I think Microsoft should be slapped with a class action lawsuit.
The fact that they are forcing every user , corporate or personal to switch to Vista or higher and spend allot of time and $$$ is insane when there is nothing wrong with XP and XP pro. They finely got it right and now here we go again. After they actually gain back the trust of most people who went through the horror of, dear I say it (M E). Vista basically is an absolute nightmare with most hardware. Since it arrived we are now faced with paying more money on a PC that barely supports it without upgrading the system you just bought. What is wrong with this picture?? I put up with it because like most people I got sucked in thinking it is the way to go.Personally I think it is time to start thinking about migrating to Mac.They have been very patient with there product knowing this day would come.When they looked doomed years ago they kept there head above water and kept trying.My hat is off to them.

As someone working in the IT branch outside the U.S. this is viewed by me as a worst-case scenario that caught the industry by surprise, because of the relatively small time frame between the launch and adaptation of Vista and the termination of XP support. This was not the case with 2000 Pro and XP as XP was available shortly after 2000 Pro had been out and the cost of an upgrade was relatively lower than from XP to Vista. In a developing country, where the majority of businesses are just now focusing on software licensing compliance, this becomes a nightmare very fast. At this stage more time and money is lost by trying to estimate what the impact of an alternative (ubuntu linux) will be for small to medium businesses. I personally am convinced that the consumers will eventually quit complaining about Vista because it's not bad (and yes, linux also has an annoying prompt that asks for a password for just about every major action but can be turned off just like in windows.

If MS is dedicated to making money, then your "if you don't like it, don't buy it" shows how stupid their current position is. That's the point. I won't buy it. I personally replaced UNIX workstations and Mac desktops in 1993 with Windows NT 3.1 and I am a Microsoft Certified Instructor in their Server products. I've implemented and supported every release of MS Server and Desktop OS since then. Your juvenile defense of what Microsoft is "entitled to do" will do nothing to keep Microsoft from going down the tubes. What are they going to do when their fiercest defenders (which I have consistently been and hope to be in the future) are ready to scrap them and switch to Ubuntu or to Leopard?

By the way, how is it "whining" to point out the truth: that a company that has produced a string of great products for 15 years, and now brings out a complete dog (let me define dog for you: half as fast, needs twice as much memory, and has poor driver support) and on top of that stops selling or supporting the only desktop OS they make that actually works...how is it "whining" to point out they're being foolish and arrogant?

Microsoft has sure been spending a lot of money to get "researchers" to talk about Vista's "inevitability" lately. Imagine so messing up your core business that you have to rely on intimidation to get people to adopt your product?

You should stop knocking Vista. After all, it is everything Apple could have hoped for.

I work for a multinational industrial company which employs fifty thousand people in the U.S, alone. We just updated our networked workstations to XP SP2 (from SP1) about a year ago because of incompatibilities with some of our older proprietary software, so for Mr Keizer to say that upgrading to Vista is inevitable shows a great degree of cluelessness on his part, of how real businesses work. We have a lot of proprietary software which won't run under Vista, and even more very expensive hardware (various lab analyzers, SEMs, etc), some of which still run Windows98 because the hardware doesn't support Windows XP. If either Microsoft, or the article's author thinks that it's feasible for a company such as this to lay out many millions of dollars for software and hardware upgrades just to run Vista, they're sadly mistaken. The software for the types of scientific equipment that we use are often one to two operating systems behind the latest and greatest that Microsoft tries to ram down our throats, because they use very expensive proprietary software that can't be upgraded at Microsoft's whim.

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SOME PEOPLE ARE LIKE SLINKIES - NOT REALLY GOOD FOR ANYTHING, BUT THEY BRING A SMILE TO YOUR FACE WHEN PUSHED DOWN THE STAIRS.

"Inevitable???" What a load of hooey! Has this "analyst" even thought about the cost to the business world, state and federal governments, educational institutions and the rest of the user community? Hardware upgrades, software upgrades, endless downtime...installing, reconfiguring, downloading patches...etc...etc...
It's time to WAKE UP EVERYONE!
Yes...I AM a MAC user...made the switch a year ago. No problems with my "propietary" hardware - works flawlessly. Operating system has NEVER crashed.
I did call tech support once...with a question about USB port configurations. Quick, knowledgeable, polite, easy to understand. EXCELLENT service!
I use my MAC everyday for offsite report writing and communication with my Windows based company. Even use Office for the MAC but recently changed to IWork 08 and have NEVER had a file compatibility issue.

There IS a better way to work...Microsoft lost me with a terrible experience with Vista. Many of my colleagues too...