Microsoft → Re: [WIN8] Windows 8 --- What benifits over W7-64?

I see your point.

However, I don’t necessarily agree with the sentiment, at least not completely anyway.

The upgrade cycle for Microsoft software in general may be arbitrary and the perceived value of the feature set of the upgrade(s) may vary. However, the cost of the product / product line often remains fairly static. A company that continually produces software may be perceived as improving incrementally, although, its not extraordinary if the product seems derivative at some point.

Microsoft could stagnate and likely would still make fairly good sales in OEM preinstalled systems (for a while). However, the competition such as Apple, Google and others wouldn’t stagnate and could increase market share during such a time. Which is not to say they wont gain in market share anyway.

Apple has presumably moved to an annual OS X upgrade cycle. That’s about three OS X full version upgrades for each Windows OS upgrade. Also look how well stagnation worked out for Microsoft in the tablet segment of the market.

The technology market is similar to a lot of species of sharks,….they better keep moving or they will die.

One of the interesting aspects of this, is that outside of the group of what I would call "enthusiasts" the typical OS consumer will likely no longer be interested in upgrading their OS. Times have changed from the 90's when we were begging for a new OS. Today, upgrade sales must be minimal because of driver issues and because hardware is cheap to replace. People will get the new OS when they buy a new box.

The other interesting issue is that Bill G. when he was designing Vista (code named Longhorn or whatever) envisioned all kinds of innovations for the new platform that, one by one, were dropped as Vista development dragged on. The interesting part of this is that I don't think any of those innovations (such as a DB based file system) have ever seen the light of day in Win7 or now, Win8.

And Bill G. got put out to pasture as a result of his failure with Vista.

Wow, that's an interesting take on history.

That's not even close to accurate.

How long was Vista delayed? What was the list of features that was dropped from Vista? Wasn't this the only MS project that Bill personally oversaw, since he wrote BASIC?

Yeah, I know, he retired with full honors to oversee his foundation.

Maybe I overstated. After Vista flopped, Bill put himself out to pasture.

Try again. Maybe use google. Or bing.

I've got a million of them. Like MS ripping off IBM when they were supposed to be working on OS/2 by using the same team to develop NT.

Really, MS has not had an original idea since BASIC.

Ok, good talk.

Could be the first time anyone's ever expressed sympathy for poor ickle IBM.

Yeah, as an ISV, we went straight from DOS to OS/2. I've still got an "Official OS/2 Ambassador 1992" medal sitting on my desk. We bet on the wrong horse, but OS/2 was a superior OS that died an untimely death.