Is Vista too little to late?

At the time of this entry Microsoft Vista is still several months away and is probably under going rigorous testing, that will hopefully show that the new operating system is ready to ship by November. However, the real question is will the operating system offer enough in new features to convince its user base to switch from XP. For any of you who remember one of my first posts dealt with Microsoft's biggest problem, which is getting its user base to upgrade, particularly from an OS which is now much more stable than it's predecessors. You can check out the old post here. Microsoft also has the problem of convincing its users to upgrade their computer hardware, since its new Vista Operating System has much higher system requirements. So can they do it?

The short answer is yes, but its not entirely that simple, Microsoft is influential in the market that it will eventually get its user base to upgrade whether they really want to or not. This is justifiable since even though that a lot of users would be happy with Windows 95, their computers themselves will need to be upgraded or replaced within a matter of a few years. At that point they'll most likely be forced to upgrade operating systems too. Most consumers tend to buy pre-built systems that already have the latest and greatest from the big M since Microsoft has partnerships with just about every major computer distributor in the world, they know that those computers will have their product. The other fact of the matter is that most users just aren't ready to switch from the Windows they know, this is where things get kind of fuzzy. Since Vista is such a big change in the Windows operating system and other alternatives such as Apple's OS X are starting to align in the ways of features; in some cases exceed, Microsoft may start to loose market share if Vista can't do the following, show that its backwards compatible with applications supported by Windows XP in the very least. It must be "secure" the less the user has to worry about malware the better. It must be stable, if Vista is unstable and buggy at release, the change from XP will be extremely slow and will hurt the operating systems market share. However, with rumors about Apple looking to find a way to run Windows applications in their new version of Mac OS X, Microsoft may have to ask themselves if Vista will be enough to silence all of the speculation.

So here is what I think might happen:
        November
        Apple Announces 10.5 Leopard with Windows parallelization of all Dual Core/ Multi processor system.
                - Apple doesn't have the time to re-invent the Win32 API so just using the existing Windows system is the only option
        What will probably happen:
                - Apple release 10.5 with additional media enhancements, making the Mac Mini the new media center alternative, look for an iPod
                tie in somewhere in there.
        Microsoft releases Vista to business sector, major enterprises hold off on the upgrades until internal testing is done
        Vista gets good reviews as a great step in the right direction but lacking in certain features

        January
        Microsoft releases Vista to consumers, its great but people are pissed about the hardware requirements
        What will probably happen:
        Microsoft doesn't release Vista until March and Vendors complain, go figure.