and how many people are going to turn this all off and go back to a windows xp desktop within ten minutes of powering it up? and, who can blame these people, given the difference in performance?
what about driver support? take a flip through some forums. they broke things as simple as file operations moving to vista (ten hours to copy files?) and never really fixed it in 7 or 8. how about creating a version with an optimally compiled kernel, designed for speed rather than appearance? stripping xp to the core and calling it "windows lite" sounds like a waaaaaay better idea to me....
the share of xp users is actually around 30%. that's more than apple and linux combined. the reason they've stuck with xp is because it's fast and stable, and the "upgrades" are flashy and obtuse. that's a huge share of the market that's going to walk the other way if they don't get something concrete and without frills that they can actually use for terrestrial purposes.
