and who is going to buy a top brand name PC without OS ?
I prefer to pick the parts myself, last pc was 2/3 of the money for 3/2 of the speed

I never said top name brand PC.  I said they can buy a PC.  And they can. 

What you are forgetting here is that an overwhelming amout of business applications will not work with Vista. An overwhelming amount of hardware will not work with Vista. It's sad that vendors delayed being ready for it. There was more than ample time for them to prepare.

In a large business organization you are not going to see management spend the money for this either.
A) The training involved with a large amount of employees would cost quite a bit and cause a drastic loss in productivity. Support costs would also increase.
The hardware costs.. nuff said there.

I work for one of the top IT Outsourcing companies in the world, supporting IT for a very large healthcare organization which owns approx 130 Hospitals throughout the US. You can't imagine how behind the software companies are and the costs associated with upgrading in this industry. Windows 2000 is still quite strong here.

At least the Enterprise Licensing for Vista is backwards compatible and will allow us to continue installing XP on new systems.

Yes, large companies are knocking down the doors of their local "Joe's PC Barn" to have a custom built rig for their thousands of employees to use....

Astyanax0 - For someone who is only 19 sounds like you have quite a job. You must be very sharp.

The computer that you are talking about is your home rig? The reason I ask is that I have found there to be a big difference between a computer that people customize for personal use and the ones that are used on the job. In my case the Mac I use at work is still running 9.2. Our only OSX machine is only up to 10.3 because 10.4 had trouble communicating with the older pc servers and Mac machines. I work for a newspaper hence we are all Quark and Photoshop. Because of the old machines we are still using Quark 4 and are only up to Photoshop 7. Although this is all outdated equipment and software we manage to put out a Daily Newspaper with a circulation of around 60,000 copies. Most companies are like that. Like Phoon said in #18.

Astyanax0 - Your machine sounds like it is very nice. Hot like a Ferrari I suppose but the truth is most of us are driving a Ford Focus.

Ummmm.........   

Phoon, I work for a rather large outsourcing company. and we are actively moving to Vista long with our clients and partners (including Dell).

We have seen very few XP applications that fail to run on Vista with existing hardware. And for most users, Vista runs close enough to XP that very little training is needed.  (Granted, our COE image puts the most common tools and apps on the desktop to avoid many possible problems.)  (As an aside, we are more leery of the new office suite in regards to training . . it's going to be a mess!)

In regards to hardware, almost everything we have and support has enough oomph to run Vista as well as XP.  And with a typical 3 year lease/upgrade cycle on PCs the hardware  . . any issues can be resolved by waiting until next cycle or speeding up the process.

We heard the same arguments when XP, 2000, and even NT came around.   MS stopped OEMing those too and the world didn't end.

For the average home user (and desktop customizer who frequents this site) making Vista the default Microsoft OS will have little or positive impact.

I've purchased a copy of XPP and put it on the shelf just in case. I have mixed feelings about Vista - the OEM versions that are shipping with most affordable PC's are less capable graphically than XP, which strikes me as an odd "upgrade" strategy on Microsoft's part. Having to pay a premium price for an OS to get what XP will do already?

A Mac with Parallels is looking better all the time.

Zubaz,
That is encouraging news and perhaps it is not as daunting a task as I am fearing. I am running it on my system at work as a test and I have found quite a few of our CORE, CRITICAL applications that will not run under it. The vendor has plans to have it Vista ready by the end of the year.
Many of our web based apps will not run on IE7 either, so we are forced to stick with IE6.
I do agree that Office 2007 is a larger training nightmare than Vista will be, but Vista will still flood the help desk, I'm relatively certain of that.
Hardware... no way, no how on about 60% of our current systems. In this facility alone, that number represents about 300 systems, and we are more up to date than most of the sister facilities.

Curious, what outsourcing company are you with?

I thought you got swallowed up by corporate Stardock.........

Question, Do you find Vista faster, slower or about the same in day to day work flow. I'm not interested in games or movie playing, just the mundane stuff, sending email writing letters running your regular business apps etc.

im considering switching to apple.

Getronics  Who are you with?
We also have problems with IE7.  But we have problems with Firefox to.  Bad coding on our part really.  We have a few apps that are tieing users to MS's JAVA virtual machine too.  Lessons learned, ya know.  Running your apps in compatability mode doesn't help you with yoru core apps?

I did a clean install and found that for day to day use it ran as well as my 2 year old XP.  But any clean install works better than 2 years worth of crap.

Because of the memory and video card I had,  the GUI was scaled back to non-aero but as soon as I got upgraded it scaled up.

Not all the time (yet). 

There is no need to be upset.  Use whatever OS does what you need to do at the price-point you are willing to pay.  Apple doesn't run the apps *I* run and is more than I want to pay to dual boot.

(and if you are going to buy a new OS [and new hardware] . . why NOT go with Vista?) 

Right, and whats to say smaller companies dont? You think there are more large corporations or more small businesses?

Cant say I have ever heard of Joe's PC Barn, they any good? I prefer newegg, a little more reputable I think.

Tell me Astyanax,
Why would a small or large company have someone build a custom box for them when you can get a business class Dell Optiplex 3.4Ghz Duo Core, 1GB RAM, 80GB Hard drive, DVD/CD-RW, etc for less than $700. This price includes a 17" UltraSharp FP Monitor AND a 3 Year, Next Business day, ON-SITE warranty. Small computer shops and newegg cant compare with that. Having the NBDOS warranty is a great value. It doesn't make sense for a business to go custom box anymore.