OneAndOneIs2

The fact that Windows 7 seven is 'newer' than XP makes people buy and use it. Why? Government rebates, OEMs only given the option of the latest and the fact MS stops supporting old versions and their related software (DirectX for example).

Plus most of the market is computer illiterate. To them, the fact it is newer, pre-installed and temporarily (until yet another exploit is found) safer makes Windows Seven the operating system to have.

I've never actually thought of it this way - it is entirely logical. Why buy something equivalent to what you have when you are fine the way you are?

The open-source world gets lighter with every project but on the corporate planet (where the dragons be) projects get heavier and require more resources every release. A strange step for Microsoft is to stagnate the requirements, but after Windows 7 I doubt this will continue.

Releasing a new OS that feels/looks different will earn a company publicity and therefore more sales. An update has no-where near as much effect, nor does an OS that is neither perfect or bad. Vista had _enormous_ amounts of publicity simply due to the fact it was inefficient. Windows Seven will gain publicity because of the fact it is more efficient.

I wouldn't say FOSS *always* gets lighter.. things like the kernel get bigger all the time. But it gets more efficient too, so using a modern custom kernel would almost certainly get you better performance than an older one.

Things like QT also get leaner but more featured with each release: They don't just add new features, they find ways of improving the existing ones. MS has no real incentive to do this: Hardware gets faster every year, hardware makers like them more if they release bloated code, they add new features and leave the old ones to it.

So it *is* both strange and, to be honest, impressive if they've made Win7 no hungrier than XP.

Mind you, since netbooks have finally broken the trend of always buying more powerful hardware, so it really *does* matter to end users how well the new can run on the old, I guess it's not a big surprise that they finally got incentive to slim down their code.

Especially when so many OEMs are STILL insisting on shipping XP no matter how much MS might want them to push Vista/7..