Vista ended the year with 21% of the desktop, up 8% in from February.
[..]
But those who are in the market are most buying Vista.

And what's the "Forced Upgrade" percent in that? I bought a new laptop in June. It shipped with Vista. Am I in that 21% even though I've booted to it a grand total of 6 times and haven't booted to it since August or so? I "bought" a Vista license, but only because I was forced to.

I tried to return my Vista license. Circuit City, after having to call two or three other Regional Managers (not the lowly multi-store supervisors, corporate managers) told me they refused to give me the money owed for a Vista License. I showed the Store Manager the EULA that states in the very first paragraph that I can return it to the store of purchase for a full refund. They refused to honor it. They said I had to go to Microsoft. After calling Microsoft three times (their server kept hanging up on me...), told me they wouldn't honor it since it states I have to go to the store of purchase.

Guess what. Circuit City, after I told them all that, told me "O-Well" (yes a direct quote), and hung up.

So now I'm in the 21% of Vista License holders?!? Pfffft... That's just corporate spreadsheet fixing...

Well, Vista isn't that horrible, it's just that it's a little slower

??? A "little". I have a dual-core 2.5Ghz laptop with 3G RAM (and a 7200 RPM 320G Drive). Id' say it's roughly half the speed of XP. I'm not saying my laptop is some major Speed Daemon or something, but with specs like that it should soar. It doesn't. I haven't booted to it since the summer sometime (I only keep the partition there so if I have to send the thing in for work, I can back up my Linux side out of and stretch the NTFS partition back out so it looks like it did when they shipped it)

And, yes, I 100% agree, there was no need to go to Vista from XP-SP3 (or SP2 at the time). XP has ended up maturing quite well. It only took them 6 or so years to get there, but they did (sort of). One of my favorite quotes about XP came from this very site:

"Windows XP - While easily the best OS they've released so far, that's not really saying much. That's like being the smartest kid on the short bus.
--sYkSh0n3 (722238) Oct 23, '07"

[...]companies were hoping to make a buck by not only selling new hardware units, but also save money by not having to support the older versions of Windows.

Which is basically what I was saying, just from a slightly different perceptive. Companies happily dumped their old stuff because of all the $$ they, in the past, were damn near guaranteed when the drove of drones went out to Wally World to get the next version of Windows. That didn't happen and could very well not happen this time (especially given the state of the economy in the US anyway...).

That's all I was saying. You said it in a way that made a bit more sense, the first time through though. :-)

Ok, but that doesn't explain why companies like Create dropped support for older products and created new ones to sell to the unsuspecting public.

Geesh, if I didn't notice your fairly low UID, I would've guess your to be around 15 or so going on that statement.

They dropped the old support because they (and many other companies) expected to the masses to keep trudging the Microsoft Treadmill and go out and buy Vista in droves just like they did for 98 & XP. As we all know, that didn't happen. People weren't enticed by the "Oooo! Look! Flipping Windows and a tiny Start button!" like Microsoft and friends assumed they would. People haven't even gone out to buy Microsoft's "Mojave" like they were supposed to either, for that matter.

Personally, I'm going to find things very interesting when VII actually hits the streets. Will the masses jump? Are the masses just as tired of dancing the Redmond Slide like most of us /. type folks are?

Perhaps you're confusing Open Source with Cross Platform.

And for it to be made into a Cross Platform code tree, the source would have to be completely open which is not how Microsoft is publishing this stuff. Just because the code is (supposedly) available , doesn't make it open . There's a big difference there.