Is Windows Vista Microsoft's New Coke?

Given that XP seems to be outselling Vista in corporate environments by 5:1, it sure looks like it.

Same old same old. The same thing happened at the launch of XP. The problem is legacy hardware, both the system box and peripherals, and the drivers for them - also the fact that a lot of PCs that run XP with ease struggle to run Vista.

If you are buying all new (perhaps your first computer and peripherals) then it's a shoo-in for Vista. But, for example, I won't be "upgrading" anytime soon - I run a 2.4GHz Athlon box with 1 GB of RAM, an 80GB disk and a low-range video card, which does all I want it to but would struggle extremely with Vista.

In addition to that, my printer works fine, but is nearly 10 years old - the drivers for 98 were pretty good, the XP drivers are barely adequate and the Vista drivers probably don't exist. There is no money in supporting old hardware.

I think I'm fairly typical. I can't afford to chuck away working hardware for the latest toys, and probably wouldn't if I could - being of a generation that was brought up not to like waste.

Commercial users won't be in any hurry either, I suspect, for many of the same reasons. Of course, eventually, Micro$oft will stop support for XP - thus forcing the "upgrade".

And lastly, Micro$oft are shafting us Brits yet again - the price of any edition of Vista being 50% higher than in the US. They don't even localise their OS's properly for the UK - buy a copy of XP in the UK and you have to explicitly tell it to use UK standards (for example, for the keyboard). Office is the same, and the customisation is harder to do.