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I don't know if Vista to Windows 7 will be a case of life giving you lemons and making lemonade out of it. Or a case of trying to make chicken salad out of chicken shit.

The real concern for MS is whether when the next MS OS comes out if enough people will have moved on. I have, I tell any lay person I know not to get Vista. I know most of my colleagues are doing the same.

In my company the first thing we do when we receive a new computer with Vista preinstalled is format c: and install XP.

The main point in the article is that MS has made Vista horrible so that when Windows 7 goes out it can be seen as revolutionary, but I think it's not the case. Most probably I would compare with the last O.S. that actually worked (XP) instead.

Right now the strongest point of MS is the massive amount of legacy code written for Windows. If they lose backwards compatibility, it's open market again with MacOS and Linux as neighbours, both of which are deemed as generally more stable than the windows platform. MacOS can have its limitations due to self-imposed hardware constraints, but the Linux community is making huge efforts to improve user experience for non-technical people, their traditional weakness. Just have a look at Ubuntu 8.04. If they achieve that, and backwards compatibility is lost in Windows, MS will be in big trouble unless Windows 7 is really awesome.