Story PC MAG: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759...079TX1K0000584

I don't.

First off they make to much money from it.
Secondly they have all of the ideas that they didn't put into Vista still being worked on. (Not saying that they are good or bad but they have them)
Thirdly they make to much money from it.

Meh. Dvorak is nuts.

Vista has a few key advances, like taking some of the graphics and other non-essentials out of the core ring, but on the outside it looks like XP with WindowBlinds.

Yeah, but XP was just 2000 with pretty additions.

The fact is, Vista is a evolutionary OS, not a revolutionary. They are making a more solid OS for the world to use. I think that's good.

The past few Mac OS's have a similar theme too. If you look at archive screenshots of Windows 95, to 98 to 2000 to XP, they are all VERY similar. I bet you can make 95 look like Vista with a few hours of tweaking.

My point is, if you brought Windows 95 out now, it wouldn't be able to withstand the onslaught of anything, and you need a power horse like Vista to handle it.

XP does seem to have better Plug and Play stuff than 2000 does, but I think you are essentially correct.

I was happy with 2000. I was happy with Win 98 SE even. I'll learn to live with XP. But I wish they would not force these upgrades on us.

I can understand wanting to get way from the 9x codebase. Fine. But with 2k and now XP, we are there. What's the rush for them to get Vista out the door?

Don't you think XP is good enough? It combines the NT codebase with Plug and Play and is a decent OS for both home users and businesses. I'm not sure what Vista offers to the average consumer, except perhaps more stability due to the core-ring changes.

There is just one reason and it's called DRM.

It's just a trend of computers and consumer electronics being progressively merged into one greater technology. Media fusion. People in the 1960s used "dumb" terminals to use computers. People in the 1980s used 8-bit computers running DOS on black-and-white screens. People in the 1990s used 16-bit and 32-bit computers running GUI-based OS on color screens. More recently, there have been several major OS revisions: Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Media Edition, Windows Tablet Edition, Windows CE, Windows Vista. The trend is clear. Anyone who wants to complain about large memory usage and slower responses should consider going back to Windows 3.1 or even DR-DOS 5. Just choose the right OS for your application needs and hardware resources.

DRM - the ONLY reason? Maybe one of the key reasons, but not the only I would think.

Still - what a pain in the tail, this DRM stuff.

You asked whats the rush.

Which is why anyone with any basic PC skills is currently evaluating Linux as a potential upgrade when XP becomes dated in approximately 2-4 years.

Linux = freedom ..... Vista = shackles.

Where do you want to go today? Bah!
Where would you like to be to shackled today.

At any rate .. I'm a tad more worried about this.
I'll be recommending XP for all IT hardware to my bosses for awhile yet

OS X is a viable alternative. Shouldn't be long before it'll run natively on regular Intel hardware used for PC's

... but .. from the restrictive embrace of one corporate giant, into the arms of another ...

Vista will be the last version of Windows that exists in its current, monolithic form, according to Gartner.

Instead, the research firm predicts, Microsoft will be forced to migrate Windows to a modular architecture tied together through hardware-supported virtualisation. "The current, integrated architecture of Microsoft Windows is unsustainable - for enterprises and for Microsoft," wrote Gartner analysts Brian Gammage, Michael Silver and David Mitchell Smith.

The problem is that the operating system's increasing complexity is making it ever more difficult for enterprises to implement migrations, and impossible for Microsoft to release regular updates. This, in turn, stands in the way of Microsoft's efforts to push companies to subscription licensing.

The answer, according to Gartner, is virtualisation, which is built into newer chips from Intel and AMD, and has become mainstream for x86 servers through the efforts of VMware. "Once Windows includes virtualisation at its core, we expect OS development to change direction from integration to modularisation," the analysts wrote.

Virtualisation is best known as a way of running multiple server instances on a single hardware platform, but it can also be used to run individual operating system functions or applications. The technique isolates the various components from one another, making them easier to manage. Gartner believes Microsoft will use virtualisation to divide the Windows client into a "service partition", controlling system functions such as management and security, and one or more application partitions. Such a path is already being followed in the x86 server world, Gartner said.

"The combination of the service partition and the ability to deliver horizontal functions in software appliances provides the key for unbundling the Windows OS," the analysts wrote. Such an architecture would allow Microsoft to make major development changes to Windows without worrying about disrupting dependencies across the entire operating system. This, in turn, would mean the company could release regular updates, and would make backward compatibility easier.

Next-generation Windows-based partitions "could run in parallel to partitions running kernels with the Vista/NT code base," wrote Gammage, Silver and Smith. They said Microsoft doesn't agree with this vision, saying it's identified problems with integrating data across partitions and creating a consistent user experience. "However, we regard these concerns as only partially founded, and anticipate a key role for virtualisation in the required unbundling of the Windows OS," the analysts said.

Gartner expects a significant update to Vista in late 2008 or 2009 that will add virtualisation (in the form of a component called a hypervisor) and a service partition. The hypervisor will allow more frequent updates, and will make the Software Assurance subscription scheme effectively mandatory for Windows from around 2010, Gartner said. To date, Microsoft's main effort to simplify Windows development, in 2004, was to rebuild Windows into a stack of more than 50 layers, Gartner said.

"Upper layers could have dependencies on lower layers, but lower layers could not be dependent on upper ones," the analysts wrote. "This would allow it to lockdown lower layers when complete and worry less about compatibility changes as it worked up the stack." But this redesign is not enough to ease Microsoft's ongoing development and delivery problems, or the deployment difficulties of enterprises, Gartner said.

This is one look at it and I tend to lean towards Womble too on this.

The future is open source and that is not Mircosoft, The bigger they are the harder they fall.

I don't mind using the OS X as an alternative.

I also wanted to add that if this is the last OS no more anydvd for users to backup there movie collection. Clonedvd2 is in the process over at japan I think it was to run on a mac but there is no good decrypter's though. Although I heard on a linux that you just need a reader and a writer program to back up never tried it though.

I'd like to raise that bet with another $50.

I bet that once Microsoft has done enough evil it will be banished from the public, but the companies and governments will already be forced to stay at the Microsoft Operating Systems due to costs and other stuff. It'll take another ten years to get totally rid of Microsoft, which gives them the same ten years (and their huge pile of money) to recuperate via marketing or other evil schemes.

Microsoft will never die. Too many people have already become far to dependant on it.

Lemmings = disappointment

This was another aspect I was looking at and if vista generates a lot of money well we all know it will then it will push out another it's sad though as the main mind to build vista is leaving after the release of the new OS and that will make it hard to replace such a great mind.