Glenn point out that windows XP is still alive and Slashdot says it will remain so at least for another couple of years.
I’ve run Vista since week one, it has a lot of pain in the rear stuff but as a computer guy it wasn’t all that hard. I “upgraded” an xp system to vista for experience reasons and found it went from damn fast to ok.
The debate at slashdot ignores several things:
When I purchased my finally dead Inspiron 1150 my 512 ram and Pent 4 was more than fast enough, now even a cheep machine is at least dual core and 2 gig of ram. With that kind of firepower XP flies.
The systems that will be running windows 7 will be at least this strong or stronger, how fast do you think XP will run on those by comparision?
For business it is a capital expense to replace computers and a large expense to re-train people and software for their use.
As a person who once ran a business let me tell you this:
Computers are a TOOL, they are there to make their business run faster and better, if a computer or system doesn’t do that its not worth the expense. Business owners don’t give a DAMN what operating system they are running, they give a damn that they are able to use the applications that allow their business to make a profit at a minimum of expense.
And as for windows 95, they were the first computers really in a lot of homes, people accepted the problems because they didn’t know any better. XP is now the best known operating system among people that don’t know computers.
It will take a really big shock to force business off of this comfort zone, I don’t know that windows 7 is going to be big enough to do it but we will see.
Finally to most people a computer is an appliance. People may want to know how to use them in the abstract but they don’t want to put a lot of effort into doing so.
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