How is it not an excellent business model if they made plenty of money from the N64 and GameCube?

Omg! I installed Vista on my Core Duo MacBook with 1 gig of RAM, and you know? I noticed absolutely no difference in the time it takes me to do things from XP!

Anecdotal evidence is just that: anecdotal.

No, but they're still irrelevant. You're talking about messing with conventions that make no sense. Moving the start menu to the right side of the screen achieves nothing but is a change for the sake of change. (Of course, in right to left languages, the start button IS on the right).

The evolution of the start menu itself was hardly changing things for the sake of changing things. It added features. Some didn't like them, sure, but at some point you have to risk alienating users with your changes. The taskbar itself has remained relatively unchanged since Windows 95, and in Windows 7 it will see changes and improvements that are welcome, which of course, some will dislike. But you can't keep on sticking to the old just because you don't want to risk alienating users.

I find it ironic that in one part of the thread people are complaining about changes to the OS, while in another part of the thread people are complaining that Microsoft focuses too much on maintaining compatability. In short? You're never going to please everyone.

True, but I have been doing both A and B in my Vista install. It still seems to work fine, and quite stable.

Huh? Your examples make no sense. You're supposed to use one foot for accelerating and breaking, and it's the right foot...

Not to mention, they're all irrelevant because they're not simple UI changes in an operating system.

I didn't say I liked every UI change. I think they brought back the File menu in IE8 (at least it's there when I booted up my beta).

Wait, so a company is not allowed to make any changes to anything because it might alienate existing users? By your logic, we'd still be doing everything by a command prompt, because hey, this UI wizbangery and windows and icons and mouse! They confused all them users!

And I don't recall the start menu being redesigned from scratch. The changes from 2000 to XP to Vista were iterative, and some people actually like em, even old users, like me.

You know all them babies born today? Plenty of new users in the future from those. All those untapped third world markets out there? Plenty of new users right there.

The problem here was that the interface item itself was designed incorrectly in the first place. As a new user, if I go to control panel and know I want to do something with programs, my first inclination would be to look for Programs, or Uninstall Programs or Remove Programs. Why was it called Add/Remove Programs? For the life of me, in god knows how many years I've used Windows, I've never used that to add programs. Plus, Add/Remove Programs didn't indicate that you could also change/remove/add the features of Windows itself, hence, 'Programs and Features' makes more sense.

There's lots to hate about Vista, sure, but renaming Add/Remove Programs to Programs and Features isn't one of them. It'll take an old user all of 30 seconds to find it, and after a couple of times, you've retrained yourself easily. It's not about being friendly to utterly non technical users, it's about being friendly to new users. You know, there are new babies born, and kids grow up to use computers. What's wrong with making sure things make sense?

apple's several transitions, m68k -> PPC -> intel (hardware) and Mac OS classic -> Mac OS X pretty much afected some few specialized (read: badly written) software. nothing that caused widespread problems.

Nothing that caused widespread problems because Apple isn't used widespread.

Though I didn't mean to indicate that backwards compatability is the only reason why Apple isn't very popular in the enterprise, but it is one of them

Thank you! I always seem to be the person saying this. Vista is a pretty good OS. Sure, it has it's flaws. I hate the security prompts, but to be honest, after the initial setup where I install all my programs, I barely see anything now. I've been running Vista since Beta 2, and it's been pretty smooth since RC1. I installed the retail version, and it's the first time where I've had an OS on my machine that lasted almost 2 years without being formatted.

Well, sometimes you need to make changes to the UI that would be more friendly to new users, even if it might confuse old users for a little bit. Yeah, the Programs and Features was a pain in the ass, but after the first couple of times, I don't even think about it (and I still use XP at work).

Why don't they cut backwards compatability? Because businesses want backwards compatability. Businesses are Microsoft's core market. Cut off backwards compatability, and businesses won't like it.

Sure, Apple did it twice, but guess what? That's why Apple isn't very populer within enterprise-level companies.

So the only really good games are ones that never get mentioned and no one buys?

Let me know when you can do apps like picnik or buzzword in JavaScript, CSS and DHTML without having a nightmare of browser incompatabilities to work around.