Bryan C. Fleming

Windows XP has been around a while, 6 years in fact. Microsoft has lost favor with Wall Street. Their stock price hasn’t moved much over the years. Gone are the good old 90’s.

There’s a lot of pressure for Microsoft to come out with a replacement for Windows XP and later this year you’ll hear a lot about that Replacement. Microsoft has already slated $500 in advertising convincing you to shell out $100 or so for an upgrade. But should you really care?

What you absolutely need to know about the Windows Vista operating system:

Microsoft’s in a bit of a bind. As they make their software better, there is less of a reason for people to upgrade. It gets harder and harder for them to plead their case. They also have to support old software. So what?

Well, it turns out that you can’t really do anything very ‘cool’ because you have to support software from 10 years ago. If you do start breaking some old rules, people get mad. Their old software no longer works. At one time, Microsoft did have some really neat stuff for Vista, like Win-FX, but it got axed because of this problem. So they put a new face on the same core and try to bake-in new ‘features’.

Do you want a computer or do you want the Internet?

Ahh. Isn’t this really the nail in the coffin? Most people don’t care about their computer, they just want to send some emails, chat, and go to porn sites (I’m kidding of course). Seriously, watch this trend: More and More PC Applications are appear as online websites. In fact, Google just bought a pretty kick-ass word processor that works just like MS Word. It’s free, and it’s online. No software to install. This means you need a lot less of a computer or operating system for that matter.

Microsoft will be successful with Vista by putting into new PC’s. Good for them. But I don’t expect many of us to run out and buy an upgrade to something that’s already working good enough: Windows XP

Do you plan to upgrade? Let me know.

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