Intel to Microsoft : Vista? No Thanks.

I honestly can't understand Microsofts rush to do away with an OS that has such a big following. The market certainly isn't saying get rid of XP. Sure there are allot of Vista devotee's but there are just as many XP fans. Is there some unwritten Law in Redmond that states after X amount of years we push an OS out of the nest? Why force an OS on people. Like it was said before, Apple sales are up and all of a sudden Linux doesn't seem that odd !

1. Microsoft is committed to Vista, and has spent billions of dollars on it. Although they have sold 140,000,000 copies, these have mostly been OEM editions. They need wide-scale adoption from corporate and government users to recoup the investment. They do not make $$ pushing XP to a world that already has it.

2. Windows 7 is two to three years down the road, and it seems it will mostly be an extension of the "old" Windows system, rather than anything radically new. If Microsoft doesn't keep its customer base as intact as possible, they risk losing more customers to Apple on the top end and Linux on the bottom (free) end.

What M$ needs is a new small-kernel OS, but they're afraid to bite the bullet on the legacy programs, which would have to run in virtual environments or be replaced. A mistake: modern systems could do that with no problem, and M$ could have a state of the art kernel that would last for decades, but they haven't found the will to innovate.