Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Here's the problem: The limits of current technology are making themselves felt.

Hard disks are just about as capacious as they can get, and while solid-state memory may soon be replacing them, it's going to be another two to three years before that is cheap enough to be used in most machines. The processor situation is even worse: They are already maxed out in terms of speed and clocking, and there are no ready-for-market alternatives on the horizon. Throwing in RAM sticks won't cure an overtaxed processor -- in fact, doing that might end up making things worse in terms of processing speed and functionality. (Besides, you can't readily add RAM to many laptops, and laptop sales are growing even as desktop sales decline: http://preview.tinyurl.com/arstechnica-laptop-sales)

Software makers that don't realize that they can't just keep shipping bloatware will soon find themselves in dire straits -- and if Windows 7 is just more bloatware, it will meet Vista's fate faster than Vista did. If the folks at Redmond keep thinking that the way to fix a bad line of code is to write a thousand lines of code to smother it, they will have to resign themselves to either selling XP or watching as their customer base goes elsewhere.