We have the facts, right here...
Do we really need Microsoft to give us the facts ? When we have them right in front of our eyes ? kinda like telling us a hamburger is not really meat when its beef ?
I had a lot of customers whom got tired of trying to get Vista to work for them, and after a few weeks, rather spent money buying XP and then pay someone to 'downgrade' from Vista for them.
Some fine examples :
One who purchased a Vista laptop with Dual core and 2GB of memory find it run much slower (or feels slower than his old PC with P4/512MB), then his blackberry didnt install, wiped out all info on it during the process, his high-end digital camera has no Vista drivers, his 6 months old printer didnt have Vista drivers, his new digital microphone didnt have Vista drivers, little wonder why he went backward.
One who purchased a Dell printer 6 months prior to Vista while running 98, Dell told him it wont work with 98, so I adviced him to upgrade to XP, due to heavy work, he waited until Jan, and new PC came with Vista, surprise surprise, now his 'old' printer wont work because Vista doesnt have any drivers.
Its not totally Microsoft's fault that there are no drivers, but as the OS maker, they sure have the responsbility to ensure manufactures comes up with the goods, unless I am mistaken that hardware manufactures must all think this is a great time to sell more kits by not making Vista drivers for old hardware, forcing users to buy new kits, hence more income for them.
Either way, its not good, if Vista really have something special to show for it, great, but deep down, for the average Joe, they simply want to be able to turn on PC, surf the web, type some letter, calculate a few spreadsheets, listen to MP3, and XP does the job beautifully, Vista do have the additional security features (with additional annoying security popups), better networking, question is, how many average Joe really sees and feels and needs that difference ? Not to mention the 'over doing it' interface, its like looking at a badly designed Mac screen, and the other and most annoying bit for me is what they have to change the names of icons ?
'Add or Remove Software' , the name to me is right to the point, guess what they renamed it to now ? This is really a pointless exercise.
Oh, have I missed the drop dead slow file copying ?
Give huge credit to Dell UK, they allow us and our customers to specify XP when ordering new PC, this is a relief...until Jan 2008.
Bottom line is :
Microsoft is forcing us to 'upgrade' from something that works really well to a new system (to grab more cash I guess), during this exercise, also try to force us to re-learn what we have been using for over 10 years, moving icons to new position, give them different names etc. What users really wanted is simple, something that will work, works fast, and stable, with good hardware support, if they only spent that $5-6b on making XP more secure and more stable than what is a good product already, we will all be happy.