Originally Posted by slim_slag
renting implies ongoing payments, which home users don't have to pay. You pay a one off fee to licence (not own) your copy of XP and that's it. When they remove support you can still use it. Whether that makes sense is not a licence issue, it's your choice, not Microsoft's. Desupporting software after a period of time is commonplace in the industry.
What about the ongoing payments for 3rd party AV software that
home users have to pay to protect MS's insecure OS? The AV component of Vista (which won't be bundled) will require yearly renewal payments too.
I know MS (and the hardware manufacturers) would LOVE us all to move to Vista (at considerable expense to ourselves and even more to any software competition [because all the programming APIs will change]).
Desupporting some ageing application that not enough people use anymore is one thing - desupporting an OS that is used globally, just because you want to sell more copies of the "next edition" is extortion (something that MS is good at).
I've no doubt Vista WILL be more secure and prettier (and full of DRM stuff) - whether that will be enough to cause folks to junk their entire working systems and buy new hardware and software at considerable expense is a moot point. Particularly as they now have an increasingly viable alternative.
