Seriously though... some time ago, Microsoft tried to force laptop manufacturers to only install Vista on their laptops, not XP anymore. That backired... XP had to be reintroduced.
Why is it that Microsoft is cutting support for XP so sharply? Cos they want to convince the world that Vista is actually good so they make more money. And work has already been in progress on the next Vista-based operating system for some time now, so they can sell the same thing under a different name.
For the same reason that Martin no longer supports Orbiter2003. The same reason that any software company stops supporting their old software.
XP was "reintroduced" only because of the super-micro laptops (like the eeePC) which don't have the minimum requirements for Vista. These represent a rather unusual trend in hardware--typically, hardware specs go *up* as time goes on, not *down.*
Of course work is in progress on Win7. What do you expect the entire Windows team to be doing, sitting on their hands?
And having seen Win7--no, it isn't the same thing. Not even close. The system requirements should be no higher than Vista, but it's definitely better.
Microsoft has tried for ten years to push any hint of a console out of the system, just to later introduce Visual Basic and PowerShell when they figured out it wasn't gonna work. Guess where that came from?
I don't know what you mean, push any hint of a console out of the system. The vast majority of computer users don't want a console. It scares them.
Besides, the sole purpose of the operating system is to allocate resources to other programs. The user should never interact or actually see the operating system. And look what Microsoft has done - Vista, when it came out, needed more RAM to function then most of the games of that time. It actually needed a powerful, expensive graphics card to run. And a computer with a single core CPU was no longer enough.
Again, the
average user disagrees. They use the operating system to get to their Word or their IE or whatever, and if it looks cool, hey all the better. The
average user is where the money is, so that's who Microsoft aims at.
My test box over the summer was a single-core machine with only 1GB of RAM, and it ran Vista passably if you turned off all the nifty features. And no,
Vista does not need a powerful, expensive graphics card to run. The features that need graphics cards (ie, Aero) can easily be turned off.
Don't you see? It's a circle. Hardware manufacturers stop writing drivers that would run on older operating systems, forcing people to buy new operating systems. And Microsoft just provides a bigger, greedier operating system so the users are forced into buying a new computer to run them.
You're never *forced* to buy a new operating system. If you want to keep doing the stuff you're already doing, then you can keep your old one. If you want to do the newest, most top-of-the-line stuff,
of course you need a better system. If you're expecting to run top-of-the-line games on a computer from 2001, your expectations are what need to be corrected.
Retailers get paid to force such ridiculous warranties for their PCs and Microsoft is ensured that people can't use any other operating system.
Retailers get paid by who? Microsoft? Absolutely not. The warranty for your PC has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft and everything to do with your PC manufacturer.
In one of the larger department meetings we had over the summer, the idea was jokingly kicked around to give Win7 a "remove crapware" tool which would allow the user to remove all the junk that manufacturers put on their computers.
Just look around, there's plenty of proof.
You make incorrect assertions, and then claim that there's proof?
