Price, Price, Price..... Bah!
The reason why most of us stay with XP is because it works and works consistantly. It ain’t got squat to do with price but rather with “Value”.
Win 7 had no appeal at ANY price.
If Win 8 is no better than I will stay with XP until it dies or I die first.
It did if you had a machine running on Vista.
Windows 7 is Microsoft’s greatest operating system ever... To say it has no appeal is quite a stretch. I administer an environment of over 1800 windows machines and we’re slowly moving them all to 7. It runs, and boots much faster with new and old hardware than xp. The file system doesn’t degrade over time either which causes eventual slowdowns with xp.
As far as Windows 8 it will need to be priced competitively because I don’t see it being adopted like windows 7 is.
I am typing this on a ThinkPad running Windows 8. Believe me, Windows 8 would be a bargain at twice or three times the price. Its a great OS. Fast. Stable (even in beta). Beautiful to look at. Innovative. There will be haters who blog about how terrible it is, but I think Windows 8 is going to be a massive hit.