Windows has always been a ‘wanna be’ real operating system. The MAC ads are quite admittedly funny but they always contains a strong seed of truth.

From a support stand point, Microsoft cause a lot of problems to the small business owner. I’ve seen many times where someone was running their software on an older machine, it breaks. So can’t get Windows 98 or XP any more (yes I know, there are exceptions but the cost of those exceptions make things worse), so they were forced to upgrade. But wait…..now their printer doesn’t work…..so they upgrade…..oh wait….now their monitor doesn’t work because the new on-board video doesn’t support that refresh rate…..so many small businesses were suddenly force to spend $1000+. Not exactly small change, especially today. That would be my biggest concern.

Now, this isn’t necessarily always an MS issue (society needs to keep in mind the dot-com crash and why it happened….greed) but they certainly aren’t helping things.

XP is an aging technology, just as floppy disks are. The reason XP install requires floppy disks to be used, is because when XP initially came out floppy disks were still the prevalent technology for portable storage. Remember that back then USB drives were still a fairly new technology, and prices were outrages for very small drives. Think $50 US for ~16MB. Floppy disks made sense in that market.

I believe that starting with Vista you can configure and install SATA and RAIDs without the use of floppy drives.

A small comment to your side notes about Vista, the only reason Vista has a bad rep is because of Apple’s clever marketing department. Yeah, I laugh at their ads too, but that doesn’t make them any more true. Vista at launch was a more secure, more user friendly, more stable, and more hardware/software compatible then Windows XP was at it’s launch time. It seems unbelivable, doesn’t it, but few people seem to remember that the “solid rock” that they are so hesitant to leave was in fact a complete “disaster” when it first came out. There were all sorts of hardware and software compatability problems, it needed much more horsepower then it’s predessesors to run, and it looked vastly different to the point where people complained they fixed none of the problems but just added lipstick.

Sound familiar?

I’m all for competition in the OS marketplace, and I believe that the push of OS X and Linux is benefiting the end users and giving us vastly better OS’ then we have ever had. I’ve used Slackware and Ubuntu extensively, and I’ve also tried my hands at FreeBSD and Back Track.

That said, I’ve been running Windows 7 beta since it came out, and then the Release Candidate since it’s release, and you’d be hard pressed to get me to switch back to an open source alternative, let alone to a Mac.

Windows 7 is not perfect, but it’s pretty darned close. That said, it’s not for everyone, and it sure can’t compete with the Linux initial price tag of $0.

On another note, I find it kind of funny how everyone “hates” Microsoft because they are the big bad wolf of monopolism, but everyone seems to love Google.