Pure & simple, XP is going nowhere – and that’s just fine with me! Hobbyists and hacker wannabes are always all over switching to Linux. But corporate users are locked in not by their preference for an OS, but by their mission-critical applications – which are written for Windows. Windows is far too entrenched in the enterprise – and corporate software vendors are far too slow to change – for anything to change anytime soon.

In my own setting (a healthcare facility), we’re still bound into IE 6 for our browser because of a handful of mission-critical, enterprise-wide, web-based apps that we simply cannot replace. And these are not from a single vendor, but several unrelated vendors whose apps are only officially supported on IE 6. Now, sure, you can (in some of these cases) get away with running their apps in IE 7, but who could afford the liability of doing so?

MS is NOT a consumer-friendly company. Their EULAs are sickening, they treat customers as thieves with WGA, they routinely “tweak” data formats to get users to upgrade to their newer applications, they’re in bed with big business to the detriment of all of us – including future privacy issues.

There are viable alternative Operating Systems *freely* available in the form of Linux and BSD, as well as the commercially available Mac OS X.

Has it reached the point where customers are begging and whining a company for a little respect only to be continually crapped on? What’s wrong with Microsoft customers? Is their no sense of self-respect?

Microsoft couldn’t care less about what makes sense in nearly everything they engage in so people need to stop acting so betrayed – betraying their customers and partners is what helps define Microsoft. Everyone’s been warned about this company for 20-plus years so ‘get with the program’ and buy Vista or take a little control of your lives and move to another perfectly viable Operating System.