Eh? XP needs about 2.5GB -- Vista requires over 15GB for the OS itself. How can that possibly be "less bloated"?
Anyway, it's not like the world has a choice -- once Vista is released, you pretty much won't be able to buy a computer without it thanks to Microsoft's nice little licensing conditions with the system builders. The vast majority of people don't manually upgrade their OS ever, but 'automatically' upgrade when they buy their next computer. So no, by no means 80% will have upgraded in a year as mentioned above... But more than likely that 80% will have been hit after 4-5 years when most people would have upgraded their computers anyway, after their current ones get crippled beyond usability thanks to spyware.
While MS makes some money on the side through upgrades, the vast majority of their income is through bundled operating systems with new computers
although especially in corporate settings, I don't expect to see XP go away any time soon -- simply because you can save a significant amount of money by getting XP capable machines over Vista-capable machines....
<unrelated>
Heh. Microsoft's worst nightmare would be for Fisher Price to get into the OS market themselves. ;-)
</unrelated>
Anyway, it's not like the world has a choice -- once Vista is released, you pretty much won't be able to buy a computer without it thanks to Microsoft's nice little licensing conditions with the system builders. The vast majority of people don't manually upgrade their OS ever, but 'automatically' upgrade when they buy their next computer. So no, by no means 80% will have upgraded in a year as mentioned above... But more than likely that 80% will have been hit after 4-5 years when most people would have upgraded their computers anyway, after their current ones get crippled beyond usability thanks to spyware.
While MS makes some money on the side through upgrades, the vast majority of their income is through bundled operating systems with new computers
although especially in corporate settings, I don't expect to see XP go away any time soon -- simply because you can save a significant amount of money by getting XP capable machines over Vista-capable machines....
<unrelated>
Heh. Microsoft's worst nightmare would be for Fisher Price to get into the OS market themselves. ;-)
</unrelated>