"Windows XP has floated along as the default choice for PC consumers, but when Microsoft tried to raise the price and tack on fluff features with the Vista rebranding, buyers demanded to upgrade to the previous version. Microsoft is still shipping Vista to manufacturers, but corporations and end users are frequently reverting to Windows XP, killing Microsoft’s ability to leverage its market position to push new proprietary standards and raise prices for features that were once included for free, such as standard networking."
This paragraph is just tedious to read.
1) While Vista might have some 'fluff' features (which OSX and Linux have as well), there is a lot of work under the hood in Vista. In fact, the changes under the hood are generally the reason people have so much trouble with it. Things like reduced admin access cause all sorts of issues because developers have become acustomed to having full system access and write their programs in an 'unsecure' manor. If Vista really is a 'rebranding', why are there so many issues?
I'd say 90% of the arguments I see against Vista are the exact same arguments I saw against XP when it came out (especially from Win2k users). However, I agree that the cost of Vista is too much compared to the new features.
2) Calling reverting back to XP 'an upgrade' is something that I deem childish in a 'professionally written' article.
3) Corporations are hardly reverting back to XP. Corporation upgrade cycles are slow and any company that has already rolled out Vista (or any other desktop OS in its first year) system wide deserves any trouble they get into. Some corporations still haven't even moved to XP because of the length of time it takes to do full system upgrades.
3) Which proprietary standards does Vista push? DirectX10 is the only one I can think of, and while it could *possibly* be backported to XP, it wouldn't be easy as the driver system would have to be rewritten (as was done in Vista) to support certain features (such as GPU virtualisation and process sharing).
4) What is he referring to with "Standard Networking"? Any version of Vista can be used on a network without an issue. Is he referring to domains, because if so, that was limited to the Pro version of XP anyway.
