when they’ve released to the market.

Still, I believed Microsoft is a dreamer. I’m also a dreamer. I can’t afford to a lot of things that I dream. I can’t afford myself to pursue a good MBA, subscribe to a lot of books and magazines, a lot of softwares. I’m dreaming to that everyday. I’m also dreaming of all the people in this world that can afford to buying the genuine copy of softwares that they want. I remembered a song that I loved when I was little. This song was “Imagine” by John Lennon:

You may say I’m a dreamer,
But I’m not the only one.

There is always a doubt, i.e. memory capacity for current Windows XP users when they plan for an upgrade of their operating system to Vista version. A memory manufacturer called Crucial Technology has unveiled its Windows Vista memory scanner, i.e. Am I Vista Ready as the above button showed. Its functionality is to advice the users whether the amount of memory in their computers is enough to run Windows Vista. It is a software that requires Internet Explorer browser and the use of ActiveX technology to scan the system. By the way, this software also downloadable if a user is using Firefox or Opera browser. After a user download this software and run it in the computer, he/she will get upgrade result on the web.

My sense is that in the coming few months, it is not surprise if we would come across a lot of tools or utilities that help the public along the way in upgrading or installing Windows Vista. But I think the real question is: am I going to upgrade my system to Windows Vista?

I often blog about the outlook for Windows Vista as Microsoft launched it in the marketplace few days ago. There have been many articles of late on how good or worse the timing for Microsoft launching its new operating system. Though Microsoft remained optimistic about their newly commercial product, the outlook about Windows Vista is unclear at this moment.

A reputable market intelligence provider, IDC released a press news and expected with calendar year 2007 deployments of Windows Vista projected at 90 million copies. This largely contrast to Windows XP, when first launched Oct. 25, 2001, there are 67 million copies of Windows XP sold in the first year as announced by Microsoft. If the prediction by IDC is true, there will be an increased of 23 million copies. To put that figure into perspective, Microsoft would see a 34% gain over first year operating system shipments.

I believed IDC’s report is based on the prediction of growing number of PC users in the world. In contrary, I came across an article mentioned that the corporate America is not ready for Windows Vista now. According to a Canadian market research firm, Softchoice released results from their own survey, and found that 94 percent of existing PCs can’t run Vista Premium because of the heavy graphics requirements. They believe half of existing PCs can’t run Vista at all because of the heavy processing and memory requirements of the new operating system. They doubt the organizations will make a substantial investment in their IT hardware infrastructure in order to deploy Windows Vista.

Obviously, there are some pros and cons of Windows Vista launched, we would only know how market response to Windows Vista from Microsoft’s press release one year later. However, assume Microsoft would not provide security patch to Windows XP when Windows Vista officially launched to the public in January next year, the users will no doubt have to invest in their new hardware and upgrading to Windows Vista, the question is how soon Microsoft would pursuing that kind of product strategy.

The other day I came across the website above that retail the German & Japanese RC1 version of Windows Vista. You may wonder, why Microsoft selected German & Japanese amongst many languages? Why not French, Mandarin, Korean, and etc.? Why German & Japanese got that kind of premium services? In attempting to find out the answer, I did came across some sources stated that both German & Japanese are complicated and hard to read and write. Thus, in theoretical if translating a software to German & Japanese, if that’s work well, so it would work for the other languages as well.

In technological setting, my sense is that it is unfair for the German & Japanese languages. I strongly believed the reason Microsoft launched German, Japanese versions besides English version was based on the consideration of the competitive advantage of nation, Per capita GDP, and purchasing power of these two countries, i.e. Germany & Japan.

As according to moneyweek.com, the United States, Japan, and Germany still collectively account for 43% of world GDP as measured in dollar-based market exchange rates. In particular, German business competitiveness is ranked second only to the United States and well above that of the UK (#8) and Japan (#9) — to say nothing of France (#16), Spain (#30), and Italy (#38). This explained why the Germans and Japanese would enjoy the privilege of using Windows Vista in their own language first.

