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Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

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Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#61

Post by pionar »

simonw wrote: post #20
alexchamberlain wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an office near work that gives its receptionists Macs; it looks great, but an insane amount of money for the functionality they use I'm sure.

Alternatively, if it saves them a few days of work in lost productivity due to malware, viruses and unintuitive software, it's a great investment.

Ha, I had to laugh at the "unintuitive software" bit. It's only unintuitive to a Mac user. I'm not insulting here, it works the other way, too. I recently bought a Mac to see what all the fuss was about, and am finding many things in OS X to be very counter-intuitive as a PC (Win/Linux) user for so many years.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#62

Post by terhechte »

jsingleton wrote: post #60
terhechte wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found that there's a great gap or schism between common digital signage projects. On the one hand you have solutions that just want to display 5 pictures or a simple website (current dish of the day, bus tables, train schedules, current news) and on the other hand you have high profile vendors that want (multiple) absolutely stutter free HD content (with huge bitrates because so much is going on in their animations…

We built a custom web page that auto detects and scales to different resolutions. We also made a self service admin interface but it was just text and a few images. The Pi has a surprisingly powerful GPU but I've not tried HW acceleration from the browser. Something to look into maybe.

I haven't looked into the Pi yet, we used Mac Minis and frequently ran into its limits, so I just thought that it should be even more problematic on the Pi. I do think that the market for small and simple solutions (webpage with a bit of text, images, etc) is far more interesting and bigger than trying to sell to the Fortune 500 like my former company does, because these have really difficult requirements, and they're prone to simply rolling their own solution. So in short I think doing Digital Signage on the Pi is a great idea :)

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#63

Post by stusmall »

"When all you have is hammers the whole world starts looking like nails."

Sure as hell not the way I'd do it, but for a non-critical system that really just kind of sits there and doesn't cause any problems when it crashes, why not if they only know Windows desktop dev and are only deploying a few? Use what you know.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#65

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

dhimes wrote: post #51
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #27

Last year I was on an aircraft watching the IFE, then it froze, I got a kernel panic, then it restarted, I was left looking at a Linux logo then the init output before being thrown back into the IFE interface. My point is that no general purpose OS is immune from fault. All you can really do is remove or disable things which aren't absolutely needed to get your work done. In this case they should have disabled Window…

I saw one boot last week on a Delta flight. I was very surprised to see Tux.

Me too! I tried to get a picture but was too slow unfortunately.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#66

Post by Systemic33 »

Havoc wrote: post #17
zdw wrote: post #10

People use what they know. Given a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you work in IT for any length of time, you come across people who use Excel as a text combiner to parse tabular text in ways similar to how a regex could, or have similar convoluted workarounds for any number of tasks. In some ways, these are quite clever hacks. In other ways, it's kind of sad as it obviously shows how badly GUI-centric "It's…

> people who use Excel as a text combiner to parse tabular text in ways similar to how a regex could, or have similar convoluted workarounds for any number of tasks. Yep. Large parts of the finance crowd are Excel experts so it makes sense to use that. Why bother with regex when you know the Excel shortcuts, functions & behaviour off by heart. That plus I don't need to explain to IT/manager why I'm messing with softw…

Before I got a studentjob, I thought I was pretty good with the Office Suite and the rest of Windows, but then when you get a job in that kind of industry, you realise, that these people who wouldn't know how to open regedit, use Excel in ways you wouldn't think possible.

For that reason, whenever i look at job postings, if there is any mention of Excel or VB script, i instantly close the browsertab... I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#67

Post by stusmall »

_random_ wrote: post #32
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #8

Because .NET makes it very easy for average developers to write GUI programs, and Visual Studio is what they use to write them. In theory, this developer could just use Mono to run his .NET app on Linux. But that requires them to learn how to do that. Personally, I've never found a clear tutorial on how to take a .NET GUI app that you've just written in Visual Studio and get it running on Mono. I haven't looked in se…

".NET makes it very easy for average developers to write GUI programs" - it makes it easy for any kind of developer, that's the defining characteristic of best frameworks.

For me the desired characteristics in a framework are the quality, stability and efficiency of the end product and then ease of use comes later. Its not that way for everyone, but I wouldn't simply say ease of use is the defining characteristic of the best tool sets.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#68

Post by smtddr »

route66 wrote: post #54
terhechte wrote: post #21

I've worked for quite some time in the digital display industry, at a company which has a very feature rich, Mac OS X based digital signage solution [1] with high profile customers such as Mercedes-Benz, or Disney. Since the company is small, it is easy to be part of all steps of the process, including marketing and sales. I learned a lot about B2B buying behaviour while I worked for this company. We oftentimes ran i…

You frame the three points a bit derogatory and seem to have missed the point of your customers. > Windows was the OS that the company was also using for employee machines, so they knew it. They understand it, have an idea about the cost and amount of support necessary. "They knew it" seems to convey that they were essentially stupid or not adventurous enough to try something else. > The IT department only wanted Win…

So, from my 6yrs in SBC/AT&T, the OP is completely correct and I don't see anything insulting in his comment. That's exactly how they made decisions when I was there. It doesn't make them wrong per se, but that's how they functioned. In fact, I think OP was being nice. A lot nicer than the description I'd give.

I could type up 3 pages of my experience there, but I'll just say that because it was my first job: It took me 4 years to confidently identify the 3 points OP listed(that it wasn't me that had a problem), one more year of research for me to learn that living in the bay area put me in the middle of the tech-start-up scene that had a mindset like my own, and another year to replace all the expensive proprietary software tools on my resume with trendy open-source alternatives.... then I left.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#69

Post by rangelreale »

I'm the lead developer in a company that does just digital signage software in Brazil.

Recently we rewrote from stratch our software in Qt so it would run on Linux and Android, even on the Raspberry Pi.

The main barriers we found in Linux adoption were:

- Support staff only knows Windows. This gets worse when screens get installed in remote areas, like we have some screens at Manaus, in the Amazon Forest. There is just no one to support Linux there.

- Flash support state in Linux is unknown. Adobe seems to be discontinuing support for flash in Linux, and flash movies cannot be run on the Raspberry Pi or any ARM device.

- HTML5 is the next target, but even on Windows the embedded webbrowsers are not up to par yet on performance, in Raspberry Pi it is inviable. It cannot replace 100% Flash yet.

- Remote admin support on dynamic IP is great in Windows with Logmein, terrible on other platforms. Yes there's TeamViewer on Linux but it seem not too stable, not to say it looks like to be running emulated. Our customers don't trust it the way they trust Logmein.

That said, we are seeing increased Linux adoptions for some markets. If the Qt5 Blink-based webbrowser is more on par in performance with current desktop browsers, than the adoption may rise a lot.

EDIT: fix newlines

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#70

Post by krallin »

Spearchucker wrote: post #25
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #8

Because .NET makes it very easy for average developers to write GUI programs, and Visual Studio is what they use to write them. In theory, this developer could just use Mono to run his .NET app on Linux. But that requires them to learn how to do that. Personally, I've never found a clear tutorial on how to take a .NET GUI app that you've just written in Visual Studio and get it running on Mono. I haven't looked in se…

Not to detract from your points (you make good ones); web is probably not a good medium for such displays. Not always, at least. You'd want them to be reasonably functional without comms. Last I checked (I may be wrong), HTML 5 constrains local storage to 5Mb, which is precious little, if the display uses images/media.

I'm not an expert in embedded displays, but I assume you'd simply run a webserver on localhost.
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