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For one thing, Vista is too bulky for pocket devices.

So is XP.

For another thing, corporations have a Trillion Dollars invested in legacy software that simply won’t run on Vista.

But they won't run on anything else, either. They should stick with 98, until they re-write it for something more modern, like they had to do when 2000/XP first came out.

Throw in Vista’s bugginess and slower speed (e.g. Vista blew multi-tasking) and you’ve got yourself an inevitable market crash of that OS.

Microsoft has announced it as the fastest selling OS of all time. And their record numbers from last quarter blew estimates out of the water. Need a link? How about a lot of them.

IBM can buy licensed copies of Windows XP, for instance, each with its own processor, and make XP available for sharing online.

IBM is out of the consumer business, sold it to the Chicomm government. Sure they'd like to sell cloud resources and support services to big business and government, but no one really wants a dumb terminal on their desk again. Some get stuck with one but no one really wants it, which is why it never penetrates beyond the lowest level.

a competitor could make XP available to users of an entirely different OS...and said competitor would comply with more of MicroSoft’s own design rules than would Vista...and would be faster...and would have fewer bugs...

Sure, several have been trying for some time to duplicate the MS API and provide Windows app compatibility on alternative OS's, but can't seem to even work the bugs out of their own code yet. Apple seems to have the best shot, yet look at their latest release. Tom's Hardware: Leopard Problems Plague Apple

Just sayin’...

And your posts are usually very excellent. But saying Vista is doomed and that MS is going to dump it completely just 1 year from now simply isn't supported by the facts.

"But they won't run on anything else, either. They should stick with 98, until they re-write it for something more modern, like they had to do when 2000/XP first came out."

Companies don't want to spend new money to rewrite software that already works...especially just to enable running it on some new OS.

Companies want the old software to run on newer, faster hardware.

That's a large market demand. MicroSoft is shooting itself by creating that demand on the one hand, and not filling it on the other.

Eventually, someone will fill that market need...that's the invisible hand of capitalism.