Upgrade treadmill reloaded
Summary: Windows XP is declared clinically dead (although it's not), Windows Vista has totally vanished from the news, and the shameless PR for Vista 7 continues despite relatively low adoption
"XP is Dead," says IDG and this is obviously an exaggeration. It is actually good news for GNU/Linux and for BSD (XP-grade computers are not sufficiently powerful for current versions of Windows). One key milestone is Dell's ending of XP:
Dell has become the first, but it will not be the last, to bid adieu to Microsoft’s workhorse operating system, XP.
This was also covered in articles such as [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6].
Needless to say, Dell won't be selling Vista, either. Hyped today, gone tomorrow. But a lot of people may not realise that Vista was far more profitable than
Vista 7 at its time (we explained the
decline in Windows profit some months ago). We found not a single headline about "Vista" in two weeks (nothing about "Azure" or "Hotmail", either) and
Mary Jo Microsoft is just pushing everyone to Vista 7, helped by
Gartner hype (Microsoft is a client of
Gartner, which sells bias). One must remember that Gartner was very optimistic about Vista, which made a lot more money than Vista 7. Gartner helped market it by selling the illusion that a lot of enterprises would inevitably adopt it within months [
1,
2]. Vista 7 too
has adoption problems in enterprises (no compelling reasons for upgrades), but Microsoft does not like to talk about it. Mary Jo Microsoft, Gartner, and the rest of this dishonest clique can shout "Vista 7" all they want, but enterprises -- unlike home users -- are more prudent and less susceptible to marketing hypnosis. Two weeks ago we wrote that
Vista 7 price drops show its sales are poor. The IE9 preview release is
an example of Microsoft's more forceful push for people to buy Vista 7 rather than use another company's Web browser.
Vista may seem like one of the dead products like SteadyState. Here is a somewhat
belated article about the
death of SteadyState (one among many
dead products from Microsoft). Judging by Vista's lifeline, it might not be long before Vista 7 too is passé. Why not move to GNU/Linux, which is constantly upgraded reliably and free of charge?
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