Putting SD's post another way, Mr Gates is saying to us:
"I know that you have invested some hundreds of bucks in software & hardware which you have tuned to do the work you routinely need to do, but you really really need to use my nice OS with lots of bells and whistles on it. (What d'you mean, you hate them?)."
"You'll buy XP for my new machine to make them work? Well, sorry, the days of XP are over. So I shan't sell it to you, so there!"
If someone could convince me that Vista (and, yes, I can dual boot to V and play with it sometimes - but I still can't get bluetooth to work reliably with it, even tho' I bought new "vista-approved" kit.) So I'm still on XP, and prob will be until Msoft tell me they ain't going to support it no more.
(But no, I don't have a third machine with Windows 3.1 to drive my dot-matrix printer...
)
Jim