According to Jim Allchin (some kind of president at Microsoft–sources vary on exactly what kind–but safe to assume he’s pretty high up in the Windows development hierarchy), all they have left to work on is “XP upgrades, performance, application compatibility….” Doesn’t that pretty much describe the whole OS? At the very least these are the three core issues for an upgrade decision, and I assume upgrade still figures somewhere into the business model–though given the hardware requirements (minimum 512-megs of RAM, DRM-compliant video subsystem, etc.), I’m starting to wonder.

Also, “it will learn and get faster over time.” Scary, yes, and yet isn’t this the same old promise they made with XP (and possibly even earlier than that)?

Then again, when was the last time we actually had good news out of Redmond?

(full disclosure: I’m a Microsoft shareholder, in the tiniest possible sense, both directly and through mutual funds, but believe me that hasn’t been anything to brag about for quite some time.)