Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Extends XP For Low-Cost Laptops
Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft says it will extend the sales of Windows XP Home to OEMs by several years, but it's not in response to the SaveXP petition. Microsoft is supposedly making the move in part to ensure that Linux doesn't dominate the market for certain types of 'ultra-low-cost' laptops. XP will be available for OEMs until June 30, 2010, or one year after the availability of the next client version of Windows, whichever date comes later. This greatly extends the earlier XP deadline of June 30 of this year (which was an extension itself), and means XP will potentially be installed on new computers nearly a decade after its original release. The author of the article suggests that the post-June 2008 release of Atom-based laptops encouraged Microsoft to extend XP, even though Intel says Atom can support Vista. Intel also claims that 'Moblin' Linux will be available on Atom-equipped mobile devices starting this summer."
"Can support Vista" and "Can support Vista for 5 minutes" are the same!
... to see a 7 years old OS making the news because it will be extended to 10 years! It's like saying Ford extending the life of their 1965 sedan into the 2010. I mean it works, but I wouldn't define it as an achievement of human progress.
It seems that Microsoft made the decision to extend XP based on an attempt to prevent manufacturers switching, after previously ignoring pleas from the end-users to extend XP. The issue seems to be that they're more interested in selling software (such as Vista) even to people who don't want it than they are in selling software to people who do want it; Vista helps to drive the upgrade train, and XP doesn't, so until the low-cost laptops came off the ground continuing XP would presumably have been seen as a huge evil from Microsoft's point of view. It's the manufacturers that Microsoft are trying to please, not the manufacturer's customers (note that retail versions of XP will no longer be available), and only because they had a real alternative (Linux in this case); this strategy may end up backfiring in the long term, because if retailers are prevented from listening to their customers as long as they stay with Microsoft, they may eventually have enough incentive to change, so as not to lose revenue.
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
Microsoft sees a need to maintain a presence in the low-cost hardware market.
Vista isn't going to do it and Windows Mobile is less than satisfying. XP is Microsofts only offering that can be squeezed onto machines that otherwise might have been exclusively Linux powered. I think this sucks for developers more than anything in that effectively Microsoft is asking them to support two platforms.
load "$",8,1
They are keeping an OS alive because it runs on less powerful computers. Nothing new. They developed Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs to do the same thing. But, in the case of WinFLP, it was to ensure that people that buy Software Assurance on a computer can continue to pay for that assurance even after their hardware reaches "Legacy" standing.
They didn't release it to the public because it wasn't as effective as a full desktop version of Windows (although if you've used it you'll see it's more user friendly than Starter Edition) and because not enough people were buying new computers that couldn't run what they saw as the current OS.
Now with a shift towards lower powered ultra mobiles, people are buying computers that aren't really suited to run what they see as the current OS.
They are already maintaining a way to run a supported version of Windows on PCs going back to P233 with 64MB RAM because they saw a market driven reason for it. Extending the availability of XP Home just means they are recognizing a similar market in consumer space now.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
That's a long way of setting some background; what I'm trying to say is that when a company that's enjoyed success for years decides that their success is due to some special insight or knowledge - the market corrects them. IBM thought they were the leaders in PC technology and made a turn and marched off into the distance. They didn't realize that nobody followed them until much later.
For IBM, this was the thing that changed them from being the leaders in PCs to an also-ran PC company in just a few short years. In their pride, they dictated how the future of PCs should be and ignored their market. Too bad for them; they're completely out of the PC business now.
For Microsoft, Vista is their "Microchannel" moment. They lost sight of the need to satisfy their customer's needs and decided to make some fundamental changes (baked in DRM) on their own. Now they're enjoying the result of that decision; sales of Vista are far, far lower than they expected. And those sales figures don't include all the new machines that came with Vista that have since been upgraded to XP. I know that Vista will never touch any PC I own or control.
Since there's a few smart people at Microsoft they've extended XP's life a few more years. A decent choice; better to sell the obsolete OS than lose more customers to Linux. This won't fix the real problem, though - Microsoft needs to decide which customers they're actually serving. If it's the end user then the next version of Windows is critical; another DRM infested release will spell the end. If they're actually serving corporate interests then it doesn't matter; they've failed already and we're just watching the death throes.
While Microsoft plays their games, Linux continues to evolve and improve. This is a golden opportunity for Linux on the desktop...
They have to keep XP going for the low cost laptop market otherwise Linux will dominate that market, but if they keep XP they're not making any money from Vista.
Sounds like their chess pieces are going to get taken whatever move they make.
They are ditching a successful product like Xp (most successful among the big selling ms stuff at least) for failing vista, but also playing dirty to prevent linux from getting low cost market.
get a load of that.
in which business school they teach students to ditch successful products and to only use them to prevent competitors from getting a slice of some low cost market ?
leave that aside, what kind of logic can justify this ? if you have something successful, you stick by it and make a pillar out of it.
no sir. ms doesnt do that. because they are much involved in their years long legacy of playing dirty, screwing customers AND partners alike and that. in recent years, they have also shifted much attention to 'preventing competitors from being successful' rather than trying to be successful themselves.
excuse me, microsoft lovers in slashdot, im no fanboy of anything, but this picture isnt a neat picture and there is nothing about it to even try defending against any criticism.
Read radical news here
They released either too soon, or too late.
If we assume that business customers are where MS's real profits come from, then Vista is a fuck-up of epic proportions. I don't know of ANY business that plans to "upgrade" to Vista. Why would they? A five-year-old PC will run XP and basic office-type appliations at full-speed (especially if those machines have 1GB of RAM or more). What does Vista offer as an improvement? Yeah, the security is better, but in a corporate setting, those machines are (hopefully) locked down via Group Policies and permissions anyway.
