Originally posted on April 7, 2008 @ 11:58 pm
I don’t know how you guys will take this recent news from Microsoft.
In a recent seminar on corporate philantrophy, Bill Gates said that the new version of Windows could be released anytime within the “next year or so”. This statement seems to back up the new corporate strategy of releasing far more regular updates of its dominant operating system. This means that we can expect the next OS upgrade to Vista to come to market far earlier than what was previously thought.
The new strategy seems to be to release a new Windows version within 3 years of the last version. What Gates said, therefore, actually fits into the development cycle that Microsoft has identified. Of course, this could just mean test versions coming out and not the final release product yet. Nevertheless, this development cycle leaves a very bad taste in the mouth. The cost of software upgrades is just too steep and now, the expectation is that every four to five years you have to upgrade again? It would have been a good thing if consumers can decide for themselves when to upgrade but with Microsoft’s policy of stopping support for older OS and bundling important features exclusively to the new OS (like Vista and DirectX 10), we are being forced to upgrade at gunpoint.
This is just unacceptable.