It (they, actually) cost tens of thousands of UK pounds!
But we can probably both tell of PC-budget machines (well, PCs of course!) running SCO Unix (Xenix even: hey, MS once had a decent OS!), supporting multiple users and churning away nicely, in the days when one was lucky to keep Windows running for an hour or two.
The cycle is wrong. I'm not up-to-date in PC chip technology, but not a great deal seems to have happened of late. If greater, better, faster chips, able to do stuff not possible a year ago, were being coming on the market, it would then be necessary for OSs to grow and develop to support them.
The current MS-based model is that the OSs are ever more resource-hungry, and people have to upgrade or buy faster machines to do the same stuff. It is a self-supporting circle that only the marketing people see as progress; it is not actually getting us anywhere; just taking money out of our pockets.
I don't think you'd change your car for the latest paint finish, especially if they put all the pedals in different places. I'm not against progress; I find new technology interesting and exciting --- I just don't see this as progress.
In my view, almost every version of Windows should have been a free 'upgrade'. Bug-fix would be a more accurate description, as they replaced each pile of dung with one that worked a little bit better, and got us to pay for the privilege. But at least they were improvements: what's better about Vista? A backward step, maybe a big mistake in the Microsoft domination machine.
In my commercial past, all our major server upgrades, certainly anything chargable, were driven by new hardware or by new requirements in software.
Not including a fancier, prettier desktop, can anyone fill in the following blank:
I need to be able to do _____________. Before Vista I couldn't do that; Vista has made it possible.
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