Ha. Ha. Ha.

This is actually good news for Apple, because that means there's a lot less market penetration for Vista than MS wants us to beleve. There's more breathing room to get Leopard out now, since the "buy a new OS" pressure apparently doesn't exist.

It never did exist as the beta clearly showed it wasn't ready for prime time yet they declared it golden master anyways. Clearly the 3rd party software vendors weren't ready. All handheld device makers are still struggling to get Vista versions out. Hardly any antivirus software for Vista either and much more. Apple shouldn't be worried one bit.

This will be a pretty hard thing for Microsoft to spin.

They just can't get a break -- especially on the blogosphere. I was just reading Shelly Palmer's article ("Cracked Windows") about Microsoft's vulnerability to Google and the new web apps.

Vulnerability? Microsoft is already fairly meaningless in the web2.0 sphere. This article by Paul Graham lays it out fairly well: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

This article, coupled with the news about Apple's Mac sales growth, says volumes about the erosion of Windows in consumer-land. Within a year, I believe that Apple will be up to 15% market share. Yes that seems overly optimistic, but I believe Mac sales growth will start to accelerate exponentially, especially the release of the iPhone and Leopard.

Dell is a custom manufacturer.

Once they stood back for a second and realized that they don't really make money on the operating system it's a no brainer to just give the customer what they want. Their manufacturing process is already setup for Windows XP, support is there, drivers, etc.

If someone wants to buy your product then you should make it easy for them to choose you. It's not like they are reversing their Vista support, everyone who wants that will get it. Microsoft may even make more money in the end because now they sell a Windows license with a higher likelyhood of an upgrade sale sooner. Some day Vista will be a mature OS and some day programs will be available that require it.

These same concerns were present for every major new version of Windows that came out after Windows 98. Devices, software, etc require upgrades to work and there is no real widespread need for the new features yet so the older version is seen by some as the wiser choice until the platform gains some maturity.

Now to compare the situation to Apple is a bit complicated. The OS X upgrades from one major version to the next have not been making big changes that impact large amounts of software that were designed for the previous version. The degree of changes is similar but still less dramatic to the OS 9 to OS X transition. In terms of transition complexity I feel that on the high end of the scale of change is the transition from OS 9 to OS X. Transitioning from Windows XP to Vista in the middle and going from OS 10.2->10.3->10.4 transition at the lower end of this imaginary scale of complexity.

So rambling on what do I think this means for Apple and Macintosh? Not much, but it's possible it's even negative. Someone might stick with a PC if they can get the old OS instead of evaluate the choice to switch if they were faced with the large software upgrades required to use Vista if you had a collection of older unsupported software.

You could be right, you might be wrong about the effect on Apple, but overall what a thoughtful, intelligent post.

Let's all go to their Ideastorm website and request they offer us Windows 95 as an option!!!!

I recently was forced to buy several Dells (for business use as glorified typewriters, not productivity!). I was forced to "downgrade" them myself to Win XP Pro from preinstalled Vista on the Dell Dimension E521 & E520, their most affordable computers. At that time I asked my "account rep" if I could get XP Pro custom installed, instead of Vista--I was told "not at the discounted bundle price". So I assume that Microsoft is giving Dell an incentive to push out discounted units with Vista in order to gro the Vista installed base. My only consolation is having a few unused copies of Vista to use with Parallels...

I recently was forced to buy several Dells (for business use as glorified typewriters, not productivity!).

Uh, so typing is not productive? What are your people typing and why is your company so intent on getting them computers to perform non-productive tasks?

And if they are just glorified typewriters, what about Vista forced you to reinstall XP?

And for non-productive glorified typing use, would you have suggested macs and OS X instead?