Drew, I do understand your comments and it’s clear you have a lot more time with Win7 that I. What I have commented on thus far has been the initial experience (based on a few days), which has been lackluster at best. I do have an open mind and am always willing to consider new things. So far, Win7 (as someone else already said) looks a bit like Vista SP2. Its support for hardware is weak and it appears noticeably slower.
I do like IE8, but that technology is mostly already available in XP as well. The start menu and taskbar do work somewhat differently, but those are really minor issues. I am running Win7 as my main OS for the moment to see how it goes.
So far stability has been worse than in XP. Many times IE8 goes frozen for 10-15 seconds. It comes back, but I don’t see that in XP for the same web sites.
So far about 1/3 of the apps I have installed don’t work correctly in Win7 as opposed to XP. If that trend continues, then the biggest expense (beyond time) for any upgrade users will be buying software updates for products that no longer work in Win7 (assuming they can even find the CDs to reinstall).
I believe that MS makes a lot of their $ for Windows licensing for new PCs and through sales of primary product lines like Office. Perhaps someone here (who has some real data) can comment on typical MS yearly revenue percentages for new PC licensing vs OS upgrade licensing. I expect these percentages change for the 1st year of a new OS and the following 2-5 years.
If MS was good at listening, they would have never released Vista the way it was. They had buckets of comments from qualified professionals and beta testers from around the world that they were building a dog. They just pressed ahead. Clearly looking back, they now have figured out they screwed up and are fixing some of the things in Win7.
Ed
