On Aug 13, 6:44 am, RonB <ronb02NOS...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Terry Porter wrote:
> > Now is the time to make that choice, upgrade from XP
> > to Linux or vista7 ?
Hard to say. If you registered and activated your Vista license, then
that may be all you need to do the upgrade to Windows 7. On the other
hand, if you downgraded to XP, Microsoft might decide that that was
your one-time "upgrade" and therefore you would have to shell out for
an upgrade, at a price.
If Microsoft doesn't come up with a free or almost free upgrade, they
face the risk that corporate customers may opt to not only stay with
XP, but decide to use Linux rather than Windows 7 as the "host"
operating system.
In effect, Windows 7 will have a VM that runs XP. This will be what
most users use initially. In addition, the Windows 7 partition can be
reduced in size, making room for a Linux partition which can be loaded
using Xen, and probably Microsoft's hypervisor. This would allow
users to run Linux and XP under Microsoft's control.
If the Windows 7 scheduler is too bulky, too granular, or just too
unpleasant, or the license terms too onerous, then corporate customers
might just opt to install Linux as the "host" operating systems, and
use corporate licenses they already own for XP.
If Microsoft tries to drop support for XP, this could drive the
corporate customers to drop Microsoft completely. After all,
corporations don't want to put hundreds of thousands of corporate
documents impacting $billions in business transactions running on
software that Microsoft may deliberately sabotage at any time.
Microsoft has seen this before, with Windows NT 4.0 server. When
Microsoft tried to force customers to upgrade from the relatively
inexpensive NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 Enterprise edition
or Data Center Edition, often costing as much as 10-20 times the
price, but offering unlimited client accesses, millions of NT 4.0
server machines were migrated to Unix or Linux systems, even Linux
running on Mainframes. Unix servers offered substantial
virtualization allowing a single server with up to 64 processors to do
the work of as many as 100 Windows NT 4.0 servers. Mainframes could
perform the work of 1000 or more NT servers.
Where Microsoft did win, was those areas where they offered unlimited
use by defualt, such as IIS servers.
> Even if I was going to stay with Windows (hypothetically speaking) I
> wouldn't upgrade to Vista or Vista 7. I would stick with XP.
You could do that, but Microsoft will pull the plug on support about 6
months after the release of Windows 7. After that, they could leave
it vulnerable to a virus from hell, or release defective patches that
do more harm than good, simply because their top support people would
have been reassigned to supporting Vista and Windows 7. Windows XP
support funding would be very limited, since there's no revenue to
support it, so testing would be minimal.
Try running Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 and see what kind of technical
support you get from Microsoft if things don't work right?
> Fedora 11 works great -- but the constant, "cutting-edge" upgrades are
> kind of a pain. I do have Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04 installed as virtual
> machines (under VirtualBox) on my wife's XP computer. I like to keep
> track of what's going on.
This is why corporate customers, and very likely OEMs, would probably
offer a commercially supported version of Linux such as Red Hat
Enterprise Desktop (RHED), or Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED).
Concentric would also need to come up with a commercialized version of
Ubunto that doesn't get upgraded as often.
The "development" releases such as Fedora, OpenSuse, and Ubuntu would
be the versions users would use to get previews of upcoming features,
probably doing just as you did, using virtualized images.
> RonB
> "There's a story there...somewhere"
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