I have been wondering if Vista's hardware requirements might give Microsoft serious headaches in selling it.
Windows XP has been current for almost 5 years and of course is based on the excellent Windows 2000 (which IMO, represented more of a real step forward than XP ever has - people are far too easily swayed by a bi of eye candy), now 6 1/2 years old.
This means that although technology has continued to move on, people have not been pressured to move on with it as they were with the myriad new versions of Windows which came out between 95 and XP. If a machine of 5 years vintage can run the same operating system and do many of the same things as something brand new today, it's unlikely that machines are being replaced as frequently as they were in the past.
My own machine runs XP and does all the things I need it to do fantastically - yet it's unlikely to have a hope in hell of doing justice to Vista - if it will even install.
And with Vista potentially another year away, this is only going to get worse. Microsoft could potentially be releasing a new operating system to an audience which doesn't have the hardware to run it - this could be the Windows 95 situation all over again, only this time, now that PCs are mature and commonly accepted devices which can allready do everything the average user needs, will they manage to convincence everyone to upgrade their hardware again (and upgrade it to much greater extents than they had to in 95 when more RAM and a new hard disk was all most people needed)? I'm not so sure.
They may well find themselves wishing they had timed things differently - either having released Windows XP later (given that both the corporate and consumer versions of Windows were given updates in 2000 anyway, perhaps they should have saved XP for late 2002/early 2003?), or getting a move on with Longhorn/Vista and having a new version out sooner.
