Actually, I think there would have been a good ROI for re-writing Office in .NET.

Migrating to 64 bit Windows would have been a lot easier. The only thing you need to retool is the CLR, otherwise the application remains the same.

And yes, I know you can run a 34 bit MS Office on a 64 bit Windows but it's sub-optimal for a number of reasons.

Something that hasn't been mentioned is how little today's college graduates will know about modems. I think this goes hand-in-hand with using analog tape recorders to store program data, this was quite common in the early 1980's and together with my 300 baud modem it really helped to demystify storage and electronic communications for me.

Go ahead and shop for a new PC with a modem in. Good luck. Everything has a network board in it now, with the exception of FAX machines the modem has quickly been relegated to attics and basements everywhere. Tape drives aren't doing much better these days, it seems direct to disk is getting to be the cheapest route.

Speaking strictly from a Windows development perspective, I think .NET has improved the experience somewhat compared to other kludgy frameworks (MFC / ATL). Assuming you don't plan on any cross platform deployments, you can implement your application within .NET using all of the capabilities of the operating system in an object oriented fashion. It's quick - it's easy - and C# is close enough to C/C++ that anyone with a programming background can pick it up.

Where Microsoft missed the mark is on the promise that their own applications would migrate to .NET. For example, Microsoft Office would get re-written as a .NET application. Ironically, I think it's because of the lack of cross platform capability that .NET was unable to meet this need. Microsoft has a number of key software products that need to run on both Mac and Windows. While native C/C++ can be easily ported, without a compatible CLR moving to Mac isn't that easy.

Had they been able to meet the portability objective (which they never promised), I think .NET could have been much more prevalent. For now, it will continue to be a second-best development environment for Windows computers (with C/C++ being the primary).

It seems that most of what Google Wave has to offer is already available in other venues... but if they can converge on truly real-time collaboration that uses chat together with a shared desktop / application, Google might be on to something. Don't forget the Google Voice project, the consolidation of these two platforms (conference calling with call recording and Google Wave discussions + real-time application sharing) could be a real GoToMyPC killer-app.

Microsoft has come pretty close with Shared View but it's tricky to get installed and it isn't cross platform. Not to mention, MS doesn't offer any telephony support (although Skype does work pretty well).

Obviously, there are commercial alternatives (GoTo Meeting, WebEx, etc.) and even some almost-there open source tools (DimDim) but they are either expensive or feature-limited. If it stays as-is, it's going to have a tough time growing much beyond a Twitter clone.

What about the ~120 minute upgrade with 70GB of data? That seems pretty long to me... 2 hours.

I'm not sure what that means, is the computer offline for 2 hours while the upgrade installs? Or maybe it's the total amount of time to install and finish re-indexing your content, in which case the core install is much shorter and the computer is already running while re-indexing of content completes.

The upgrade is a pretty realistic scenario as there are going to be quite a few Vista users standing in line for Windows 7. With the advent of DRM, I'm not sure how successful even power users are going to be at getting the clean installs to work - an upgrade sure would be easier.

I've had a similar experience on Ubuntu as well -- I've upgrade from 6.10 to the current stable release 9.04 with a variety of issues on the way. Generally it is possible to recover but you need to be familiar with the command prompt to manually initiate the completion and/or reconfiguration of your environment.

Of course, a commercial operating system like Windows should be able to accomplish an upgrade -- particularly when a majority of your users running the existing platform (Vista) want an upgrade. I'm not sure on the 650GB storage thing, assuming this is your user documents & settings and not your external storage (where you might have music and videos) then I can't imagine it's that much of an issue.

This tactic worked great for me when I upgraded from XP to Ubuntu. While just about everything I needed to do was available in Ubuntu, there were (and still are) a few legacy apps that require Windows XP. Booting up my XP image under VirtualBox is nearly instant since the OS never really needs to be shutdown. Of course, the fact that it can run seamlessly with my Ubuntu desktop is a bonus.

I think it's incredibly ironic that Windows users will now get to run a virtual Windows XP on Windows 7 for compatibility. Is this really worth the upgrade? It's a nice safety net for large XP installs that are wary of a Windows 7 upgrade that might render their apps unusable; of course, if Microsoft is admitting that you still need XP then you can do this virtualization on a Mac or with Linux... for that matter, you can skip the upgrade altogether.

This is an important observation -- we have quite a few discs that simply cannot be copied as a result.

My best success has been with VLC, although DVDFab works fairly well also. Unfortunately, there are a few discs that we can't even *play* in the DVD-ROM drive on any computer. This level of "protection" is starting to border on ridiculous. While our new $74 DVD player seems to play them fine the media center PC is now a virtual brick when it comes these discs.

I can't believe we had to buy a separate player just to watch certain movies. Be wary of the movies you backup, if it's a Sony disc you might want to think twice before you even bother to purchase it.

Why bother with a real store? Microsoft is primarily a software company, they should be looking at ways to maximize the sales of software.

If you're going to steal something from Apple, maybe looking at the App Store would be a good starting point. Imagine if Vista had an Add/Remove Programs link that would actually show you new programs you could install just like the App Store.

The current Microsoft store is missing way too much, and most of the software is far too expensive. Consumers won't be buying $150 copies of MS Office anytime soon. Why not offer MS Word for $25?

More importantly, take advantage of _software_ and integrate this with MS Windows. Let me shop for programs from within my os, similar to Ubuntu's Add/Remove application, but with a hook into your MS Live ID where you can include billing information.

Heck, if you do it right you can ditch the MSDN downloads for enterprise users and have the billing info in the MS AppStore connected to the corporate account.

Aside from the complexity of all these different versions of Windows, what about the problems with supporting your software on them?

First you have to determine if it's 64-bit or 32-bit -- after you get past that you need to determine which edition is running specifically.

If it's Home Basic then only 5 SMB connections are allowed but if it's Home Premium then it's 10 connections. Maybe that's not your problem, if your app is CPU intensive then the user won't have a second CPU without Business edition.

Of course, if you're doing any multilingual work you will need to be on Enterprise or Ultimate.

Do you need your application to use a web server for anything? What about sending a fax or scanning something? Better figure out which version of Windows you need and detect on install before you run into trouble.

Rather than have such a complex lineup, with such stringent upgrade paths, MS would do better to have an app store level functionality where you could simply install the additional programs you need.

Are you running low on SMB access? Spend $10 and get another 10 connections! Do you need to scan something, spend $25 and get the Windows scanner support.

Or you could just run bing:

http://fgouget.free.fr/bing/bing_src-readme.shtml

This is a point-to-point bandwidth measuring tool based on ICMP. It works fairly well and doesn't require you to saturate the network to establish thruput.

It's also nice because you can use bing to measure the speed between two arbitrary hosts. In other words, Server A and Desktop A or Server A and Desktop B.

With that said, if you do observe a potential issue based on your bing results then you will want to try a method like Shawn suggests here (ie; saturate the pipe and see what results from that).

As an aside, if you can use iSCSI or NFS for your network file solution the performance over something like CIFS is notable -- especially on slower networks.