“Microsoft Corp.’s newest operating system, Vista, has been relegated to waterboy status at the 2008 Olympic Games, while wireless networking won’t even play a supporting role in Beijing,” Dan Nystedt reports for IDG News Service.
“Windows XP was chosen to run on all PCs handling chores vital to the Olympic Games and has been installed on most of the PCs delivered by Lenovo Group Ltd. Vista will be used only on PCs in Internet lounges set up for athletes to use during the games,” Nystedt reports.
“Lenovo [is] the official computing sponsor of the games… All software and other IT choices made for the games came from The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad,” Nystedt reports.
Nystedt reports, “The Olympic Games require mature, stable technologies, said Yang Yuanqing, chairman of Lenovo, during a briefing in Beijing. The Olympic Games aren’t a place to try new technologies because of the size and importance of the event, he said. Everything must work smoothly. ‘If it’s not stable, it could have some problems,’ he said.”
“‘At the Olympics, we need the most reliable and stable system,’ said Leon Xie, director of Olympic technology and sponsorship at Lenovo,” Nystedt reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Another ringing endorsement for Vista. Fact: if they really wanted the most reliable and stable system, they would have chosen Apple Macs over Lenovo PCs to begin with, but, we get it: Lenovo is a Chinese company, the Olympics are in China, etc. What’re ya gonna do? This is a great reminder that if you make a bad decision at the outset, your problems will just snowball. The modern Olympics… with a 7-year-old OS. Sheesh.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers too numerous to mention for the heads up.]
They just picked the lesser and possibly the most unsecure of the two poisons…the hackers are surely
loving this.
Can I post today…? Here goes:
MDN… you’re take this time is a stretch. This is not an Apple or Mac related story, unless you want to report that Apple was not selected for IT duties at the Olympics… again. Vista or XP, doesn’t matter. MS got the job and Apple didn’t.
Just wait though. When the games begin there will plenty of stories about all the Macs producing the segments. I’d rather wait for that story than to hear what Apple didn’t achieve.
My, they sure look butch together!……
Before the final wrestling match, an American wrestler’s trainer came to him and said, “Now don’t forget all the research we’ve done on this Russian. He’s never lost a match because of this “pretzel” hold he has. Whatever you do, don’t let him get you in this hold. If he does, you’re finished!”
The wrestler nodded in agreement. The match began and the American and the Russian circled each other several times looking for an opening. All of a sudden the Russian lunged forward, grabbed the American and wrapped him up in the dreaded pretzel hold! A sigh of disappointment went up from the crowd, and the trainer buried his face in his hands for he knew all was lost. He couldn’t watch the ending.
Suddenly there was a scream, a cheer from the crowd and the trainer raised his eye just in time to see the Russian flying up in the air. The Russian’s back hit the mat with a thud, and the American weakly collapsed on top of him with a bloody mouth, got the pin and won the match.
The trainer was astounded! When he finally got the American wrestler alone, he asked, “How did you ever get out of that hold? No one has ever done it before!” The wrestler answered, “Well, I was ready to give up when he got me in that hold, but at the last moment, I opened my eyes and saw this pair of balls right in front of my face.
“I thought I had nothing to lose, so with my last ounce of strength I stretched out my neck and bit those babies just as hard as I could.
You’d be amazed how strong you get when you bite your own balls.”
sponsorship money….otherwise, it’d be HP saying that they are going to run XP and not Vista…
“The Olympic Games aren’t a place to try new technologies because of the size and importance of the event, he said.”
Bullshit. Several new, and practically untested video and broadcasting technologies got their baby teeth during the Olympics. MDN is right- Lenovo is absolutely a chinese company, happy and gleeful that they bought IBM, but turgid and useless at their choice of OS partners. Lenovo is just beginning to install linux on their systems, mostly due to insistence against Vista.
This is brilliant news:
“The Olympic Games aren’t a place to try new technologies”
Microsoft Windows: a new, untested, untried technology.
What a mess they’ve got themselves into.
@Spark
Sorry, this IS an Apple story. If Windows is regarded as unstable and unreliable, then the impact on Apple with OSX’s 100% reliability will be huge, massive, unprecedented…
As Splat points out, if Apple wanted to play in big boys marketing pissing contest at the Olympics – any Olympics – the first thing they would have to do is butter up the local Organising Committee then the IOC and finally the IOC’s chosen systems integrator (which was SEMA until the end of the Athens games, IIRC).
IIRC, Macs drove a lot of the opening ceremony at Athens and – with XSan – are becoming the portable edit suite of choice for many broadcasters and independent producers for everything from the Tour De France to the Olympics and on to the SuperBowl.
