With all the lawsuits, bad press and negative feelings towards Vista, Ballmer had said that Microsoft would change its mind about discontinuing  XP if consumers (aka Businesses) asked (demanded) the continuation of XP.  Well, they have shown no signs of accepting Vista and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hinted that XP will not end come June 30.

Our recent poll showed that Vista isn’t the worst operating system when compared with Windows ME but which is the worst?  Let’s start right in with a list of most operating system or operating system “add-ons” from Microsoft since the company started and see which our readers thinks is/are the very worst.

Microsoft should prepare to let more embarrassment fly.  The company filed an appeal in order to attempt to reverse a lower courts decision that the Vista Capable lawsuit would be allowed to continue.  That appeal has been denied and the case will now resume.

Microsoft admitted that it’s previous flop, Windows ME was a failure and hid its ugly child in a closet and never spoke of it again.  Vista isn’t quite the same thing, at least it’s prettier but it suffers some of the same problems as Windows ME and didn’t quite get enough votes to be the worst when compared with Windows ME but it’s still pretty bad.  Here’s a solution, Microsoft could stop making Windows Vista right now and re-release Windows XP.  You heard me right.

Democracy works.  Instead of declaring Windows ME as the worst operating system of all time myself, I decided to let our readers decided and indeed, all of you did decided and gave Windows ME the crown of worst operating system over Windows ME, though, I’m told the poll was a bit flawed.

Microsoft is close to releasing Windows XP SP3 to the masses which brings that operating system closer to Vista by including features that are already native to Vista.  Vista, includes features that are notoroius for slowing down system performance which to date no one has been able to identify with any certainity; let’s hope these aren’t in XP SP3.

Have you been sitting around thinking you would go insane or explode if you had to wait for Windows XP SP3 one more second?  Well, your wait is over.  Windows XP SP3 has gone RTM (release to manufacturing) today and will be available on April 29.  Microsoft is still being secretive on some of the details, however.

Microsoft has done everything but admit Vista was a failure, it has skipped around the term with Steve Ballmer saying that it is “a work in progress.”  Well, it may be but after trying to fit in every feature possible, DRM bloat (which may or may not be the cause of system sluggishness); the company is now once again trying to please everyone that is dissatisfied with Vista and will do everything possible to make Windows 7 everything that Vista wasn’t.

While I may hold this opinion to some extent, this is what a majority of our readers think as voted in a recent poll.  There was a close tie between “It was rushed to market” (22 votes) and “Windows ME II (29 votes).”

Windows Vista is reviled by many of being a “bad” product because of its poor compatibility when it was first released and inability to function with old programs and hardware even now, someone, somewhere is having a problem with Vista.  Well, this was partially by design but some things are problems that Microsoft needs to address in the future.

Microsoft would like us to believe that Windows Vista and Server 2008 are basically the same and use the same codebase but the two differ slightly in certain areas.  It appears that Server 2008 performs better in almost every sense of the term but benchmarks have failed to pin down the exact reason why.

Microsoft has a checkered past with its (in)ability to provide on-time releases of its operating systems.  Windows Vista is a prime example of this.  It’s on-again/off-again release schedule was enough to drive one to insanity, we finally got it, two years late, several features shot and incompatibilities plagued it but at least we got it.

With all the problems surrounding Vista, it’s been suggested that Vista could actually be more along the lines of beta software than the final version. Microsoft spent five years developing Vista but half of that was spent with Longhorn which was trashed about half way through and Vista was built, at least partially, from the ground up.

With all the problems regarding Vista, Microsoft is trying to think its way out of the worst marketing debacle since Windows ME and it may well have found it.  Speaking at a conference in Seattle, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called Windows Vista "a work in progress."

Usually the idea of an update is to “fix” something that is “broken.”  It seems Microsoft didn’t get that memo or implement that idea of an update.  Updates at Microsoft, especially for Vista seem to fix the problem it was designed to fix but at the same time cause another problem or two.