The core of the issue is the widely reviled Windows Vista, which many businesses have decided not to bother with on the grounds that they shouldn’t have to buy a new supercomputer mainframe for every employee who needs e-mail. So many, in fact, that Microsoft have been forced to roll back the “end date” of Windows XP and – with Windows 7 hovering on the horizon – face the horrifying prospect of people daring to not buy a broken product they never wanted. Clearly, this will not stand. Microsoft VP Mike Nash writes in a newly released white paper, basically threatening any business with the temerity to attempt upgrading from XP (an official product of Microsoft) to Windows 7 (an official product of Microsoft). They would face security vulnerabilities, uncertain stability, reduced support and – it seems – plagues of locusts while MS support looked on and shrugged. Unless, of course, they buy a copy of Vista. Let me restate that in case sheer capitalism hemorrhaging horror of it hasn’t sunk in: customers would have to buy an entire failed operating just for the privilege of buying another one. Implying that the MS engineers are RIGHT NOW specifically NOT fixing XP-incompatibilities in the developing version of windows, because they have already decided to simply bully people into buying two products. To call this a gross abuse of the customer base would be to dismiss torture-homicide as “rude”.
