Small business may have some choice, but any large business have to go with the big shops. They need the support structure and consistency of the business.
Not necessarily true. The large (Fortune 100) company I work for is finally replacing the various Win95 and NT4 boxes with Win2000. Only the laptops have XP. And they are still standardized on Office97!
Lets face it, if your apps run on Vista, and the price point for hardware that runs it is always dropping and therefore comparable to an XP build, you are going to want Vista. It will have better support going forward, updates to your other software will be optimized for it, all the other cool companies will have it.
And that's partly the point. Most of the software I need to run (PLC machine programming software, SCADA data collection systems, etc.) do NOT work on the latest and greatest MS OS whenever it comes out. These type of programs need to be stable, and need to run on a known stable OS... NOT the latest bug-infested, half-tested, beta release (no matter what MS labels it) of MS's latest half-baked OS. Vista is a buggy, drm-infested, overbloated pig of an OS, and the closest it's coming to my computer for at least a year or two is in a virtual machine... DEFINITELY not my host!!
The point to all of this is that customer should be offered a
choice. Obviously, from the article, many customers are currently exercising that choice, and choosing XP! By taking away that choice, MS will be driving away customers, and may be skating that thin edge of their monopolistic behaviour.
