Perhaps I’m the only one who hasn’t heard this yet, but the server version of Vista will be available in a version called “Server Core” with almost all of its GUI components stripped out. The removal of all that bloat will reduce it to about 1/6 its regular size.
Sounds like the first version will be rather paltry — no IE, no .NET framework, no MS Paint (gasp!), a “stripped down” version of Notepad (that’s not a joke) — suitable only for running as a file server, domain controller, or DNS/DHCP server.
Kinda surprising, considering most services such as IIS can already be managed remotely, although I’m sure that isn’t too far behind. I’m sure that such a move would make them much more attractive in the web hosting space, where LAMP-based platforms are still the norm. It’s pretty difficult to beat a box that’s not wasting any CPU cycles on anything besides the Linux kernel and Apache!
