While Microsoft hasn’t made any official announcements at say, a press conference on Windows 7, there have been confirmations and plenty of what I would consider interesting leaks and demonstrations the company is holding continuously.

You state that Microsoft doesn’t want anybody talking about anything but Vista for a while to come – to which I would agree if the majority of the talk were positive, which I think you and I both know it has not been.

A bad public sentiment can certainly be an albatross – even if you feel it is unearned (not sure if you do or not), and sometimes the only thing you can do is move forward – which in this case is Windows 7.

“Yet, it’s Microsoft’s own fault for that speculation. The company keeps showing off early versions of Windows 7 and other operating system projects — and it’s hardly being secretive about it.”

Microsoft has made absolutely no announcements about the next version of Windows, nor talked about or shown anything related to it. There are the supposed “leaks” and that is it. Clearly, Microsoft doesn’t want *anybody* talking about anything but Vista for a while to come.

You do realise that last isn’t possible from *any* OS yet? -OSX is available only on Apple hardware (although with great support for anything you add around that), Linux has issues with hardware less than a year old (until companies start producing the Linux versions of their drivers, the advanced features of that ATI graphics card will go unused) and although Windows probably has the best hardware compatibility, it sacrifices some reliability to do that. And if no OS can do what you’re asking, then we’re even further off being able to choose *any* OS and have it just work.

i started using windows in 1995, toyed with Macs and then had to move back for development purposes back to NT4 …

what strikes me most about MSFT now is that they do indeed have a strangle hold on the market, they can force hardware manufacturers to go the windows way bcos of the billions they can use for after sales support and repair and the pre-sales hyperbole,

i looked at the screen above and my second reaction was
where are my internet tools ?
where is my dual boot tool-kit ?
why arent they on my desktop ?

they arent their bcos this isnt my desktop – this is MSFT ´s desktop that i was fooled into buying, bcos RedHat and Debian and SUSE dont have the bucks needed to force themselves onto hardware manufacturers, and stay there, DELL and a few others offer linux like they are peddling a disease

so good hardware gets burdened with a clunky, slow, ugly, non-intuitively built OS that some bean counter built for other FUD victims –

dont get me wrong, im a power business user with average programming skills (not bcos i cant do better, but bcos i dont want to write code, i want to do other things), no Unix fan or Linux geek

yet i wonder, where is the freedom i have to buy a laptop or a PC and then run it, error free, with hundreds of differenty types of other devices ? a laptop on which i can install any OS and it wont not detect this and not be compatible with that — when will windows finally level the playing field for the end user ?

the time to get rid of the ugly windows monopoly is nigh, they stifle innovation, variety,

yes, they do have a lot of very deep roots among business users, but thats going to change and change very fast indeed, this is why redmond is now getting into consumer electronics,

there is only one way MSFT can pull off involvement in 3 major businesses – break up into smaller units and compete via innovation rather than ballmer powered brow-beating, they are currently a classic case of doing many things quite poorly —

– this is Information Technology not a war. it needs to be led by intelligent people not the sales and marketing department.

I’d like to see them build a new OS code base from ground zero. They should be able to achieve better security and give us a true multi-user PC OS where users are totally isolated from each other and user code can’t cause problems by being mixed in with OS code.