[LINK] vista critique

[Adam Todd]

At 10:04 AM 5/01/2007, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
>Jan Whitaker wrote:
>>A case of unexpected consequences?
>>http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt
>
>I'm still trying to make sense of Microsoft/IDC's claim that Vista is 
>worth $40bn to EC economies.


200 million people at ...


<smile>

Oh come on!  Everyone has to have Vista!  Vista La Viva!  Vista Vista!

Vista la Vista even!

Personally if most people just dumped a Linux on their desktop and didn't 
bother to upgrade their current windows, or hard drive, or memory, or 
monitors or processors, or motherboards or ... just to run Vista, life 
would be simpler.

Unfortunately when Win95 was released, the concept of upgrading your 
hardware to meet the software requirement became a marketing tool for not 
only software vendors, but hardware vendors.

I don't buy into it, and I advise people to stay away.  Do you need to 
upgrade your hardware/software?

Generally not.  I still have a Win95 laptop, it runs Word, Excel and 
Access.  It browses.  It has ICQ, MSN and it's not missed a beat in 6 years.

I mistakenly upgraded my Windows NT4 to Win2K in the belief that I was 
magically going to get USB and Firewire support.  Linux worked fine, Win2K 
didn't like the hardware.  But then my deskstops died from over use :)  So 
I moved to a laptop with all the bells and whistles I wanted, and a few I 
didn't at the time but now do - alas.  It came with XP.  It seems to work 
fine.

But I won't be upgrading it to Vista just because Vista is "cool" or better 
or whatever someone wants to tell me.

In fact to be honest I'd be very surprised if I upgrade or purchase any new 
Microsoft Software.

I'm STILL using only 2 of my ten user licences of Office 97, had it since 
1998 and continue to use it without any problems.  If I need to "upgrade" 
it, I'll switch to Open Office and be done with the issues of Mac/PC 
incompatability.

If I switch to Open Office, I'll be motivated to dump Windows XP from the 
laptops, put an ODBC database front end or even finish coding up my Web 
based "Access Feature Alike" application and that will be the last of 
Windows around here except for my little Toshiba running Win95 faithfully.

$40 billion.  Gak.