why do you "hope they pull it off"? their time has passed. none of their own users at home or in business are even interested in products past xp. they don't represent a positive force in the market, they continue to cling to dead ideas like drm...i'm not sure at all why anyone other than employees or shareholders would be cheering for them.

I'm cheering for them because I enjoy developing on their hardware, and I hate programming for the PS3.

Also, relax. It'd be great if an OS team made something that was technically interesting. Everyone, regardless of whether or not you use their implementation, benefits from their research.

please stop flame-baiting on news.yc, almost all of your seven posts in this thread have been of that nature. i come here to avoid flamewars. thanks!

Wait a minute, why do you accuse the poster of flamebaiting? I just read all his posts - he's speaking his mind using logic. Please quote him on what you consider flamebait within his posts, otherwise YOU are the one flaming now . . .

Exactly.

I've been confused about why anyone, especially in the (relatively enlightened) programmer crowd, would want Microsoft to succeed at just about anything anymore.

Haven't they tried their darndest to prove they really are evil quite a few times already?

They've basically held back the development of the Internet for many years now, and were most likely planning some kind of world-wide DRM-enslavement with Vista.

If Vista doesn't add much compared to XP, why would you suppose it took such a long time to develop?

OOXML? -Bribing countries/companies to let it pass, anyone?

Depends what you mean by enlightened I guess.

There was a time when IBM was the evil empire. For all we know it will be Apple next, with some sort of thin client lock-in based on safari and itunes.

Genuine innovation is a good thing even when it comes from unpopular origins.