If MSFT screws the product, as with Vista, the makers suffer the fallout because the market doesn't buy their latest generic plastic. Apple managed to identify this rotating gimmick early on, and went down the proprietary hardware path because it was their only choice. And look who has the market attention now.

So I'd say that the makers are a bit pissed right now that MSFT didn't hold up their end of the deal. They know that all the crap they sell is generally indistinguishable, but that didn't matter because MSFT would provide them with a mechanism for recurring income that was better than just waiting for the plastic to simply wear out.

And with MSFT depending on thousands of licenses just to keep the lights on, I'd say the next few years are going to be interesting for the siamese twins.

With my MacBook Pro, and my dual Dec Alpha box that I plan to put Genera on, I think I'll just sit back and watch.

You probably do a lot more with your machine than run Office, play Windows Solitaire, and read email. Three year old machines can do all of that perfectly well.

That $600 laptop is cheap, all right, but it's more expensive than "another few years for free". Especially when you multiply it by a headcount the size of GM's.

I do agree, though, that "systems requirements" is partly an excuse of convenience. It always looks better to complain about price-gouging vendors than to complain about the enormous amount of extra work, overtime, and personnel budget that a major OS upgrade might require of you. Plus, carping about Vista's systems requirements is easier than trying to use the phrase "sucks ass" in a corporate report without being fired.

Few months down the line, I bought a faster laptop for my parents, and realised how aweful Vista was. I still regret not having wiped it out, and just installed XP on it.

Then my sister asked me about upgrading ther laptop. That laptop was fast enough for XP, but not for Vista. Imagine, installing Vista limited to it. A laptop that was adeguately fast and decent for XP, it would have been dog slow for Vista, with very bad user interface and the awkwardnes of a really bad Operating system. My sister whould have been duped badly if I hadn't told her not to "updgrade" her computer.

Image all those people that bought Vista for $150+ as an upgrade from XP, maybe paid a $50 installation fee to the local BestBuy, and realise they just spent a lot of money in a very inferior product.

Until Vista, buying a new computer meant getting noticably something faster. It may not have been as much faster as the underlying hardware change, but it was faster. Vista broke that.