@Squiliam: M$ have been putting a pressure on the manufacturers. For some it's more effective than for others.
You're right about the compatibility issues, but aside that, the companies aren't too happy to pay the cost assossiated with the OS upgrade. Besides jumping to new Windows system requires training the tech support anyway.
About jumping to Vista, i believe that quite a few companies are willing to do that, since quite a few skipped XP.
Some companies already have jumped to Linux, and the companies proprietary software shouldn't be a problem in the change, since your programs may stop working even when upgrading to newer Windows.
Anyway, the commercial side of things is a bad excuse, since the nerds are coding their open source equivalents from commercial software for Windows in the same fashion they do for Linux systems. And there already are commercial Linux distros and programs you have to pay for. The problems with the commercial software are with a centered location where you'd get software for free and the lack of registry that would register your trial versions (although, the current trend seems to be that the trial versions have only limited features but unlimited use for the "trial" features). In any case, you still can distribute your commercial software in the same fashion you distribute Windows software; you just provide the code to be copypasted to terminal and apt-get handles the rest.
Ei Kiinasti.
Eikä Japanisti.
Vaan pannaan jalalla koreasti.
Nintendo games sell only on Nintendo system.
