Microsoft Is A Target-Rich Environment But Is That Really Justifiable?

We've put up a new poll up on the front page regarding Windows Vista uptake amongst HotHardware's readership, just because it seems to be a lively discussion in our news with lots of strong opinions flying about.  So take the poll and let us know your vote but let's expand a little bit on the topic here as well, shall we?  What is it with Microsoft that gets folks so riled up?  Perhaps it's just the fact that a company could get so big that they can control such a large portion of the market and the product offering in that market as a result?  Or maybe folks are just passionate about their technology and therefore lots of debates crop up organically.

Whatever the reason, as of late there are few topics in the technology industry that conjur up the kind of buzz and banter than Microsoft's loved-to-be-hated desktop OS, Windows Vista.  Obviously there are some wide-spread hardware and software/application level issues that end users have reported.  And of course the enterprise has also shunned the new desktop OS for the most part as well but isn't this the general rule of thumb with any new operating system?  Were your company IT departments and system admins quick to roll out Windows XP when it first hit the market?  Was your first installation and experience with Windows XP clean and bug free?

I'd offer that new OS adoption in the enterprise is always a long, drawn out, conservative process at best, which doesn't always even equate to a full adoption.  So I don't think this is anything new.  However, the outcry in the end user space certainly seems a bit louder than I recall, versus Microsoft's previous releases.  Regardless, we use Vista installations here at HotHardware, both as workstation operating systems and of course in our hardware test-beds.  Some of us are more fond of Vista than others.  I personally have my good days and bad days with it but overall it has been a relatively pain-free experience for me.  What are your thoughts?  Sound off here and in our poll...

In the mean time, I'm off to find out what's going on with my SSD testing and some of the write performance inconsistencies I'm seeing.  Maybe I should just blame it on Vista.  That would be easy enough I guess.