Microsoft bows to pressure on XP

Customer demand has forced Microsoft to extend the shelf life of Windows XP by five months.

Microsoft was scheduled to stop selling the six-year-old operating system on 30 January 2008 to leave the field clear for Vista.

Now the date on which many sellers of XP will no longer be able to offer it has been lengthened to 30 June 2008.

Microsoft said the change was to help those customers that needed more time to make the switch to Vista.

Sales profile

In a statement Mike Nash, Microsoft's Windows product manager, said: "...maybe we were a little ambitious to think that we would need to make Windows XP available for only a year after the release of Windows Vista."

He added that most of the other operating systems that Microsoft has produced were available for about two years after a new version shipped.

The newest Microsoft operating system, Windows Vista, had a staged release between November 2006 and late January 2007.

In some quarters Vista had a lukewarm response and in April 2007 PC maker Dell was forced by customers to re-start sales of computers with XP installed. In January of that year the computer firm switched to Vista on almost all of the machines aimed at home users.

Software giant Microsoft does run a scheme that lets people rollback installation of Vista business and ultimate edition to Windows XP by ringing a customer support centre and getting an activation code.

Microsoft denied that the policy change was due to slow demand for Vista. Mr Nash said that up to the summer of 2007 Microsoft had sold more than 60 million licences for Vista. This put it on track to be the fastest selling operating system in Microsoft's history.

The XP date change applies to retailers and other manufacturers who sell Microsoft products. Independent firms that use Windows XP when installing and maintaining computers and networks for businesses can continue to offer it as an option until 30 January 2009.

Microsoft is also extending the availability of the cut-down version of XP, called Starter Edition, until 30 June 2010. It said this was because it was seeing increased demand for the software to run on low-powered devices made specifically for the developing world.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/7017624.stm

Published: 2007/09/28 09:11:17 GMT

© BBC MMVII

That's kind of interesting, as when Windows XP appeared it was largely flamed by the people too, for being often incomatible with older programs or games, and also for the same spying on home computers as Vista is now blamed for. Now people seem to at least want to stick with Windows XP anyway than to have to put up with Vista, since XP established itself over the years, anyway.
I guess Vista will probably remain in the history as the operating system that was either the most loved or most hated one among all the operating systems from Microsoft. I wonder also what Microsoft is going to present us as the next operating system after Vista, seeing how this one already received and receives so much criticism...

There is one slight difference: Vista have nothing, and I mean absolutly nothing, do add to the functions of XP... At least when you made the switch from 98SE to XP, you realised immediatly that the core of XP was extremely well done in comparison. No more crashes after a few hours, no more blue screen of death every day, no more loss of control when a program goes awry, compatibility with new hardware is so easy you simply need to plug an USB device and 90% of the time it works without external program to run it, etc.

What's the improvement from Vista to XP? We all heard of the propaganda about the next version about big brother watching you to prevent hacking and pirating, abusing your privacy even if you don't do it anyways? New kind of graphics which take thrice the amount of power so you need a beast to run it with the new themes? Extremely few games which jumped OS and can only be run on Vista with DirectX (like the, oh!, so much prised Halo 3 which is said to be way better on console than on PC)...

Oh yeah, get me in already! The incentives are too much! I must jump in my car and go buy it right away!

... Not.

well it has transparent windows. :D

yah i too noticed a change in stability. but right now as i can see Vista brings instability (even for programes and games that were made to run under Vista). And ofcourse it didn't bring anyhting new. form the start it seemd to me as Vista was planned for those touch screens Microsoft made. you were supposed to have them on your desk (i.e. instead of your desk). It seem to me the whole system is designed just for that. to browse through it with your fingers.

i was using windows since this year. i didn't want to spend for XP. then i updated the computer a bit too much and Win98 couldn't handle so much RAM propperly, so we had to switch to XP.

I've found Vista to be very user unfriendly. I've had to disable almost all of the default security options to allow me to free install programs and do other administrative stuff I'd expect to be able to do automatically under XP.

As far as I can see, Vista just uses up processing power with its snazzy looks (I've disabled those too) and doesn't bring any extra stability or useful features to XP.

Vista is bloatware but as far as I know it can work perfectly well if you have the requirements, and the first Service Pack is coming. But I have no reason not to continue using XP and that's what I'm going to do, and Microsoft will support XP untill 2014, and if you want my opinion, that deadline is going to be extended quite a lot. Microsoft has finally extended the support deadlines for all its products including previous versions of Windows, and XP is the most successful so far.