Friday, July 11, 2008

Tech.view | Waiting for Microsoft to turn green | Economist.com

A surprisingly harsh, superficial, and subjective article in The Economist; the full article goes on to list the usual Vista-bashing conventional wisdom themes, many of which, imho, are unsubstantiated or blatantly biased (e.g., attacking Vista for issues that are class- rather than instance-based for modern OSes, such as the need for less-than-ancient hardware).  Having happily used Vista on several PCs (old and new) over the last year, I'm perplexed by this sort of article, especially from the usually outstanding and objective Economist.

TWO big things happened at Microsoft this past week. Bill Gates retired from the company after 33 years as co-founder, guiding spirit and undisputed boss. Then, following seven years as its flagship product, the venerable Windows XP—arguably the most successful, and certainly the most widely used, operating system in computerdom—was pensioned off as well.

Since June 30th, original equipment makers (OEMs) like Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo have ceased selling PCs loaded with Windows XP. And software retailers no longer have boxed copies of Windows XP on their shelves. For all intents and purposes, XP has now gone the way of the dodo bird.

Tech.view | Waiting for Microsoft to turn green | Economist.com

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