Business users are rejecting Vista in droves. Although XP is officially end of life, and no longer supplied by Microsoft, it is still effectively selling well via "OS Downgrade" options. (I.e. you buy a PC with Vista license and media, but it comes with XP installed). At this point in time, major suppliers would not dare to say that they can't supply machines with vista pre-installed, as they would loose massive amounts of corporate business.
Vitualisation is taking off, but as RedDavid says, it is not for the small business or domestic market. It will have no impact on the demise of Windows - in fact the opposite is the case - it will allow old operating systems to live on for a while longer on new hardware - where I work we have grotty old Windows 95 software running on a Windows 95 virtual machine, hosted on an XP box. (Because the old software does the job it is needed for, and Win95 will not run on the new boxes).
Vitualisation is based on the concept of running "Virtual Machines", but those Virtual Machines need a real Operating System, and the real Operating Systems which have been tried and tested on Virtual Machines are not the new ones - they're the older ones. (Microsoft Virtual Server 2003 has been around for ages, but it's only since the release of SP2 that it now can host Vista PC's - it still can host Windows NT4!) Virtual server will run on a 64 bit platform, but the guest OS's must be 32 bit, so for the time being Virtualisation, far from threatening the life of old OS's, will actually preserve them.
The huge amount of software now available for the Windows platform, and the difficulty in porting a lot of it to a new platform, will mean that Windows will still be around for quite a bit to come, in som form or other.
JAYDMF - the reason it is unlikely we will see a dedicated version of Windows for media work is as has been said, the lack of volume sales, and the problems with supporting yet another variant. (MS already support 4 versions of Vista, not to mention ongoing XP support, Windows Mobile edition, a raft of server OSs...) And an unfortunate fact of life is that Vista has become bloted because a lot of "the junk that comes with windows" has been added to make it work with the video, flash and animation which you want your specialist version to run! Without all the media add-ons, and the flashy front-end, Vista would probably be just as lean as XP.
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