Robert Pogson

M$’s biggest product is vapourware but they do an excellent job of selling it one feature at a time in order to capture mind-share. OTOH anyone who looks at what is finally delivered as value/dollar will be shocked at what many pay for second-rate software. Remember the wonderful features for Longhorn Vista? They turned out to be worse than the features of GNU/Linux from years earlier. Then there was the malware. Backwards compatibility revived some from the ancient days of the web.

Now, the strip-teases is almost over. It looks like they will charge top-dollar for a service pack to Vista without a neat upgrade path from XP, the world’s most common OS.

Some will pay. They feel they cannot use their PCs without M$’s help. So helpless are they that they equate IT with M$. Others are more alert and have already figured out that they have been charmed by a snake. They have checked out GNU/Linux by the millions and will be adopting GNU/Linux rather than going with Vista II. Interestingly, wide adoption of GNU/Linux will scarcely bother M$’s bottom line, now that they are charging for service packs and the locked-in have agreed to remain locked-in. M$ can charge these folks whatever M$ wants. They will continue to pay.

The malware aretists are loving this. They can continue to target a single OS and reap huge rewards for years to come. The rest of us will be free for many years. It is all good.