MS Abandons XP

Today, April 14th, 2009, Microsoft stops support (bug fixes) of their still popular Windows XP. They will still be providing security patches until 2014, however.

You can read an article here, but some of the highlights are XP is over 7 years old now and probably the most popular* Windows to date. It still has an estimated 63% compared to 24% for Vista of computers connected to the Internet.

People buying computers recently have discovered that getting one with XP has been difficult if not impossible for years now. I remember talking to a BestBuy tech when MS first cut off manufactures from selling systems with XP**, and he told me that the majority of their work requests were for removing Vista and installing XP on systems people purchased a week or two previous. Slowly it has become harder to get XP, first Home and Media editions disappeared and now Pro is a hassle. All the while MS was battling negative stories about Vista and launching ad campaigns to try to tell people that Vista is fine, just try it. The truth is that with good hardware (about double what is needed for XP), Vista is a good operating system -- it doesn't have the stability issues of 98 or ME, and the interface is pretty enough.

Vista's problem is that it's not XP, and far too many programs which people have gotten used to on XP stop working on Vista. When Vista first came on the scene, the PC's being built didn't really have the power to run it smoothly -- so people resisted. Admins remembered the flop that ME was. Software companies still were wull under their budgets and manpower from the dot-com bubble and they had to make choices. Most chose to improve their programs for XP or work on new projects altogether instead of pouring money into development to make thier old programs work with Vista, which no one ran if they could help it anyway. Today, the new PC's mostly have the horsepower to run Vista, but there are so few programs than need it and still some many good ones that people are used to, that people stilll want XP. So it could be argued that Vista's biggest flaw was really timing.

The simple question that occured to me this morning is this: why does Microsoft hate XP?

Seriously, I don't get it. They've already sunk in the development money, but why keep spending the advertising to sell Vista? It's not that nobody knows what it is, we just don't want it. Why keep upsetting customers and alienating vendors by taking away the Windows version they want -- XP? They made their nut to develop XP years ago. They even have a 64bit version of XP -- tho, the 64bit version of Vista is still rare. All they have to do is press new CD's and box them up at a cost of something like $2/box (maybe $0.50 for OEM packs), and they'll have people lined up to buy them at $120 each.

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* - It depends on who you ask. I'm sure other versions have had a greater market share, but I don't think any other version has been accepted as thoroughly by the users and admins.

** - Xp is still packaged with the new netbooks using Atom processors. These cute little guys just don't have the memory to run Vista.