More reasons to leave Windows behind

See, I am not the only one that thinks Microsoft's views of what people want is wrong. The article in the link indicates that despite the confusion of most users on what version of Vista they have, and even more going back to Windows XP due to no significant advantage in spending another $200 or so on a newer yet only slightly upgraded version of Windows.

That article and many like it point out something I find quite amazing... OSX has but a single version for 1/2 to 1/4 the price of Windows, often each update, usually about once a year, has more features/fixes than Windows updated versions put in every 3 or so years, and more often they are significant features, not features that should have been in, or missed a version and we waited 6 years for. There's another OS that I believe to be even better than both.. in most ways.. Linux. Specifically I refer to Ubuntu because that is what I have finally moved to. But other flavors of Linux offer similar features. What I particularly like about Linux in general is the almost daily updates that are available be it bug fixes, new features, etc. The linux community is continuously improving on the OS and the various software that comes with it.

So why can't Microsoft try something like this? Microsoft is still by far the dominant OS in the market.. sadly.. I am amazed at how many viruses, bugs, useless features and so on Windows has and yet the mass majority still use it and buy it.. and all because of one word.. familiarity. That one little word is what holds the majority of people from moving to Linux, or even OSX, both vastly superior to Windows in many ways. At the very least.. offer a core OS and allow users to download and install the extra features they want. If OSX can do it and apple is able to figure out how to support it, I am sure MS can do it.

Ah well, I will continue to keep a copy of Windows XP around.. which I run in a VM on my Ubuntu. Oddly enough, it runs darn fast inside a VM! I think that is partly because linux has more performant.. less bloat, than Windows that VMWare, VirtualBox and even Xen can run guest OSes faster than the Windows incarnations of the VM software. Therefore, at least to me, it seems Windows XP runs nearly as fast inside my VM window as it used to on my slightly older computer natively.