Mary-Jo Foley highlights the confusion of Microsoft's Windows upgrade roadmap.
I've no idea what corporate Windows users are likely to do, faced with this mess. But M$ could be making it a lot better. Here's one suggestion : Give Windows 7 away, free-as-in-beer, to all existing Windows Vista licensees. XP users still have to pay to upgrade, but M$ should get everyone off Vista and on to Windows 7 as quickly as possible.
This is, of course, assuming that Windows 7 is as good as everyone says it is. But what about earlier incompatibility issues? Once again I ask, isn't Windows 7 based on the same core as Vista? Are they making it better than Vista by undoing some of the things that were new in Vista? Can 7 be both more compatible with XP and more compatible with all the new .NET stuff that came out on Vista?
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1 comment:
Phil, sorry up front for even commenting--I know so little.
The question Foley raises: "On which version of Windows should I standardize as my corporate desktop?" clearly means Vista or Windows 7. I don't mean to go off too far on a tangent. But I really wonder if it really makes sense for MS to simply ditch XP when it's still the most widely used OS for desktops.
Large corporate customers are clearly MS most important customers, but market share makes a difference. Business won't use Windows without anti-virus. Perhaps one of the anti-virus makers will make services that work well with ReactOS.
Maybe that's far-fetched, but in the comments thread on the Foley piece was a librarian who pointed out how antiquated the hardware they depend on is. Business, education and government are all going to be slower to replace old hardware in this environment; even replace hardware with used hardware. XP is going to be around for a while.
If I were MS I would take ReactOS seriously and want to provide XP support so as not to loose market share. Doing so as SaaS make sense, packaged along with anti-virus software seems the most direct way of doing it.
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