It's just impossible to justify in a corporate setting. Upgrade all the machines, to get performance rougly equal to what you already have. Oh, and lets not forget that quite a few peripherals don't and WON'T have Vista drivers.
Now, the next version of Windows will come on a hardware-upgrade cycle for a lot of companies, so it will probably sell better. But even then, I imagine that many companies are planning to stick with XP until it's just no longer possible to run it on new machines. And that could be a long time.
What made Linux good was not that it competed with Windows (quite successfully despite the press and the critics of both OS's). Windows techs did learn to start community websites to help each other, so Linux user mindsets have permeated the Windows side of things.
Be happy, Microsoft might be an evil entity or a tool of evil men, but at the very least, many of its users found Linux or BSD or even Darwin because of this. By the same token, competition has been good for the Linux geeks. If the arena full of evil tyrants wasn't there, they would've never received the same press they got now. Had it not been for gaming, some geeks might have never discovered they were geeks.
Microsoft was a stage in evolution, if one seeks to see it as such. They put lots of cheap computers into the homes of those who would've been too inept to make use of the various Unices. Be happy for it, is what I say. Competition has been great for Linux, and would you truly wish to have the OS that is the world's biggest target?
If those in the community decide to fight against Microsoft, they will become what they kill. Microsoft became what they killed (IBM in 87 anyone?). Don't strive to kill Microsoft's joy. Microsoft is sinking themselves. Just keep doing what we've all been doing. It works far more than aggressively fighting for ground. Remember Sun Tzu: "Any warrior can fight a battle and win, but a master wins the war before the battle is fought." Try it. Microsoft is doing admirably at shoving their own foot in their own mouth. All the rest of us have to do is just help the "lusers" in our lives learn to use something else, and make that transition less painful than it would've been for them when many of us got into Unix.
You don't have to be a "guru" or a "wizard" or "3l33t" to help someone less technically inclined. Who knows, they might be able to help elsewhere.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
This is all well and good, perhaps. And yet, despite it all, Microsoft is doing extremely well both in selling Vista and as an organization, with Q1 '08 profits up more than 20% over Q1 '07- client sales alone up 25%. Vista is selling, and selling well, although perhaps not as well as marketing 'droids would like, but so what- it is selling well. Neither Microsoft, nor Vista is dying, Slashdot commentary to the contrary. If you think Vista is a failure in any sense of the word, you really need to reexamine the realities of the situation.
That happens when you don't ask them to change for 7 years. People get comfortable.
It might also be a recognition that the upgrade treadmill is no longer providing much in the way of new value for the end users, compared to the nineties and early this century.
Recognition? It's a downright admission to market failure. This is not something that can be said for free software though.
The last seven years have provided all sorts of great things for free software users that were stuffed into the same modest hardware requirements. Interfaces that were functional and stable have become beautiful without excessive bloat. There are all sorts of productivity increasing features. Printer support has gone from decent to phenomenal. Media playing and transcoding was very hard to come by seven years ago, now it's common and very good. Network integration in both KDE and Gnome is astonishing and this feature alone would make it impossible for me to consider running XP outside of Parallels or some other Virtual Box. Then there are all the specialty applications. The exponentially growing Debian tree has applications for just about any purpose you can think of and it reflects an even larger body of free code.
Free software is not standing still either. People have new itches and they are scratching them so things are not going to slow down anytime soon. Besides better interfaces and specialty applications there are basic communications and sharing needs that people have. I imagine greater speech recognition, better wireless communication in general, better automation of wireless file transfer and synchronization based on location and a host of other digital life uses. Better and cheaper displays will create all sorts of information surfaces and free computing will be the first to really fill the smart house. People have made a good start with X10 type stuff but the ease of porting to ever smaller and more powerful platforms finally will make these things common.
No calls now, I'm
It's total EEE panic. Asus is selling better than either Microsoft or Asus imagined. It's reaching into Microsoft's core market and teaching them that free software is just as easy to use as any other if it has vendor support. It's also teaching makers that there's a pot of gold waiting for them outside of Microsoft control.
It won't work because XP can't really compete against free software on the same hardware. Compare Works to Open Office, then imagine trying to make the whole Microsoft Office thing work in 8GB of flash memory. IE 7 or IE 8 or Firefox and Konqueror? Outlook Express or Kmail or the whole KDE PIM package? The choice is obvious and the difference is going to grow. The price of hardware that will run free software will continue to fall but the utility of the device won't.
That makes a continuously building profit potential for hardware makers that has nothing but avoidance to do with Microsoft. Microsoft won't be able to get licensing fees from those computers and will have to raise the price on others to keep their revenue flat, say nothing of growing. All of this leads to less control of users and vendors and that will be a very good thing.
No calls now, I'm
Considering the ever increasing error margins ("to hell with QA, returns are cheaper since the customer has to pay shipping"), a device able to support the sticker without crumbling IS already some kind of sign of quality today.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I dunno about the XO but ASUS supported the EEEPC with XP from the start and is either offering or planning to offer EEEPCs with XP preinstalled.
MS probablly knows they can't kill linux in this space but they really really don't want linux to be the only preinstalled option for such machines.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
what isn't being made clear is exactly what microsofts definition of "ultra-low-cost laptop" will be.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
You've got it backwards. The market exists, the devices already exist and are selling like hotcakes - Asus is seeling EeePCs as fast as it can make them, they're selling at above RRP everywhere and others are bringing similar devices to market in the coming weeks and months. Till this week they ran Linux out of the box. That scared Microsoft into extending the life of XP and offering Asus an extra-low price. Microsoft haven't created the market, they're reacting to it.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News