Umm...no, where did I ever say I'm forcing anyone to buy anything that I approve of? Excuse me if I don't believe a 13 year old operating system shouldn't be bought or sold anymore when there is a proven version that more people use than anything combined as well as another that expands features of the last one even further.
You wrote that people are
idiotic for wanting to use XP on modern hardware.
Therefore, to gain your favour, people
must use an OS newer than XP.
Also:
So let me ask you this, if you were the lead engineer in the Windows division, you would literally say to everyone, "Hey guys, let's take Windows xp, build it onto the NT 6 kernel, and sell it to everyone as the new Windows!" I don't know about you, but that's a HUGE waste of time and energy just to keep an operating system that was improved (to very limited extents) with vista and vastly improved with 7. There is no need for a "better" Windows xp, vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 are the "better" versions of xp.
It's only a waste of time if you can't sell enough copies to do better than break even.
The recent $900M write-off comes to mind here.
IMO, it would be more worthwhile to try to discover what things upset your customers and then fix those issues.
Obviously the priority would be to fix the things that upset the majority of your customers first.
Just because it is in MS' interest to extract more money from people, doesn't mean that ordinary customers, businesses and 3rd party coders receive any benefit.
And besides, if you don't know the fact that IE is a different beast than chrome, firefox, safari, and opera by now; you should really do some research about how IE is a very deep system level component and not a side program that can just be loaded willy nilly just like that.
I quote; "That's not an excuse WHATSOEVER."
MS wrote the code and presumably they even have the developer documentation about it.
You are basically saying MS is too incompetent to create a "standalone" version of IE.
I'm not responsible for MS' incompetence and/or slackness.
In any case, aren't users supposed to be able to completely uninstall IE from Windows 7 (and presumably W8) unlike earlier versions of Windows?
Maybe Microsoft decided IE 9 shouldn't be made for xp to force people to switch, I don't blame them.
MS is responsible for its own competence/ethical/moral problems.
If you use "standover tactics", you can't expect people to be favourably disposed towards you and your products/services.
They might even try to find alternatives to your products/services.
Note:
As they are a rich company, obviously MS has made more good decisions than bad decisions.
Plus, why would I trust any company with my personal data, and why would I add an additional monthly expense, just to rent space. What am I missing that makes the cloud so advantageous.
#1). you can encrypt anything private to safeguard
#2). the monthly expense is justifiable by some for sheer convenience of their data and the concept of a free backup solution as stated above.
Not much use with slow Internet speeds that most people have to put up with (even in the US).
Two-thirds of Americans surf the Web at less than 10Mbps | Ars Technica
Using my Internet connection, the 60 GB that
Coke Robot mentioned would take:
- >5 days to upload
- >1 day to download