I have been accused of being a zealot for GNU/Linux, hater of M$, and ignorant of Vista. I will own up to the first two, on rational bases. My exposure to Vista has been brief and horrible. I can debate Vista. However, what do the statements by Intel that they will not deploy Vista say? Intel is one of the most tech-savvy firms on the planet. If after a year and a half, they agree with my observations that Vista is a dog and unfit to run on their systems, I can claim the justification that folks who know Vista much better than I come to the same conclusion.
More significantly, this is an assertion by one half of Wintel that things are broken at M$. Where will this lead? Will Intel cling to XP until M$ up-chucks something else? Signs are that it will be Vista II, containing the same useless features that are an advantage only to M$ no matter what the feature is called by the sales department. Will M$ finally get the message that they have to behave and to earn money the old-fashioned way, earning it? Will Intel go to GNU/Linux on the next round of upgrades? MacOS? Roll their own? I doubt they will stampede any particular direction but they will diversify, weakening the dependence on M$ which is a sinking ship. No large organization can risk being locked-in to a supplier which produces a horror like Vista and then pressures customers to migrate to that horror.
About the time of the next release of that other OS, we shall know the truth. Will the monopoly be truly gone or just weakened? I predict the monopoly will fail again to fix Vista because it is not fixable by design. That is the ultimate lock-in, M$ is locked-in too. They cannot free themselves without freeing their customers. If they free the customers, 25 to 50% will migrate to something else, perhaps GNU/Linux because of the proprietary hardware of Apple. If they try to release Vista II, Moore’s Law may get them out of trouble on performance but drives are still the bottleneck. If you need a ton of RAM just to hold files, you might as well use GNU/Linux on a terminal server for a lot less cash. If they try again to lock-in customers to Vista, a lot more will wake up. The low-end has crumbled. Expect the middle to crumble in a couple of years. The high-end may go its own way just because performance is big there. M$ cannot impose its machinations on the world and deliver performance. XP and Vista have shown that. Vista II will make even the sheeple aware.
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“I predict the monopoly will fail again to fix Vista because it is not fixable by design.”
Exactly. The next version of Vista, Windows 7 AKA Vista SP1 will be decisive for the future of MS. And this future is not looking bright.
It will be a shock to the world of IT, but the decline of the empire will be a good thing. People all over the world will be challenged to think for themselves and to come up with better solutions. GNU/Linux and FLOSS will flourish. Consumers, OEMs and retailers will have real choices. It is about time.