Windows 7 will certainly be an improvement over Vista. It's stable, faster and has some nice improvements in functionality, though it is primarily focused on improving performance. In early testing, Windows 7 substantially outperformed Vista and XP in day-to-day computing tasks, such as start-up time, application launching and performance. Anyone upgrading from Vista will be pleased after using the new OS.

But the comments in this thread are proof that the environment in which Microsoft is launching Windows 7 is substantially different than when the company settled on its current packaging and pricing approach, which emphasizes general categories of computing, such as "for the home" or "for the office." The resurgence of Apple has changed the perception of value at retail, because every shopper compares the Mac and Windows PCs as the primary "value comparison" they use.

At the same time, Google and cloud applications generally, have changed the buyer's expectations about what they can expect for their money--or simply for their attention.

Apple's Mac OS 10.6, or Snow Leopard, will ship in September for $29 as an upgrade. One version, one price. New buyers will still get the OS with a new Mac, so the upgrade is the competitive price point when looking at upgrading to Windows 7. Microsoft is sticking with its Home ($50), Professional ($100) and Ultimate ($220) packaging, followed by high-priced upgrades to Office in 2010. Again, making the comparison at retail, the Mac OS, media and office applications cost $169 total.

It's probably time for Microsoft to abandon the packaged software approach and offer a very cheap basic OS that can be customized by purchasing additional application functionality during initial configuration, or at any time after the customer starts using it. For example, sell media apps for $50, individual Office applications and other "enhancements."

This would change the focus of their marketing drastically, but would aim the company and customers at the real competition: The ability to piece together highly customized computing experiences rather than "packaged software solutions."

Then, Microsoft could focus on differentiating the OS, the value of its client-side productivity tools vs. cloud-only products.

The comments in this thread are ridiculous, as is the "Playing God" idea.

End-of-life counseling isn't instructing people on how and when to die, it's a form of education that is necessary because we live so much longer. And, given the huge medical expenses concentrated in the last years of life, a better informed patient is in the position to both live better and help reduce the cost of their care by choosing how they want to live. I, for one, do like the idea of being in control and not simply proscribed a lot of treatments I don't need or that don't improve the quality of my life when I am old.

There are nowhere near 20 million people in the United States illegally. The correct number is about 11 million, which is down from the historic high of 12.5 million in 2007.

President Obama isn't a racist. How many racists get people who are in an argument together for a beer? Racists burn crosses and start riots for their own benefit. Having an opinion about the handling of an arrest is an American right and a conservative tradtion. It's the people who are looking to twist every word to portray their political enemies as inhuman who are the danger to this country.

One of the major problems in alternative energy is that the same short-term financial focuse and rampant greed that destroyed the banking system is at work in every local project to lower the cost and environmental impact of energy production. The way our utilities work, they are incented to spend more on their distribution system than on anything attached to it, because they have a legally mandated margin on that distribution expense. So, when local companies, like a paper mill, want to create a cogeneration plant (which uses heat produced by the industrial equipment to produce power that can be sold back to the grid), the utilities do nothing to help unless they are guaranteed the same kind of profits from the effort that they make from power distribution. We're seeing hundreds or thousands of such opportunities to cut the expenditure on carbon-emitting power that would be viable shut down or never started because of the financial piling on by utilities and bankers looking for unreasonable shares of profit. If, instead, we accepted that early projects will often be revenue neutral, we'd be seeing a lot more experimentation that could deliver real profitability in the future.

Mixed light rail, regional rail, buses and personal transportation is the right answer, generally speaking, because there are so many different levels of travel. We're never going to eliminate cars carrying one person to a destination, but we can substantially reduce the intra-local congestion while making the engines driving all the different modes of transportation cleaner. Overall, that's cleaner and cheaper than the eccentric travel that characterized the 20th century (one person per car going to the same places), which will still allow people to go where they need to go (sometimes in their own car by themselves).

It's amazing how talking about healthcare options can become distorted into such demonic visions of government agents pulling the plug on elderly people. Talking, people, is what we are talking about. Discussing options, not making decisions for people. Good god.

VMac, could you provide any proof that if the government had not acted the recession would have been shorter and deeper, other than their opinion? Moreover, the initial reactions, which were far less focused and effective, but more expensive in the long term, were taken by a supposedly fiscally conservative administration.

Other than economists who are ideologically opposed to the stimulus, the vast majority of economic experts and business leaders in this country are confident that federal discretionary spending has helped avert a much deeper and longer downturn. We need less ideology and more pragmatic thinking. Anti-stimulus economists are calling for tax cuts, which would leave the nation if far worse straits in the short-term while offering no long-term benefits based on the economic history of the past 30 years.

Jparham, your argument is incorrect. President Obama is calling for a public-private insurance system, not the conversion of all Americans to a Medicaid/Medicare coverage regime.

With all due respect to my fellow citizen's opinion, VMac is deeply wrong. As long as we demonize doing politics, we will remain disengaged from our political power. Peiple who run for office are always partially motivated by their own interests—that's the basic assumption in our economic system, so what sense does it make to lionize self interest in economics but condemn it in politics?

Politics is a process of negotiation and compromise. The results are imperfect, but better than the results of leaving the process entirely to self-interested economic actors, because they have repeatedly proven that, when the public interest conflicts with personal interest, greed wins. See the banking crisis, LTCM, etc. Politics forces participants to account to some extend for public interests, because the vote is the last word on whether politicians will keep their jobs.

One needn't choose Democratic or Republican. In fact, choosing and blindly following a party is the best way to succumb to a lack of accountability. But if you learn about, meet and decide about voting for someone the way you decide to hire someone, you can enforce real accountability. Being a citizen takes more work than most people want to admit. Bad politicians are just the output of a disengaged citizenry.

While business likes to say that it is good business to be green, the hidden costs of everything we buy and use are seldom disclosed. That makes the early investments in green living look far more expensive than the returns might justify. Consider that when Seattle seeks to put a $0.20 per plastic bag fee on the use of plastic bags at retail, the plastic bag industry can affort to sink $600,000 into a campaign to stop the new law. If the industry can spend that much to preserve its profitability based on a polluting technology, there must be ways to save tens of millions of dollars in shopping bags while reducing pollution nationally.

With whom?

It's interesting that after having been adopted by business users and filtering into consumer usage, Office is expected to sell itself the other way round. How many of you, reading this, think you could get your IT department to adopt a technology?

Is there any point where the value of reduced complexity would override your privacy concerns? I did a brief seminar on "free" services facilitated by ecommerce systems for an MBA class last week and, while the students started out really excited about the prospect of free stuff, they ended up concluding that there were limits to the level of control they'd be willing to give up in order to get free stuff. The easiest way to find that limit was to suggest a situation where one couldn't have something they wanted, because the company managing their "free" interactions decided it would lower the customer's value to the company.

I seldom think about universal healthcare when considering what software to buy. Did you post here inadvertantly, Nance?

Gatorbaiter -- I think most people do what you do, using different accounts in different contexts to separate your personal lives and work. Would you want the Office app -- or any cloud service -- to help you manage those multiple identities?

It's a mistake to think of social as a feature of media, actually, because it is the social that emerges from the use of media.

A Mac version will certainly come sometime in proximity to the Office 2010 release. The Mac software group is still one of the most profitable in Microsoft.