Several people have asked me why I don't think Vista will make many inroads into the O/S market in 2007.

My reason for this is quite simple, Whilst Vista will be forced onto new machines and laptops thanks to many who are IT professionals or know enough to understand some of the jargon will avoid Vista like the plague because of it's perceived heavy handiness against 'ripped' DVD's and CD's - Ripped in this context means legally purchased CD's and/or DVD's but where the contents has been ripped from the CD or DVD in order to allow playing on the PC or for transfer to a 3rd party device (e.g. iPod).

There is some truth in the rumor that Vista employs some heavy-handed content protection but it's only for high quality content played over certain interfaces. I'm no DRM expert but the information listed makes for very interesting reading. If I understand this correctly then even without premium content being played certain A/V devices will STILL have to check in with the O/S every 30 milliseconds and this will be a massive performance hit.

The second crippling factor for Windows Vista are the tricks it employs to ensure that nothing in the Kernel is tampered with. This hasn't gained as much notice as the DRM additions but it's been around for a while. An does indicate how third-party personal firewall and anti-virus vendors think that Microsoft is playing foul with them over locking them out of the Kernel all in the name of security.

article on the register website