In message 
<[log in to unmask]>, 
Ray Shahan <[log in to unmask]> writing at 16:05:41 in his/her 
local time opines:-
>I may sound like a conspiracy theorist (and I am), but it could be said
>that MS may have pulled off a great marketing scheme (rip-off) with
>VISTA?

>Let's face it, most folks (like me) never upgrade their OS until they
>buy a new PC, but now, it's very likely that folks (including me) will
>buy W7 just because VISTA gives me/us grief, and thus, MS will sell a
>lot of upgrades through the more profitable retail channels rather than
>through PC maker's hardware sales.

>My son's laptop came with a free (so they say) upgrade to W7, but my
>laptop and my desktop PC are older, and I have to pay for the upgrade.

>Just a thought...

>Raymond Shahan

My heuristic is that a conspiracy takes a great deal of skill, whereas 
almost anybody can engineer a cock-up.

And Vista was a cock-up.

For everyone who buys W7 to replace Vista, there is probably someone who 
stayed on XP instead of upgrading their PC/laptop; and Vista was such 
that very few machines could be upgraded to it, even if you wanted to, 
dying in a plethora of incompatible hardware and drivers, inadequate 
hard drive capacities and blizzards of unwelcome UAC messages.

My guess is that Vista was such a black hole for Microsoft's revenue 
that they have had to rush W7 out, instead of going on, even now, to the 
more radical revamp that Vista was supposed to be.

But W7 is going to be quite stable because, deep down, it is only what 
Vista would have been if MS had had enough time to get it right in the 
first place.

Vista *hurt* MS; the last such misfire was Windows ME, which did the 
same, and here again many people skipped it. But at that time, MS had 
the brilliant Windows 2000 for the professional market, which many 
people still swear by, and regard as the last proper 'NT' OS.

With XP, MS put all its eggs in one basket. With Vista, it dropped that 
basket. They'll have to sell a lot of W7 eggs, just to break back even.

-- 
Roy Brown        'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be
Kelmscott Ltd     useful, or believe to be beautiful'  William Morris

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