On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 5:54 AM, Vitaliy wrote: > Funny, where you get your ideas from? I know that defending Microsoft is > unpopular, and I hate Vista too, but I don't subscribe to crazy conspiracy > theories. In general, it makes me cringe anytime someone starts saying "this > company is making a shoddy product on purpose, so it would break and the > customers would buy more". I agree with you. My verdict for XP versus Vista is that XP is far better as long as your PC (especially when you are using a laptop) can support XP. Still I do not think any one with right mind wants to develop a shoddy product to make customers unhappy. > Vista problems = more money for Apple and Linux. Microsoft would have an > incentive to make a good operating system, even if they were a total > monopoly, though there's no question that they would have a much stronger > incentive if they had more competition. Microsoft have zero incentive to > sabotage their products. In fact, there are many reasons why they would NOT > want to do that. Vista problems lead to more money for Apple, not so sure about Linux. Paid version of Linux is not cheap. And people do not pay for free Linux version and do not normally pay for support. They rely on community. Yes Microsoft has zero incentive to sabotage their products. But they do have a big burdens for backward compatibility and they do not have controls over the hardware like Apple. So it does have some difficulties. So whether Windows 7 can really solve the issues with Vista remains to be seen. Will Apple take over Microsoft even if Windows 7 is delayed by another 3 year? I do not think so. Apple needs to have control over everything to do well. And I do not think they can control PC hardware if they want to take on generic Windows PC market. So there will be a cap for Apple. Linux may get more market share and has more potentials. Linux on low end laptops has boosted the Linux market share. But now XP under today's low end PC (still more than enough) seems to do better. For example, I went to Comex show here and people still preferred XP version of Asus EEE than Linux version. > I really wish more engineers paid attention in Economics 101 (or had better > professors). On the other hand, maybe it's good that some of the best > engineers are mediocre businessmen -- they can concentrate on what they do > best. :) > Xiaofan -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist