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Microsoft Extends XP's Life By 6 Months
hairyfeet writes "Despite Microsoft releasing Windows Vista more than nine months ago the adoption rate has not been as Microsoft hoped. Bowing further to pressure from OEMs and consumers, Microsoft has extended the life of Windows XP, which was due to end sale by OEMs on January 1 next year, to a new date of June 30. Asked if this was an indication of a strong demand for XP, a Microsoft representative sought to downplay the extension, stating 'We wouldn't term it strong, we would describe this as accommodating a certain element who needs more time.'"
What happens to the activation servers long after the products (ie 2000 and XP) are out of extended support?
My first thought when I saw Microsoft's site with the four versions of Vista compared side-by-side: "They don't list the version we are using here!"
You have to scroll down to the bottom to read about the other versions.
Microsoft representative sought to downplay the extension, stating 'We wouldn't term it strong, we would describe this as accommodating a certain element who needs more time.'
Hmm...
Journalist: "Did Vista fail?"
Microsoft Representative: "I wouldn't say it failed. I'd say it successfully failed in succeeding to fail in successful failure."
Journalist: "Oh.. right, exactly what I had in mind!"
It's just so transparent when companies spin things, it hurts. And you know behind the curtains they shout and curse and spit, and say things like this:
"I am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) [..] our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, [..] I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn't translate into great products. I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft."
And, as you know, this is an actual quote from Jim Allchin's private email to Gates and Ballmer. Regarding Vista. Not quite like their public claims of vicious unstoppable wildfire Vista success, now, is it.
I've used vista and there are many thing that I dislike about it, not least it appears to have been designed by people from Marketing. I like my interfaces to be simple and clean, where as vista has too much going on, too many controlls within controls and special effects. I was very happy with the Win 2K and XP's interface.
Another thing that bugs me are the X million flavours, can we just stick to Server, Pro and Home! and as to why the new functionality can't be integrated into XP is beyond me.
Finaly the resourses it take to run (largely because of a bloated GUI IMHO) are way out of proportion.
Now I'll admit I am a bit of a technical Luddite but I will move forward if I can see a benifit... with vist I see it not.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Yes, that's obviously the case. Anyone who still trots out the old stupid chestnut "Windows is unstable" argument has either never used 2000 or XP, or is just lying in hopes of attracting attention from the gullible to his purely political motives (or both).
Actually, I think this is pretty fortuitous for Microsoft, despite the fact that it calls attention to Vista's lack of popularity. Computer stores around here are using the fact that they "still" sell computers with XP as a sales tool, and the support extension is a pretty nice method of keeping everyone happy and quiet while Microsoft does whatever they do to Vista to make it a reasonable upgrade. Although I've not used Vista beyond a few tries in the store and a minute or two at a friend's house, it seems from popular opinion (beyond the completely unsurprising groupthink here at Slashdot) that Vista was born prematurely, and Microsoft is fortunate to have a historical product like XP they can use as a tool of placation until the new one is what it always should have been.
XP *is* really good, and Microsoft is pretty lucky that Vista didn't come after, say, Windows 98 or ME, because those are not something they'd want to fall back upon in a situation like this. I guess the old saying is true -- business is as much about timing and luck as it is about skill.
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Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
I work in an organisation who has a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement license so on Vista's launch I installed Vista Enterprise on a pretty crappy work PC (Dell GX240) and Vista Ultimate on my home PC (self made Athlon XP 2000+) to see what it was like and I still use them daily.
And I have had no problems with instability and apart from an obscure Belkin USB IrDa device I have had no problems getting other devices to work, either with Vista drivers or XP Drivers and I find it stable and fast, apart for copying files which is a dog.
At this point you may be thinking "Ah, he thinks Vista is great", but you'd be wrong. I quite like Aero, I love the way Vista Ultimate talks to my XBOX 360, but I'm left thinking "Is that it?" There is nothing there worth the £350 Microsoft is asking for the full version, asking that is taking the piss. The basic version I think is £100.. is it worth that.. even then probably not.
While we have no plans to roll out Vista at work at the moment, we said to any of the IT support staff they could install it if they liked on their PCs/Laptops and only 2 of us (including me) did it out of 120 people.
It seems no-one is really interested or cares about Vista.
Jonathan
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http://www.irvtheswerve.net/
This does not affect their income, but it affects their stock price.
Financially I think you might be right. They keep selling licenses. This is a HUGE failure for MS management. Essentially, they spent countless millions on something that is going nowhere and their revenue stream continues to come from a product that has already been established. Since the stock market is forward looking, this completely shakes investor confidence that MS management knows their head from their arse. I honestly don't know why they keep balmer at the helm. MS is making money on cruise control. They need someone who won't ef that up, and I'm pretty sure balmer and his "we threaten our customers with patents" philosophy puts that at risk.
-Nuke the moon
Everything you said is correct, but you are still wrong on one point. Microsoft doesn't give a shit about developers following the rules. If they did, they would just fucking fix the problems and a million applications would stop working tomorrow. Instead, they view backward compatibility as the single most important feature of Windows. Microsoft spends a ridiculous amount of time, money, and effort on ensuring application compatibility, going so far as to write little shims that fix memory leaks and other bugs in 3rd party applications. Read Raymond Chen's blog entries about compatibility to get an idea of why Microsoft has the problems it does. If Microsoft were willing to ditch backward compatibility they could put out a great product. Instead, we have to have little hacks to ensure Lotus 1-2-3 still runs correctly under Windows 2045.
I'm no big fan of MS either and I just find the whole thing rather funny.
Please feel free to add to this fascinating time-line following the last year's press releases.
Yeah, XP works, I use it at work, but when I've used Macs, a whole host of linux desktops and the amazing RiscOS desktop (still my favorite every despite being a real linux fanboy), I most definitely find XP the clumsiest least consistent desktop around. Heck - and Vista is worse? nah... Oh boy, somebody vote Microsoft out of office please.
OK perhaps the "screwing money out of people" phase is a little harsh, they are a business, but they lost my sympathy many years ago.Vista was designed for the movie industry, but Microsoft forgot that the movie industry is not buying vista, the customers have to. Speaking of lost focus.