The only value that Windows has over other operating systems is hardware and software backward compatibility. Vista does not have that and Windows7 won't either. Except for the virtual XP piece, which has been tacked on at the last minute, because there is no reason for any organization to upgrade to Vista or Windows7. There is ZERO upside, except that Microsoft has a gun to your head and will stop supporting XP.

Windows 7 is Vista SP3. Microsoft is hoping that rebranding Vista will get corporations to adopt it, but without transparent compatibility for ALL their existing hardware and software companies will just keep wanting XP.

XP performs better on the same hardware.
XP is compatible with everything they have.

There are ZERO killer features in Windows7 to make it worthwhile to upgrade to it from XP.

Windows7 offers nothing except higher resource requirements and incompatibility with the installed base. So there is no reason to upgrade to it.

We used Sun386i's for commodity trading workstations. They were fantastic. You could run multiple MS-DPS instances with all the MS-DOS applications. You could even use PC hardware with box DOS and SunOS simultaneously. All while running large trading apps in SunOSin Sunview or X11. (But you had to build your own X11.)

Adding a parallel printer interface to a Sun386i was a $50 card at Fry's. It cost at least $800 on any other Sun product at the time. Almost any ISA hardware could be made to work if you could get interface documentation.

We wanted Sun486is! But it became clear after the SPARCStation was introduced that Sun was never going to release the Sun486i or any Intel based systems. Our company never bought another Sun product. The Sun486i was faster than any SPARC offering at the time, while the Sun386i was about the same as a SPARCstation in performance.

For a while the Sun386i was Sun's fastest Workstation.

I also wrote a Sunview/video driver on the Sun386i for the DOS version CAD/CAM program. The driver allowed the Sun386i to use the DOS version of that program like the SunOS version that cost 8 times as much, but ran at about the same speed. If the accelerated graphics card was added to a Sun386i, my DOS version ran faster than the SunOS version.

When Linux arrived and had a groundswell of first hobbiest and then developer support it was clear that Sun was doomed unless they adapted their offerings to Linux. They never really did and then opened Solaris way too late for anyone to care.

Transition costs. Code rewrite costs.

Hardening Windows is a fools errand. It has repeated been demonstrated that new Windows vulnerabilities are constantly developing and the lag time before Microsoft patches them can be years.

Switching to Linux and learning to use it is a one time event. Constantly patching and protecting Windows is an ongoing and never completed task.

Viewers complaining to FOX is like cattle complaining to the cattleman. Viewers are the product for advertisers, what they think does not count. And unless all the cattle/viewers disappear FOX does not care.

NX and FreeNX are cross-platform and very efficient remote desktops... Citrix has always been a slug. FreeNX also is not tied to a specific operating system and can be used as the frontend of virtualized Linux and Windows now!

Combine a light Linux base, OpenVZ, Ubuntu, Windows, Virtualbox and NX and you have a complete virtual platform that runs in the cloud with all of Ubuntu and Windows. And the only thing you need to pay for is hardware and Windows.

This works on any modern processor with virtualization extensions.