>So the purchasers of your product have to put up with something that can only run slowly for 2 years before they can buy the required hardware to get it to run at a suitable speed?

No, thats not what I said. In fact, I've been running Windows XP on a machine that I used to run NT4 many in 1998. XP runs well, in fact, to the user (IOW, without getting out the stop watches), faster that NT.

But, when the software gets blasted for being slower than its predecessor on the same hardware? Thats unrealistic to me.

>I guess when the hardware is up to speed, you release another version which runs slowly again, because in two years more the hardware will be able to cope again.

You don't want it to intentionally run slowly, but you want to be able to have solid features performing on the hardware it was meant for, thats the two year range that MS is trending towards.

>What benefit is there to your company to force the user into upgrading their hardware ?

None, the benefit is to the user. The user bys the software, and it may be a little bit slower, but thats because there are more featuers, its stabler. Once the hardware catches up, it will perform better than the previous release.

>When I buy a new product, I want it fast NOW, if in 2 years time I upgrade & it's blindingly fast, that's a benefit.

Like I said, I think XP is fast, but what people are expecting out of this industry is simply unrealistic IMO, and thats really what I wanted to discuss here.

But since you're demanding performence, Len, lets say for exmpale, MS took out alot of the stability and compatibility additions they put into XP, simply so it could run fast. In 6 months, you needed to BUY another upgrade, since the hardware could no handle half of the load taken out of the product. 6 more months, you need to pay AGAIN because they just now put in the features they were sitting on so they could pass some benchmarks. That doesn't sound like a benefit to anyone. The alternative is locking the feature set of Windows and all hardware. Thats called stifeling innovation, and its not for me.