Sure, you can argue that IT departments and individual users are customers of those PC manufacturers, and thus indirectly Microsoft customers. But follow the money — Microsoft is [I]very [/I]responsive to the expressed needs of those major vendors. The vendors will be [I]somewhat [/I]responsive to us end users (including IT departments), but only somewhat, because they generally don’t have a small number of customers who provide the vast majority of their revenue.

It’s to neither MS nor your PC vendor’s disadvantage to force you to rotate your PC hardware and software purchases. MS is more than happy to do this because their customers are extremely happy to have you buy lots of new PCs. It’s only when the perceived advantage of the new package is as low as Vista’s (despite MS’s advertising), that there’s enough pushback by end users through the PC vendors to have some effect.

There’s no mystery or conspiracy here; MS is trying to meet the needs of their major customers. It’s just that most of the people who think they’re MS customers really aren’t.