“That’s in spite of the forced march this will impose on users:
of the 50%-ish of people still running Windows 98, there’s a fair
whack of punters (myself included) whose machines aren’t up to a
Win2k installation; additionally, lots of users who aren’t
Americans don’t have access to a broadband connection, and
therefore are unable to run the obligatory tens of megabytes of
patches each month. There’s the apps at home which I’d have to
ditch because from Win 95 to Win XP is too long a stretch (not
everything is replaceable), and there’s the modern version of
Windows, in which the requirements document is written by the
lawyers…“So for people like me–or rather, my wife, who owns and runs
her business from the PC at home–Microsoft really is kicking open
the door of opportunity for the Open Source world. We can buy a
brand-new computer (unattractive when it’s bought out of a pocket
rather than someone’s budget), or we can stick with Windows 98 and
ignore the nagging fear of a new bug, or we can put up with the
sometimes-infuriating file-compatibility issues and run with the
Penguin…”