Microsoft's Dumbest And Smartest Moves Of 2011

[psxphill]

People are mostly okay with Vista/7, I think, because despite the aesthetic tweaks it doesn't really screw around with what already works (too much.) But if Microsoft tries to force users into a different model, I think there's going to be a lot of backlash.

Some people hate change, I remember when XP came out and how unpopular it was with the 9x lovers. Then Vista was terrible and XP was great, etc etc. However change is innevitable, so if there is a backlash it will be a minority and in a couple of years nobody will care anyway as there will be a new version to hate.
 
We're so far away from windows 8 release to even begin to know what it will look like. But if they remove the classic start menu then at least the people who complained about it in 1995 will be happy.

[psxphill]

The dev preview of win 8 has been out for months, and the RTM/Consumer preview will be out on the 29th.
 
RTM means ready to manufacture, the version coming out on the 29th will be very similar to the end retail product.
 
Dev preview was freely downloadable, so will the RTM/consumer preview version.

RTM means release to manufacture.
 
After the consumer preview there will be a release candidate and then release to manufacture. There is no current ship date for RTM but it's widely believe to be in 6 months.
 
Any minor annoyances could easily be changed in that time. Now is your chance to find them, when it's free to try & you might stand a chance of getting them changed.
Major changes would be harder to predict, although it's known that Windows Media Centre doesn't come in the consumer preview.

[psxphill]

you know your product is loathed when you are forced to offer downgrades to XP on machines that came with Vista pre-installed, so in that case it was a real shambles. Hell, I even "downgraded" a Toshiba laptop that came with Vista, back to XP.

It's no different to commodore allowing degrader to include kickstart 1.3 when the a500 plus came out.
 
Then again there are some people who preferred kickstart 1.2.
 
I ran vista x64 as it was the only choice if you wanted a 64 bit os. You could run XP64, but that was basically Windows Server & had less worse support than Vista.
 
Then I wouldn't touch XP if you paid me.

[psxphill]

They are now merely MS-DOS emulations when you enter that CMD command.
 
Then again, any terminal junkie is already running a *nix or BSD variant and doesn't give 2 ****s about Windows or OS X.

CMD is nothing like DOS and Power Shell is the new hotness, I also use jpsoft's TCCLE as I've been using their shells for years.
 
Or you could slum it and use one of the *ix shells on Windows.