You probably knew that a lot of dissatisfied WIndows Vista users had downgraded -- some might say "upgraded" -- to Windows XP. It was never clear exactly how many people took that step, but it was enough that Microsoft extended the shelf life for XP for a while. Now we have a number, thanks to a survey by Devil Mountain Software: nearly 35% of new Vista machines are being downgraded.

The survey used data from PCs that have been shipped in the last 6 months, and included machines that were downgraded by vendors before delivery or by users after the fact. The Register seems to think that Microsoft is shifting focus away from Vista, and instead increasing the marketing effort for its next major OS release, Windows 7. I hardly think these numbers spell doom for Microsoft, but they hopefully provide some incentive to look at why customers are ditching Vista and address their concerns.

A bit more than a year after going gold, Microsoft is already assessing and discussing some lessons learned from Vista's underwhelming debut. ZDNet quotes Microsoft VP Mike Nash about the problems associated with the Vista launch and steps the company plans to take to prevent those kind of problems in the future.

The two main problems Microsoft seems set on avoiding with the next version of Windows, dubbed Windows 7, are fewer architectural changes to Windows itself and more realistic release schedule.

The amount of significant changes to the core OS were blamed for many of Vista's delays, as well as many of the compatibility problems with existing products. While Microsoft doesn't regret making these changes to Vista (well, so they say), they are not making changes on that scale with Windows 7. When it comes to addressing release issues, Microsoft has made the decision to be less transparent about release schedules, only making information available when the date is actually feasible. Right now, Microsoft is aiming to launch Windows 7 sometime in 2010 (or 2011 or 2012...this is still Microsoft).

This week, as we do every week, we spent most of our waking moments following all those tiny hamsters which keep the Internet humming along.

Here's the best of what we saw this week.



Twine: a social network built on the semantic web

The semantic web is one way we might give search engines a little more intelligence about the things for which we're searching. Our own Brad Linder caught up with Nova Spivack, the CEO and Founder of Radar Networks, one of the companies pioneering the Semantic Web.

Adobe: In 10 years, all our apps will be online

It's no surprise that simple, everyday applications have picked themselves up and moved from our hard drives to the Internet. While word-processing, editing spreadsheets, and some minor image editing makes sense in a browser based world, we were shocked to hear Adobe say that in ten years, all their apps will be online. Photoshop, maybe. Premiere? We'd like to see that.

Dr. Shutleworth or; How I learned to stop worrying and love Open Source

We're openly predicting that Ubuntu 7.10, released Thursday, will be the tipping point for Linux on the desktop. Could it be true?

Mark Shuttleworth talks Ubuntu 7.10

Speaking of Mark Shuttleworth, Download Squad attended a virtual press conference with none other than the space traveling, Linux advocate himself. Find out what Shuttleworth had to say about the launch of Ubuntu 7.10

Dept of obvious research: Girls with photos online get more messages

We were less than shocked to learn; Girls who post photos online are more likely to be contacted by interested strangers than boys, or girls who don't post pictures. The Pew Internet & American Life studies group spent actual money to settle this long debated question once and for all. We'd have never guessed.

Other popular articles this week:

A Tiny peek at Windows 7
RIAA sues Usenet. Wait, you can do that?
Office 2008 for Mac; The first screenshots

If you're like most Windows XP users, you're perfectly willing to wait for Windows Vista Service Pack 13 to be released before upgrading. Well, there's good news. If you can hold out for three more years, you can skip over Vista entirely and get the next version of Microsoft's operating system, which the company is internally referring to as "Windows 7."

The announcement came at a sales force conference in Orlando this week. Microsoft plans to get back to releasing Windows upgrades on a regular schedule. Windows Vista was released more than five years after the last operating system, Windows XP.

But we kind of knew all that. So the only real news to come out of this sales force meeting is that Windows is no longer using the codename "Vienna" for the next operating system. The nomenclature behind "Windows 7" is a bit unclear though. The way we see it, the new OS should be called Windows 11. Or if you take out NT, Windows 10. Perhaps OS 10?

1. Windows 1.0
2. Windows 2.0/2.1
3. Windows 3.0/3.1
4. Windows 95
5. Windows 98
6. Windows ME
   
7. Windows NT
8. Windows 2000
9. Windows XP
10. Windows Vista
11. Windows 7

Okay, so Microsoft's probably pretending that Windows 1 - 3.11 and NT don't count. But the company's got three years to come up with a snappier name than "Windows 7." Best get started soon.
[via Engadget]