When you make things up, you look like an idiot. Microsoft has published their support lifecycles for all versions of Windows. Here's the one for vista. Mainstream support ends in 2012, while extended support ends in 2017. So that's a little over 5 years for mainstream support, and a little over 10 years for extended support. Compare that to WinMe (here) which was only supported for 3 years and 5.5 years.

Pretty damn well? The registry cleaned up the mess of .ini files thrown everywhere (not unlike the giant pile of files in /etc (or whatever other location a particular installer decides to put its config info in)), and the b-tree structure means keys leftover by old apps have negligible impact (despite the alleged "winrot" that so many drone on and on about).

The code to actually do something useful *is* frequently distributed fairly widely. Pretty much every major instrumentation company provides Labview support along with lots of example programs that you can use. That's the kind of stuff that requires a PhD to do. We're willing to pay NI a good bit of money for Labview because it works and it's easy. As experimentalists, we have neither the time nor the funding to sit around coding up drivers and writing our own programming languages. Labview makes it easy - easy to get data, easy to make multithreaded apps. Easy is good when you need to get papers published.

Exactly. It's a neat step forward, but surface plasmon resonance is nothing new at all. Lots of companies make SPR devices (Biorad, Texas Instruments, etc etc) and publications about using gratings date back at least twenty years.