Exactly, but there's more. It's not just buying new 3rd party shelfware that is compatible with your new OS...you've also got to re-write all of your in-house corporate proprietary software that's been working fine for your company and its programmers for years.
And after you spend large amounts of money paying your own programmers and rush-contractors to make the changes, you are only getting the same functionality from your software that you once had back when your company ran XP instead of Vista.
That's a lot of money for a company to spend to wind up doing the same thing. So why change OS's?
And here's the kicker: MicroSoft could write a new OS from scratch and simply ship XP with the new OS. The new OS could have dual boot or virtualization (i.e. actually run XP in a window). So there's NO REASON for spaghetiing XP/Server03 into one giant VISTA OS.
Microsoft could have trivially shipped two OS's together "as one."
Boot to pure XP for speed...or run XP in a Vista virtual window for convenience...and have Vista available for whomever wanted/needed whatever it is that Vista does that XP doesn't (sound of crickets).
Instead, Microsoft so butchered the Server '03/XP code that old hardware drivers won't even run on the Vista OS. Backwards compatibility was thrown out the window...and for that "priviledge" Vista runs at half the speed (at best) as XP on the same hardware.
Faced with an easy solution for the entire marketplace...or a cludge that would hammer performance and botch backwards compatibility, MicroSoft chose the worst of all strategic options.
This is why the new Iphone and MS want to move everything you do to THEIR servers.
The compatability nightmare will mean you will eventually be forced to store your data at their locations and remote your database and then pay them to subscribe to the software to access your own information.
OS as a utility service.
I wonder what would happen if there was a REAL os battle between Mac OS and MS OS.
Where the OSes could REALLY run everything and anything without issue and it was just the product alone that mattered.
We alegedly have that with linux with MS winning on the consumer and majority of business front. Could mac os compete outside in the real world...