Microsoft is still sawing energetically away at their own jugular by refusing to give up on Vista, their recent attempt to buy Yahoo! notwithstanding:
I have been using Vista for well over a year now (since Beta 1). Of course Vista is slow, its bloated (over 10x the size of XP), aero kills system performance (even though this should be done on the video card), networking is pathetically slow, etc etc. We all know Vista sucks. But recently my blood has been set to a rolling boil by the fact that most of my games just don’t work in Vista. At all. Its so bad that out of spite I have decided to make a list of games that work better in Linux under Wine than in Vista. These are games that were originally written to run in Windows XP, are broken in Vista, but magically work in Linux.
You know, back in 1995, Intel had already recognized that the games industry drives computer hardware sales. Microsoft also appeared to be completely cognizant of this reality when they first set up a games division, then put out the XBox. But this Vista disaster is going to hurt them for a long, long time.
I’ve never used Vista. And it appears that I never will. If Microsoft was still smart, they’d go out of their way to be the first to put out a game-centered version of Linux tied in closely with the XBox platform. But Microsoft isn’t smart anymore… and somewhere in Northern California, Steve Jobs is sniffing the air, scenting opportunity.