>As of July, 2011, I know that at least one major car manufacturer in the U.S. was
>still using WinXP purposefully over Win7 because XP was lightweight, reliable,
>and worked well with the Dell machines they had. This was true even on their
>critical just-in-time manufacturing production lines, though some in the office
>had migrated to Win7.
>I'd believe this if it were true. Win7 used less system resources than XP and
>was dead-on reliable.

I'll agree Win7 is great, but WinXP is a much smaller install, even if it uses more RAM when running. The two are hardly comparable. The WinXP SP3 CD(!!) ISO is 603MB. The Win7 32-bit DVD ISO is 2.5GB, the 64-bit is 3.3GB. When expanded and installed, the size is notably different on the disk as well. I personally still use Windows Server 2003 for many tasks because of its size comparable to modern server OSes, even though it has many inefficiencies comparably. The Windows Server 2003 SP2 ISO is 535MB.

>Now, if you tell me the car manufacturer had specialized hardware and there
>were no drivers available for Win7, I'd accept that.

Nope. A few of them had card readers, many had scanners, all had touch-screens with USB input.

>There were major driver architecture changes in Vista that carried over to Win7.

The Dell machines had 512 MB of RAM, generic video cards, and fairly small hard drives. Nothing fancy.

>>I believe Microsoft is offering wide upgrade paths to people at such a low
>>cost because they want people to migrate to their new architecture
>>(Metro/Windows 8/Modern UI), and they know it's a leap for many. They
>>wouldn't pay $100+ for it. And it seems many aren't paying $40 for it,
>>at least not yet, and at least not in droves.
>Of course they know this. Win8 is a very carefully designed and calculated
>version. Microsoft knows exactly where they'll be taking Windows in the future.
>Want evidence of this? The person that replaced Steven Sinofsky as
>development head for Windows is the person who had most responsibility
>for its design.

That and in 2008 when Microsoft announced Windows Azure and remote server farm hosting, they said Azure would "set the stage for operating systems for the next 50 years." Now that's a plan(!!) given Microsoft went from Win 3.x to Win8 in 20 years. Imagine the evolution of Windows Azure over 50 years. Whew!