I wonder whether as a result of this policy that IE6 becomes one of the many different browser options, just to keep happy those businesses with legacy code that wont work on anything else!

Now that really would cause Microsoft a headache - competing with its own lack of standards...

Not that many web designers will be happy with this though!

is the fact that it ships with IE7 and not IE6.

Vista took too long to develop, but during that period too many software vendors wrote bad web interface code for business applications that would only work with IE6 and not IE7, Firefox, Oprah or any other browser. Let us face it, IE6 has known compatibility problems. This problem is compounded by the fact that Microsoft chose not to support IE7 on Windows 2000. Therefore, it did not make sense to repair this bad code if it meant that older machines would immediately become obsolete unless with XP or Vista was installed, especially as XP was made available as an alternative to Vista Business Edition allowing the burying of heads in sand.

If the bad code was rewritten to support any suitable browser, then most business would try and use a different operating system other than windows. That is probably why Microsoft have released their mistake and backtracked allowing business to continue to use XP. But this solution has a double edged sword that they need to be wary of; when Windows 7 arrives, will be be even less compatible with business software than Vista? With the way the economic downturn is going, by the problem software developers waiting and not planning to resolve the problems presented by Vista, how will these businesses survive much beyond 2010? and what impact will that have on Microsoft as a result?

As for home use, I have been using Vista for 12 months. Don't find many problems, but then I'm using the 32 bit edition and don't need to using web browser based business applications.

With regard to complaints about minimum specification, Vista 32 is ironically holding back the specification of home PCs due to its inability to address more than 4GB of RAM. It sounds like everybody will have to adopt a 64 bit Windows pretty soon.