Hey, Billy, as regards Vista [1]… I tend to concur. But you apparently have forgotten the first rule of Microsoft operating systems. Never use version one of anything they produce. By chance, do you remember Windows Millennium Edition? Case in point.
Keep in mind, I do this stuff for a living, these days,so this is not an idle funny; I’m deadly serious.
To make matters even worse, Microsoft has decided that they’re not going to be supporting XP , very shortly, and in fact by early next year that contracts with manufacturing concerns will only let them sell PCs with Vista loaded on them. No XP. [2]
I suspect that at some point that situation is going to have to change. The pressure from the manufacturers who are getting clobbered with support issues on an unstable operating system, which is precisely what Vista is, will become far too loud to ignore.
Even absent the stability issues within Vista many businesses are still going to be operating on the old OS. That’s a simple fact of life. Mostly, there is little or no advantage to most of these businesses to upgrade their operating systems at several hundred dollars a crack. It’s going to be interesting to see what files out of all of this. My guess is we will see a version 1.1 out before that axe falls in the spring of 08.
For the meantime, I will continue running my combinations of NT, XP, and 2000, along with the two linux boxes I run.