Vista offers no improvements?

Mike,

First of all, you can take a default installation of Vista and make it fairly similar to XP so that most users would not be able to tell them apart. You can disable Aero, turn off UAC and throw Defender out the window, and presto: XP lives! Most of these settings (if not all) can be reached by setting group policies, so system admins can easily configure all their clients, if they want to...

True, Vista carries no revolutionary improvements over XP. It is not a huge upgrade like 98->XP. But after using Vista for a while, I don't want to go back. For one thing, the start menu is easier to use. It just works. I like the new explorer as well (easier to navigate the folder hierarchy from the address bar).

As for people lining up for W95 because it was a better OS... Wrong. There was already a superior OS out at that point (from MS): Windows NT 3.51. The problem was that nobody knew about it, and hardware requirements were a little steeper (but not much really). Eventually the old Windows 9x line died and NT was carried forward as 'XP'. Win95 was initially popular due to marketing and a slightly improved shell. Technically, W9x was a total disaster. Its major design goal was backward compatibility, and it shows. (W95 could even access devices that only provided 16-bit DOS device drivers... Benefit for some, huge opportunity for major instability for the rest of us -- I can crash any Win9x installation by typing a few commands at the command line)

So please leave W9x out of this discussion. Win98 should NOT become public domain but rather be buried sixty feet under the surface.

Personally I'm holding off on Vista deployment until Longhorn Server is released. I've found no easy way to host Vista drivers on our Win2003 print servers... (D'oh!)