Ben, what makes you believe that this was planned and what has Microsoft to do with it?

Think if they were selling a product in any other market – cars, TVs, holidays…. IT needs to join the rest of the sane business world and drop the notion that money doesn’t matter. Your comments re 4GB of RAM clearly illustrate that you speak for yourself only and not for any business or organisation of more than 1. How can you possibly expect any company to regard putting 4GB of RAM in every machine as normal?!

For my company, XP does everything I need it to – and seems to do it relatively well. Please give me a real business reason why I should upgrade. What will I get for my money? As we say – What is the ROI?

JC, I think 4GB is not really high-end anymore. Memory has become quite cheap lately. I don’t know what apps you are running, but I have absolutely no performance problems with Vista. I still have my old XP machine at home. When I bought it, it was absolutely high-end and I think it was only 2 years old when XP came out. This machine is definitely slower than my Vista laptop now which I bought short before Vista came out. All you need is enough RAM and, as Aaron rightly mentioned, to disable Windows Search.

Ronald, nothing to edit

Andy, I think we still have to wait if Server 2008 will get the same critics as Vista. But bashing a desktop OS brings more page views, so I think it won’t be so bad for Server 2008.

In organizations having little to do with IT as their business (let’s say a clothes factory), executives sees IT costs as a something they have to pay for employees to work, but they may not want to invest more for little benefits.
IT Managers have to have a great deal of good reasons to tell the executives they want to order new PCs in the organization (in most of the case, the rest of the PC like the CPU or Hard drive is too old as well to run Vista decently, so a simple memory upgrade won’t do).

Now, it is quite unfair to compare 98 with XP since they were different kernels types, but as I said, it is true that reactions were more or less same.
However, with XP, you got huge improvements over 9x : stability is several orders of magnitudes better, you could join it to domains, etc…
Vista has some extra-features (most of these can be obtained through third party program running on XP anyway), but not enough to justify the upgrades for most people.

Now, regarding Windows Server 2008, things are pretty different for a server OS than a client OS.
You rarely work on the server directly, unless it is a terminal server, so the user interface doesn’t bothers as much as on a workstation OS.
It is also easier to justify hardware upgrades on some servers than for lots of clients.
Same with Security : you obviously need even more security on the server than on the clients, so having to solve some either software or hardware incompatibilites is worth the security gain here.

As soon as companies will renew their computer fleets, they will either keep the preinstalled Vista or deploy their own once most of the fleet will meet hardware requirements with dignity, but before, it seems hard to justify.

You write this :
“relatively new PC for his benchmark tests: 3.4Ghz, 4GB, 2×250GB.”

4GB of ram is by no mean “relatively new”, it is a high-end PC.
I’m consider myself happy when I go on people’s PCs and see that they have 1GB of ram and the point is that they simply won’t upgrade their PCs just to run Vista…

Also, the problem is that the added features simply do not explain the added overhead in performance which is sometimes massive…
The number and purpose of the new features simply do not justify the added overhead…
While I can be OK with boot time, why do we see so much difference in files copy performance ?

The problem is that customers are not going to buy the “It is OK for it to be slower, because it is brand new and have added features” excuse.
Granted, the same was true with 98 and XP (many users, especially home users, didn’t get through the Win2000 phase), but it was a whole different kernel and the gap in requirements wasn’t as massive as from XP to Vista.

While you are right that better hardware is required for better (I would prefer to say “newer”) software to run, it is something that software use and abuse with the hope of this to cover their occassional sloppy programming.
I think it is clear that today, the focus is not on performance but on features and looks, and who cares how bloated it is becoming : it is why people have the feeling they need to renew their PC to do barely the same thing as before.
If programmers had performance more in mind when writing programs, our PCs would run much faster today than they did in the last years.

Unfortunately, I am not feeling that my PC that I renew almost every year has been much faster than a few years ago in day-to-day tasks and I can’t help but be sad when I realize that the added performance from the new hardware i have been buying has been sucked away from me to make up for software bloat and occasionnal sloppy programming (I’m not only speaking of Vista here but almost any software vendor today).

My view of Vista is that it has wanted to do too much at once : new user-interface (very confusing and breaking years of user-experience and habits, ending up in huge training costs and productivity loss), new security features (while they are certainly good, some seem overkill over the loss of compatibility and it is why most admins think that XP is “secure enough”) and insane hardware requirements compared to what most people or companies are equipped with.
Not saying that things shouldn’t move, but Microsoft tried to do too much at once, resulting in a lot of rejection from its user (worst point for me over all I said is user-interface : it is why I am not planning to deploy it yet in my organization).

I hope Microsoft can get back to its sense with Windows 7… as this service pack doesn’t seem to solving much issues, people may lose any hope for it and simply skip it…

It’s ok to defend Vista, but you look like a Microsoft comercial.

And now, face it, Vista is slower, and will ever be. Two years from now, it will be bearable, but now? No thanks.