The one area where it would be good to see Apple is in motorsport, particularly F1 and IndyCars: if Apple wanted to, they could attach themselves to Dave Richards’ new F1 team (which comes into the field in 2008 allegedly running this year’s McLaren chassis) probably at a knock-down cost in comparison to being attached to McLaren, Ferrari, Renault or BMW.
Being in a high-paced, “winner takes all” environment like motor sports would count a great deal more to the people who own and run small to medium sized businesses than the Olympics which is really an advert aimed at monolithic corporations. It would also – in the case of F1 – give Apple seventeen to nineteen chances in a given season to entertain potential customers and employees for a three-day period which is a better ROI than the Olympics where you get three weeks every four years.
However, since Tony George and FOA have chosen to part company, the problem is that Apple would have to follow IndyCar or Nascar in the US and F1 for the rest of the world. The only other option for global reach would be MotoGP or World Superbikes, either of which would be cheaper although bike racing is – quite rightly – still seen as a sport in which the rider’s skill and determination is almost more important than the technology he’s straddling.
Oh, my god, who’d want to sponsor Dave Richards’ Prodrive F1 team?!? I love F1 and Champcars, but sponsoring motorsports is a waste of a company’s money. F1 has doctored their viewership numbers for years.
As far as B2B opportunities, if Apple was interested in B2B, then it might make sense, but Apple is a consumer products company. Sponsorship is a waste of money. Apple is far better off continuing its current marketing strategy. You do know that AMD and Acer sponsor Ferrari, while HP sponsors BMW in Formula 1, and I don’t see either of those sponsorships being that useful to those companies.
Apple, and the broader market in general, is really taking a hit today!
Some of the adult Olympians were still in grade school when XP came out.
I believe they’ve just invited hackers to take them down.
“I believe they’ve just invited hackers to take them down.”
Or take them up.
Somehow, the Chinese will end up dominating the gold medal count and Taiwan will be an unexplainable no-show.
Watch out for lead poisoning in the silver and bronze medals.
I’ve been part in TOROC – Torino 2006 Winter Olympic Committee – and I can tell you where the problem stands: 99 % of the people who work in organizing and running this kind of event has only seen PCs. In no way it could be possible to have all these people trained to OS X. Remeber that we’re talking about around 3000 paid staff and 25.000 volunteers for a Winter Olympic Game. And the number is bigger in a Summer Olympic Game. And IT has to be accessible to all.
Simply put: huge organizations made of people coming from around the world, with a set dateline and objective will always choose Windows.
7 year old OS for the modern Olympics.
Oh come now. How old is Unix? Mac OS X’s underpinnings were around when the Apple 1 was born.
Of course, the Olympics were around over 2000 years ago.
And, China is a 5000 year old civilization that predates paper.
Chisel those damn 100 meter dash times on stone, the way Buddha meant it to be done.
If this was about dropping Windows for Mac or Linux, I’d say it was news worthy. Simply not upgrading to VIsta from XP (yet) is hardly news for Mac users to crow about. I’m all for Mac news and wish MDN wasn’t so blatantly an anti-MS site just looking for vain articles to slam Windows users.
Is it really about stability, or is it that Vista requires a license key server and more stringent activation, which means China can’t use pirated copies of it as easily?
“If this was about dropping Windows for Mac or Linux, I’d say it was news worthy. Simply not upgrading to VIsta from XP (yet) is hardly news for Mac users to crow about. I’m all for Mac news and wish MDN wasn’t so blatantly an anti-MS site just looking for vain articles to slam Windows users.”
Exactly! It’s not Microsoft’s fault that hardware companies aren’t updating their drivers fast enough. But hey, let’s just blame Microsoft anyways, right MDN? This site is the reason that people are put off from the Mac platform. The childish anti-Microsoft attitude.
Who cares? The Olympics suck more than the Tour de France does.
Whatever.
Does the mac have any presence in China?
To my knowledge, outside of the expat market in Beijing, the mac user community is miniscule. And in spite of the fact that most Apple products are made in Chins, macs are imported and subject to 17% VAT. Apple provides little support to mac owners in China, or at least that’s what I’ve been told.
The only alternative to MS Windows in China is Linux.
Apple should do something in China. That would definitely increase the global market share which currently is stuck around 3%.
Sorry,
should be made in China
Twisted Mac Freak,
I just laughed my balls off. Ouch!
You are way cool. So cool… the coolest. Yeah, real coooool.
Whatever.