Re: Vista

Richard wrote:

Microsoft's customers are Dell, Gateway, HP, etc and _not_ the end
user. Slowing down XP would result in many end-users buying more
powerful replacement machines from Microsoft's customers, and these
will have Vista installed so MS collects revenue. They will also get
extra revenue when the user buys a retail XP to install over Vista.

Most hardware suppliers (Dell, et al) will replace Vista with XP. Some new
hardware, especially laptops, can't run XP because the drivers for their
unique hardware are Vista-specific.


MS needs to keep their customer's happy and selling lots of Windows
boxes, otherwise they may start selling cheaper machines with Linux.
If people are actually happy with existing XP machines then the price
gap to new Vista and beyond will become too great.

Linux accounts for less than 1% of the desktop market (0.86% was the last
number I saw). This is roughly equivalent to OS2.


The main competitor to Windows and Office is older versions of those.
As well as eliminating other competitors MS must also ensure that
older versions of their software stop working. They do this with
Office by introducing new incompatible formats that older versions
can't read, and making these the default for emailing.


Docx was not created to obsolete prior versions; Docx was created to use XML
architecture, making Word more open than its .doc predecessor. There are
already scads of docx-to-doc converters, but you can do it by hand. Take a
..docx document, add ".zip" to the end, click on the file. Inside of the
archive is a file named "document.xml" and clicking on that should open the
original file in a browser window (or maybe not...).


With OSes they try to ensure that new games, eg, will only run on new
OS. There is no technical reason why DirctX10 cannot run on XP, if
fact it can be hacked to do so.


.

Relevant Pages

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