I’m not the only one defending Vista, look at this thread. Many people are quite happy with it, what is your evidence Microsoft will “drop” it? Sounds very far fetched to me, the only OS they’ve ever dropped was ME but it was lacking any significant new features and was released at a time there were many other new choices from MS.
You also keep going back to backwards compatibility, when Vista is just as backwardly compatible as any other new MS release, and much more backward compatible than other options like Mac or Unix would be. I’m not saying Vista is a perfect easy upgrade for everyone, no OS upgrade ever is, but it’s definitely not the disaster you keep making it out to be. It’s already running on about as many computers as these alternatives combined, even though return policies on $500-2,000 products are excellent. I know I wouldn’t have kept it if I didn’t like it, and being an IT pro making a change to something else would be a piece of cake, I run several different alternatives already.
Vista and Windows ME share the same embedded MS-DOS 8, by the way.
...And MicroSoft dropped DOS 4, too.