Worst of all? The newest browsers are ugly, and without any 'personality'.

You could access the individual sales records of each PC supplier and compare them with OS purchases but that I think would be haphazard at best considering XP is no longer on store bought PCs. Neither is Vista for that matter. As for browsers. All Windows comes with IE8 or now that 9 is out with that one. Since the other browsers are freebies I suppose you could add up all the downloads and try for a ratio between that and PC sales versus home builts. Tedious to say the least. I wouldn't want to try it though.

Agreed.

Remember Netscape Navigator/Communicator, kona? Crap but they were beauties. May AOL rot in Perdition.

They need to learn to make/release OS's slower. For the last few years of the 90's and early into 2000 it seemed like all MS was doing was putting a new number on the box, adding a couple bugs, and re-releasing last year's OS. The jump between XP and Vista was a total sh!t storm and MS knows it. Hell, when I built this system Win 7 wasn't out yet, Vista had been out for a few years (and was still a P.O.S.), and XP was getting old. Still, I picked up a fresh boxed copy of XP 64. A year later I bought Win 7x64 Ultimate when it was released. Anyone who built a gaming rig and did their research (before Win7) knew that they needed XP Pro 64 and to avoid Vista like the black plague. That should have told MS right there that they should have held off and slowed down, to protect their own interests if for nothing else, but nooooo, of course they didn't....and now they're paying the price for it.

RavenX no matter how bad Vista may have been it sold and Microsoft made money.  They then made some more money bringing out Window 7.  Oh, and Windows 8 is on the way and guess what, they are going to make more money. 

My main PC at home still has XP on it.  Why?  Because it works and no reason to upgrade.  When build a new PC in a year or so I'll put Win 7 on it.

At work it's all XP and IE7.  Why?  Because to upgrade 110,000 users costs tens upon tens of millions of dollars which nobody wants to spend.  All corporate apps run fine and thus it is what it is.  Last I heard they plan to have a pilot of Win 7 going by end of 2011 and perhaps a rollout of Win 7 starting end of 2012...maybe.

Yeap, they never learn. At best they should release a new OS every 5 to 10 years. Especially when half of the time they're asking whole corporations to upgrade every system they currently have in use, and that gets pretty damn expensive, even for smaller businesses.

Correct, but to bring us to reality: OS's are like cars, etc. in our mercantile society.... with planned obsolescence, along with competitive "Keeping up with the Firefoxes next door." Profits are based on sales. So, there's a built in profit motive to make it very good, but not great.

Remember... most powerful word to describe a product? "New." 

Windows 8 should be out in beta this year I hear. If you want a more ridiculous release schedule try Linux. Most flavors release a new version of the OS every 6 months.

NEW! Best catchphrase there is. I wonder what Win8 will be like.

 Here ya go, Uvah:  http://windows8center.com/uncategorized/download-windows-8s-aero-lite-theme-for-windows-7/

Google it and you can find it. There are lots of install discs out there for sale yet of XP and you can get them pretty cheap as well.

That's because people are generally sucked in to all the hype and the need to have the latest greatest thing on the block...and like a bunch of lemmings they just jump off the cliff. If people thought for themselves instead of buying into the hype I doubt MS would be selling as many "New" Os's. Plus as soon as you say your not going to support something anymore everyone tends to bail out...as though the previous OS is going to just stop working.

Maybe they did not feel like making it worse than it is in order to accomodate an OS they want to die?

XP isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Way too many people still use it. Why do you think Microstuff embedded it in Win7 as a virtual OS. Popularity.