Maybe Vista is better with security than XP and patches work quicker and better, but how many businesses are willing to cope with downtime and afford to upgrade all their workstations to take the demand? Not many I suspect.

More importantly, how many businesses are willing to put up with the absolutely dire network performance of Vista which - judging by the tests I've been running on a box with SP1 beta applied are STILL not fixed a year after release?

Vista is this decade's Millennium Edition

Upgrading, I'll agree with. But what downtime?

Apart from the vista's security fixtures businesses would need to bear in mind its hardware resource intensive.

Unfortunately, this means high spec on the hardware if its to be used in a business. Thirdly even with all the graphics fancies being turned off still doesn't help much.

I personally, think it's not bad as an operating system but when taking into account the above issues then it becomes an issue.

Any critical workstation getting vista on it would be down time even if its just one at a time especially when the installation goes wrong because the machine needs upgrading to support Vista.

Anyway one of the RSS blogs I watch has report saying Microsoft are dissapointed with the problems with Vista and want to crack on with Windows 7 and get it out before 2010, which in my opinion could be a mistake as they should know by now not to rush these things.

Zeb that will be a statement that will become gold one day!

Nobody said you had to upgrade existing XP workstations to Vista... what about new computers with Vista on it? No downtime there.

Microsoft used to roll out new OSes every three years... Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows XP. Why should the three... no, FOUR!... years between Vista and Windows 7 be different? There were FIVE years between XP and Vista... that certainly isn't "rushing things".

A couple of comments:

1) The report is put out by Microsoft, so any comparisons to "open source" is irrelevant, IMHO. They're hardly unbiased in the matter. It's possible that the data is true, but unless the open source software was released at the same time as Vista, it's not an appropriate comparison.

2) RE: Windows Vista has fewer initial flaws than XP. Well, duh! I would hope that they've learned how to better secure the desktop after 6 years between OS releases.

3) The more relevant comparison, in my opinion, is how well Vista compares to a fully patched Windows XP computer. I suspect that Vista would still compare favorably. That's the selling point they should be trying to go after. I think most people would agree that Vista is more secure than the XP that was released in 2001.

The more stuff they cram into an OS the longer it will take to produce, therefore take longer to check its stable and if they rush it to retail then it wont work aswell as it should.

True... but that by no means that three years is "rushing things". The differences between 98 and XP were pretty substantial, and there were only three years between them.

One of the reasons it took so long to produce Vista was because they went back and re-engineered part of the OS to allow them to put out updates more frequently. Also, don't forget that they started working on Windows 7 before Windows Vista was released.

I didn't know that they started Windows 7 before vista, I thought it was just a recent thing.

When I say "started" I mean that they've been planning this release for a long time. I have no knowledge about when they actually started writing code for Windows 7, but the planning started for Windows 7 before Windows Vista was released. In fact Windows 7 has gone through several code-names over the years, including Windows Blackcomb and Windows Vienna.

I did hear that Vienna was planned then the named changed to 7 but still it was after vista had been out a while.

For the record, I prefer Vista to Xp apart from file transfer time.

But i don't see the point in any business upgrading to vista, unless they are buying new machines. Xp is great for what i needs to do i.e. work