Johndowe,
I liked your post and understand your point. Windows and even Linux have to incorporate scores of programmes for supporting entertainment to suit the needs of most customers. And look at windows Vista now, it eats up 10-15 Gigabytes of diskspace! And think of the RAM capacity we will be needing in future to support that kind of memory overload!
If the whole nine yards are done in Assembly, the GUI will become cripled and the debugging will kill a few programmers.
Put VC++ and Asm side by side. What do you see?
Furthermore, ASM is(or, should I say,
was) for geeks, not laymen. But most peole can handle Visual Basic. And then there is the question of being just structural (as in C programming) and Object Oriented Programming as in C++ onwards. VC++, Java and .Net are object oriented through and through. Could ASM ever have handled that?
But one string that Microsoft is pulling is really evil. They are getting tie-ups with Intel and other major players. And these harware giants are producing machines that can only run in the most recent version of windows. So, if we upgrade hardware, we are being forced to buy Vista and "more to come" and pay Microsoft. And some of my favourite softwares wont even run in XP-sp2 or Vista!