Comparing costs.....

Vista Home Basic £139
Vista Home Premium £169
Vista Business Edition £219
Vista Ultimate Edition £229

https://emea.microsoftstore.com/UK/DesktopDefault.aspx/tabid-16/?et_cid=17&et_lid=56

I'll be talking about performance later, but for now I'd just like to say that Ubuntu is a modern stable OS, it looks better than Vista, it is 2-5 times faster when running on the same hardware, it has a massive amount of software available for it, and it can be made to run windows applications.

Ubuntu £0

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu

Apple supply arguably the most powerful and easy to use OS available, the latest versions run on modest hardware, it is the best looking and fastest OS available, it has the built in ability to dual boot with Windows.

OSX Leopard £85
OSX Leopard family pack (covers 5 computers) £129
OSX Leopard Server (unlimited number of clients) £629

There is a rumour, doing the rounds, that Apple's new OS called Snow-Leopard will be free or very low cost to existing Leopard users! Although I think it is very unlikely that this will come to pass ;( Snow-Leopard will be an optimised version of Leopard with minimal new features.

Apple and Canonical (the maker of Ubuntu) are responding to what the user wants. Lightweight, efficient, modern OS's that can run equally well on low powered mobile devices and top of the range hardware.

http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MB576Z/A?fnode=MTY1NDAzOA&mco=MTUzMzk5Nw

With that sort of competition what can Microsoft do?

1. Make Windows 7 free for all registered users of Vista.
2. Produce a simple set of products: At most this should be Windows 7 Home, Windows 7 Business and Windows 7 Server.
3. Microsoft need to be brave and licence the mpeg2 codec so that Windows can play and create DVDs out of the box. It should not matter that it will kill the market for 3rd party players, as this market should arguably not exist in the first place.
4. On a multiboot system Windows needs to detect other OS's and play nice, not do as it does now placing files everywhere and destroying bootloaders.
5. Windows needs to improve interoperability, adoption of world standards, and become more open.