Alex St. John was one of the founding creators of Microsoft’s DirectX technology. He is the subject of the book “Renegades Of The Empire” about the creation of DirectX and Chromeffects, an early effort by Microsoft to create a multimedia browser. Today Alex is President and CEO of WildTangent Inc., a technology company devoted to delivering CD-ROM quality entertainment content over the Web.

I got a lot of surprisingly angry mail back in 2006 when I started warning CPU readers that Vista was shaping up to be a disastrous OS release from Microsoft with highly intrusive new security measures and capricious incompatibilities with most Windows XP applications. The bulk of these messages had one of two primary themes: 1) You’re a bitter spyware maker thwarted by Microsoft’s brilliant new security measures, or 2) You’re a disgruntled ex-Microsoft employee lashing out at your former employer. Two years later, I feel largely vindicated as it appears that the broad consensus on Vista supports my early conclusion that it is bloated and intrusive. Of course, it’s not just people saying it; Apple has experienced a major surge in market share growth since Vista’s launch, and PC sales have been relatively flat.

I’ve long been frustrated by the media’s portrayal that Microsoft’s habit of making increasingly bloated products somehow benefits PC makers and Intel because consumers are forced to upgrade to newer machines. Apparently, however, the leading “beneficiary” of this bloat disagrees! Intel has declared that it will not be adopting Vista internally. The very word....