Windows VISTA

[jan1024188]

[apoorv_khurasia]

Reuter's News (link may be removed after sometime)
The OS is out but it will not be available to retail marketers until Jan. 30th however, the report says.

[macondo]

This is an enlightening article for the 'unwashed masses', in my opinion.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2...8_001308.html#

Excerpt:
"Microsoft -- a company that eventually learns from its mistakes -- will not make that particular mistake again, certainly not with Windows Vista, in which they have a $5 billion investment.

What we'll see for ourselves and read about over the next six months, then, are users complaining about Vista instability, an inevitably emerging vulnerability to hackers, and applications that don't work as well as they do under XP. Enterprise customers will hold back in droves. But does any of that make Vista a failure? Nope.

Those who are trying to figure out if Vista will be successful haven't yet grasped the concept that Vista will be forced on the market, and in time it will be the only operating system you can buy from Microsoft. Of course it will be successful. Will people upgrade their existing systems? Of course not. Microsoft operating systems are always designed for future PC's, not for the installed base. Part of the plan is to make Vista work poorly on current computers so we'll all have to buy new ones. This strategy has been around for years and there is no reason to believe we won't fall for it again. Sure, some percentage of people and firms will upgrade, but most of the upgrades will come with whole new computers.

Think back to the Windows 95 introduction, where one of the selling points was that the new OS would work fine on a 66 MHz 486 computer. The truth was that it would RUN on a 486, but not well, so after a try of Win95 on our old hardware, rather than go to some other operating system we all bought new machines. And we'll do that again with Vista."

[burntfuse]

To be totally fair, you can turn off all the effects and go back to the 9x-style theme to get it to run on an older machine, but it still is nowhere near lightweight, and honestly, who's going to do that? An average person's thoughts are going to go like this after seeing Vista: "Oooh, look at those transparent windows and all the pretty stuff! And they flip to one side? Gimme right now, I don't care how much hardware it takes!"

[duffman108]

Microsoft - We love to screwover our customers, and make billions by doing so.
Microsoft - We don't invent ideas, for we wait till other people think of them, take their idea, slap our logo, and say we were the first.

[bigtomrodney]

Okay I think this thread has been dwindling away from its original purpose for a while now. I'm going to close this off before it gets any more negative.