Ms bad yadda yadda yadda.
The fact is they did the same thing with the switch from 95 to 98 to XP at some point they stop selling the previous product.
Why would anyone sell program 1.0 when they have 2.0 out?
Keep in mind Microsoft is still a monopoly which is not regulated like a monopoly.
While you may have moderate Geeks who are able to use an emulator to run windows based programs with matchbook, a paperclip, and a slightly modified linux OS it is useless to those of us who rely on off the shelf product to run business applications for our business and staff.
MS will rule the market until it is regulated out of existence or those kids in the garage finally come up with something new.
Because your users need (especially in large environments) need enough time with version 2.0 to plan and implement their migration to that newer version. In fact with most software companies tend to skip a version for that very reason.
e.g. My last shop did not go to RHEL4 from RHEL3, they waited for RHEL5. If they did not do this they would constantly be updating their OS's to new versions not improving their infrastructure.