I have a totally different take on that story. You can't trust regular news media to give you the whole story when it comes to MS. I once saw a story about a group of people running a petition to ask MS to continue supporting XP. The story put a smarmy spin on it, with an MS spokesperson talking about how it shows how much people like XP. Not one mention of the frequent criticism that Vista is really nothing more than XP with extra GUI and a completely unnecessary AND intrusive DRM system bolted onto it. I've seen tests with regards to computer games, Vista showed a consistent reduction in performance in every game. The problem is that they decided to encrypt some of the system buses, everything has to pass through this ridiculous encryption layer and it slows everything down. Ordinary PC apps may not make this slowdown as apparent, but in games you can measure the drop in frame rate and there seems to be no way to compensate for it.
In this case, you need to know that MS has already applied for a patent to the idea of selling an OS to people one part at a time. The example was that if you wanted to add more memory, you have to pay to get your OS to support that extra memory.
When I read "modular OS" that's exactly what I thought of. You want to edit video? Better be prepared to shell out extra cash for the firewire video module. Have an external digital audio interface and want to use it for some music recording for your indie band? Hand over the cash first.
Those later examples are only guesses, I don't know for sure, but if you've seen what MS has been doing lately.. they're trying to make people pay for a lot of things that they haven't had to before. They're working their "Live" system that they originally debuted for the Xbox console into PC games, requiring game players to pay every month for a Live account in order to get access to the full feature set of the game. I absolutely refuse to purchase any of those games, but.. if they continue to spread this to other areas it may become difficult to avoid it without going Mac.
I've always been strongly anti Mac, for many reasons. But MS is making Apple the lesser of two evils (yes, I'm sure many think MS has always been more evil). I'm starting to think about toying with running OSX on my PC so I can start getting used to the Mac way of doing things so that, if MS continues down this road of unlimited greed, the changeover to Apple will be less painful to this former Mac hater. I might be able to run OSX in a virtual machine so I don't have to worry about setting up a multi boot system, but running OSX on a PC is a tricky process in the first place.