IMO, the relative position of Windows and OSX has a lot more to do with history and inertia than the systems themselves. If you could go back in time and put Apple or NeXT or Amiga in the dominant position, chances are they’d still be there today.

As far as XP to Vista goes, I’ll let John Carmack say it http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=22161
It’s not a bad thing, but the reasons to upgrade are essentially manufactured by Microsoft to pad their wallet (which of course is their primary purpose). If they just continued to issue service packs for XP, users would be equally well served.

IE7 itself is probably not fuXX0r3D in such a transparent way, but I wouldn’t know, since I didn’t actually run the cursed thing (so, RichVR, I have no idea whether the God-awful no-fullscreen-windows thing has been fixed). All I did was accept MS’s invitation to install it on my sister’s computer while I was visiting, to mind the cat while she was away, and read.

I have, in case you’re all wondering, mellowed considerably in my attitude to Microsoft software. I used to tend towards the standard Slashdot OMG M$ R teh 5uck end of the scale (although, of course, I still used Windows, just like all of the most vehement Slashdot commenters). I still take a dim view of Microsoft’s corporate practices, but it’s not as if they’re a proper evil corporation. And, importantly, a significant portion of the things that piss off geeks day-to-day about Microsoft software are, I now know largely thanks to Raymond Chen, not really Microsoft’s fault.

To oversimplify to a positively cosmic degree: Apple chose to be strict and ended up with a clean, sensible, unpopular system; Microsoft chose to be lax and made a messy, contradictory, popular system. The mess and contradictions are to a considerable extent the result of developers who did not do what Microsoft clearly requested.

(I recommend Raymond’s old posts to anybody who’s interested in the unpleasant details of the sausage that is Windows.)

Back when I had a news.com.au e-mail address and so appeared to be important, I chatted with Rick (I think) at the excellent Radsoft about Microsoft, and Windows, and suchlike.

I don’t think any of Rick’s statements about anything quantifiable to do with Windows was incorrect, but he was, at the end of it all, perfectly convinced that Microsoft was doomed, based on the unquestionable disastrousness of… Windows 2000.

He’s similarly convinced, now, that Vista is a bad idea. Which it is. And so was XP. But everybody’s going to use it anyway, and we’ll keep muddling along. The current botnet-spam crap is profoundly annoying, but I don’t think it takes unreasoning faith to assume that something will be done.

If you buy Vista now, though - or even if you rip it off - then I think you’re something of a goose.

…?

Thanks!

Microsoft used to be the entire software industry’s role model for proper accessibility, internationalization, and localization processes. Despite their other faults, we could always count on them to make sure that their software would provide consistent mediocrity no matter what country you were in, what font size you used, which direction your text flowed, which alphabet and language you used, what awful color scheme and icon packs you configured for Windows, or what cheap buggy hardware you were running it on.