The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) said in a report that is does not recommend the upgrade to Microsoft's Windows Vista and Office 2007.

"We have not had sight of any evidence to support the argument that the costs of upgrading to Vista in educational establishments would be offset by appropriate benefit," said BECTA. The British agency has calculated that upgrading Britain's schools to Vista would cost around £175 million ($350 million), excluding graphics cards capable of displaying Windows Aero Graphics.

"Microsoft should provide native support for the ODF file format increasingly used in competitor products and those that are free to use," BECTA said in its report.

The British agency has also recommended that:

The ICT industry should be pro-active in configuring the products they ship
to schools and colleges to allow easy access to a ‘free-to-use’ office
productivity application – ideally one that is open source.

When specifying new systems, schools and colleges should normally insist
on the desktop having access to office productivity software that is capable
of opening, editing and saving documents in the international standard ODF,
and setting it as the default file format.

The world's largest software company spent some 6 billion dollars and 5 years to develop the new operating system and is offering a smorgasbord of different versions designed to fit everyone from the web-surfing granny who needs just basic functionality to the media and gaming- obsessed geek who wants his computer to do everything except pour his coffee. Prices range from 199 dollars for Vista Home Basic to 399 dollars for the Windows Vista Ultimate with all the bells and whistles.

In July last year, Ballmer said that Windows Vista boasted at the time with more than 60 million legal licensees. This means that since July until Gate’s speech at CES 2008 Vista has sold only 40 million copies or close to 9 million licenses per month.

PC World, the guys behind the "top 100 high-tech products of the year", have in December confirmed what everybody already knew: that Vista is a more or less a flop. In a top that contains other big flops (like Zune, Amazon Unbox, Office 2007, Yahoo and even the iPhone), Windows Vista came first, surpassing its "contenders" by far.

Among the reasons cited by PC World for blasting Microsoft's OS is the "user account control" (UAC) -- allegedly one of the security features in Vista aimed at giving users more control over their machine, but which ended up annoying them. Windows Vista might not be that bad, but when you think that XP is faster, has no compatibility issues, works fine on weaker hardware and does not cost $399, you have to agree with PC World. According to them, the best system to run Vista is... an Apple MacBook Pro.