Today for some reason I saw lots of articles discussing Vista and its adoption (or lack thereof) by the consumer as well as the business user. It’s been almost a year since Vista was released and people who are giving it a shot only recently have kind of re-started a wave of negativity that began right around the product launch.

It is not that I expected Vista to change between January and today. But as I read these articles that have started to sprout up again I can’t help but remember the way Vista was “received” by Microsoft employees when I was on contract up there earlier this year. People often complained about having to reboot the computer when waking it from sleep because the screen stopped working. They’d complain about the performance. Others just complained because they were happy with XP. But alas – it was a corporate directive that (what was initially a select group of) employees install Vista.

The other dynamic I noticed involved Microsoft employees wanting to be supportive of the company and voluntarily installing Vista on their newer laptops. These people would invariably run in to the known issues and just accept them as part of The Microsoft Tax.

I’m quite curious to see what Microsoft does with Windows 7 and to what degree (if any) the comment “Vista will go the way of Windows ME”  will come true. How many people will just stay on XP, given what we know about Vista, and wait until 2010 when Windows 7 is targeted to be released?