Bottom Line: If you are considering translating a software to other languages other than English, consider the above factors such as competitive advantage of nation, Per capita GDP, and etc. Doing so is just good business.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I was going to attend the Windows Vista Preview, when I arrived there, surprisingly there are not much people attended the Technical Preview as I expected. As I attended one of the session entitled,”Vista and AMD”, there are fewer than 100 people at that seminar room.

During the Technical Preview, few issues really surprised me:

1) One of the speaker stated the Vista version will require at least 1G of RAM in order to support the Aero interface, a lot of people know that, however, he stated this particular 1G of RAM must be in 1 piece, there are not in any case like this, 4 pieces of 256MB (4 X 256 RAM). In my case, my PC come with 2 pieces of Kingston 256 RAM, it would not work well if I buy another two (2) 256 RAM and stick these addition RAMs into my PC to make it 1G of RAM in total.

2) BitLocker’s recovery mode is really look cool. But this feature will only available in Vista Ultimate version.

3) There are far too many different version of Vista when it officially launched in the market, i.e. Vista Basic, Vista Business, Vista Ultimate, Vista Enterprise. For Office 2007, there are available in eight (8) versions when I looked at its leaflet. For a lot of people out there, I wonder they all know how to differentiate the Office 2007 suite, i.e. Office Standard 2007, Basic 2007, Professional 2007, Professional Plus 2007, Home and Student 2007, Ultimate 2007, Small Business 2007, and lastly Enterprise 2007 when they purchase it from the retail store?

4) Vista looked too many security advancements. For myself, i just want to have a reliable operating system, and enabled me to run some applications. But with Vista, I need to switch from “Standard User” to “Administrator” each time when I install a new program. I can imagine it would really annoying in this kind of situation.

5) I believed Microsoft have already made this Vista “looked” very powerful. When I looked at the Demo on the screen, there is a myth that Vista was so secure it might be possible to run this operating system without any anti-virus program installed.

6) The tagging feature really cool when I first saw it from the Demo, but frankly is there a need to have the tagging (categorized) feature in Vista? If one want to tag a picture, he/she can install a third-party software and run it. Is this strongly implied that Microsoft want to develop an operating system that could cater all the users’ needs and wants?

7) Windows Vista cannot be considered as a upgrade version of Windows XP, both of them look differently in terms of performance and feature. Thus, it’s no longer an operating system that we familiar with.

Bottom Line: Windows Vista no doubt looked powerful, but I urge all the potential buyers to have a second-look preview before they upgrade their Windows XP to Vista.

I am going to attend a sneak preview of Windows Vista in Asia South, i.e. Kuala Lumpur this afternoon. Most of my close IT friends were not fascinated about the new Windows operating system (OS), asked them whether they going to upgrade their Windows OS to Vista yesterday evening, they are more concerning about the compatibility issues.

I just read an interesting news from Yahoo!, this article stated for Microsoft, getting Vista out the door was a enormous milestone, critical to the star-crossed OS’s expected release to businesses later this month, and then to consumers in January. But with enterprises cautious about compatibility issues, and buzz already shifting to Web-based applications and service-based software, Vista may fall short of the mark set by predecessors Windows 95 and XP.

I agreed.

It has been five years since Windows XP was released on the market. Now Microsoft has set the date for their newest release Windows Vista. November 30th 2006 for corporate customers and January 30th 2007 for the public. However, I’m not excited for Windows Vista nor planning of going for an upgrade. Major reasons are: A friend of mine in fact has experienced several difficulties in installing Windows Vista Beta. And my advice here is before considering a switch to Windows Vista, check for the compatibility. Moreover, I’m really surprise inside the Microsoft’s Vista End User License Agreement (EULA). There are some limitations we should be aware to if we planned for an upgrade or buy. On the other hand, I wonder how this licensing restrictions will affect the sales of Windows Vista. After reading thoroughly this article, I’m also starting to understand why a lot of people thinking of a switch to Ubuntu.

For me, if I am seriously doing to switch from Windows to Ubuntu, I will definitely try a dual boot system first…that allows me to run Windows and Ubuntu next to each other on my PC. I know I’m not the type of people to go that far and conclude Windows operating system is not good at this moment.