Despite Microsoft’s attempts to sound like they’ll be on time with Vista, beta testers don’t think so. As predicted, the current release, Beta 2, is so buggy that none of the testers could believe that MS could move on to a “first release candidate” before a third beta release gets most of the plague of vermin purged from the system. Anti-virus software still won’t work with Vista, and the OS alone still requires a mammoth 700 MB of RAM (down from 1 GB, but still way too high).

Meanwhile, most companies don’t plan to switch to Vista until more than a year after its release, and many don’t plan to move there at all. Certainly for home users, Vista has few if any real advantages, and a lot of disadvantages–such as requiring major hardware upgrades, as well as MS’s new “Genuine Advantage” “feature” which is an advantage to software vendors only–as for you, it assumes you’re a thief and essentially forces you to prove that you didn’t steal your software. Why anyone would want to make the switch is beyond me.

In short, don’t buy any Microsoft stock anytime soon.