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Microsoft Extends XP To May 2009 For OEMs
beuges writes "Microsoft has announced over the weekend that it would allow computer manufacturers to receive copies of XP until the end of May 2009, shortly before Windows 7 is expected to hit the market. This should allow users to skip Vista entirely and move straight to 7, which has been receiving cautiously favorable reviews of pre-release and leaked alphas."
Is anyone surprised by this? Many customers told them time after time that they didn't want vista, and that they would rather use XP. Now I'm not a fan of M$, but I can say that XP Pro SP3 is absolutly amazing and stable I really really don't feel the need to upgrade to vista when I've finally got XP tuned so well that I hardly have to do any maintenance on it.
It's not uncommon for companies to skip OS's , so this works out great for our 40,000 users. So we can go from XP sp3 direct to Win7 , but we will probably wait for SP1 of Win7.
Why don't they cut backwards compatability? Because businesses want backwards compatability. Businesses are Microsoft's core market. Cut off backwards compatability, and businesses won't like it.
Sure, Apple did it twice, but guess what? That's why Apple isn't very populer within enterprise-level companies.
I wonder if they will let you buy the windows 7 upgrade for xp though? Or will you have to buy the full retail for 7, in which case they've as good as sold you a vista upgrade (plus a windows 7 upgrade) even though you didn't want anything to do with vista?
I personally find it hilarious that they keep extending xp as the consumer mass keeps threatening to make a "true" upgrade to another os...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The justification? simple.
To require all MCSE's to re certify. Oh and to get the millions of employees using windows out there to take new training courses in windows. The test users here we switched to Vista were non productive for 1 week. WORSE than the linux trials we did last year, and they required more training.
that is the ONLY reason they pull that crap.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Now, what Microsoft needs to do is:
(1) Offer free DOWNGRADES for anyone with a Vista license.
(2) Offer free UPGRADES to Windows Seven for anyone who buys a machine loaded with Vista.
Today I shall be installing a replacement IDE hard drive in a 6 year old system, a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4, which I'd much rather upgrade but won't simply because anything I bought today would be running Vista.
...will be the name. By not being called "Vista", users won't associate it with all the horror stories they've heard about Vista, so they'll be willing to give it a chance.
It will have a handful of minor improvements, but otherwise I expect it to be mostly identical. Vista's biggest problem is third-party compatibility, which should mostly be worked out by the time Windows 7 ships.
Personally, I hate Vista a lot less than I hate XP. Most people can't understand how I would say that, but that's because they actually like XP. Blech.
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I guess I'll really care when they have a new OS that will run on an Atom based netbook.
Windows Embedded Standard 2009. You can actually download the trial and play with it. Build some various loadouts of the operating system. You can included exactly what you want and do some fairly cool things with how it accesses the HDD and loads.
It costs too much, so you won't actually be able to afford more than the trial as individual end user, but you will at least get to see what windows would be if Microsoft would just let us use it how we want.
Windows XP is all the 32 bit OS anyone should ever need. It's fast, and pretty much scales as far as 32 bit will go. Windows 7 better have an option to be as sleek and unobtrusive as Windows XP. They lost me 2 years ago when I switched to Linux, but I spent 5 years learning the ins and outs of XP so it's almost as comfortable as my custom Fluxbox configuration (which took me all of a week to get to a reasonably functional level.)
Anyway, even if it does, $150+ is way to much to pay for an OS that has regressions in functionality (whether coming from XP or Linux, this is definitely the case on Vista, and I'd expect it for 7.)
An OS is worth about $50. Don't get me wrong, I understand the energy that goes into optimizing it. But it's unnecessary. I've used new Macs running quad cores, I've run new Fedora machines running the same, I've used Vista... sparingly, and I have to say, the performance gains of the past 4 years over my single-core integrated graphics machine are negligible. If I'm paying, I'm paying for security fixes and continued driver support plain and simple. I have yet to see anyone give me something that so blows away Windows XP that it really sounds like it's worth more than $50.
This is more or less useless trivia for most of you, but when using the "Add / Remove Programs" cpl, it actually puts the machine in "Install" mode. This is extremely important for Terminal Server environments for a variety of painful registry related reasons. You can accomplish the same thing by typing "change user /install" in a cmd prompt, but the cpl applet is more convenient.
Actually, the ME disaster was a plus for MS.
They couldn't get people off the 9x platform.
Windows ME forced people to go to Windows 2000.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
if MS just dumped XP and FORCE-FED Vista on Business
Then we'd move to full volume licensing for all machines that require Windows, and use our downgrade rights for XP (unless Windows Seven is actually worth using).
I've been running Ubuntu at work partially as a test to see how easy it would be to move people over to it if necessary. Things are working pretty nicely so far, I'm thinking everyone but our engineering design department could do their jobs fine with free software. In fact our Fabrication department would probably be better off with free software than the OmniForm crap that they're using at the moment. Sure, Evolution's Exchange integration isn't perfect - the unread messages number for each folder isn't updating like it should - but apart from that it works great. If MS try to force any shit onto us I'd be happy to move all our general office workers over to Linux, and yes I'd provide full support for them - it's part of what I get paid for after all ;)
which is totally what she said
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I am running Windows "Workstation" 2008 and I can tell you that it is amazing. So much better than Vista. No 12-20% CPU tax from the MAFIAA. And running as Admin, I have NEVER been asked for a prompt for anything nor have I ever seen anything like a UAC prompt.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Windows 95/98/ME were just graphical shells running on DOS.
Will that myth never die? Just because you booted to DOS doesn't mean Win95 was a DOS app. Win95 was a 32-bit OS with a protected memory model. It was also the most amazing piece of backwards compatibility I've seen: it could run 16-bit drivers that expected a shared memory model.
Of course, this backwards compatibility made it Hell for those stuck supporting it, as it had all the unreliability of the old crap drivers, but it was certainly the right business decision for MS, and a heck of an engineering feat.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
All that aside, I'm trying to be optimistic that 7 will be what Vista promised to be.
Except it won't be. None of the features that were promised to be in Vista but were dropped to keep from sliding the release even further will be in Windows 7. As far as I can tell, there aren't really any new important features in Windows 7. It's a new OS in name only (and bit of spit polish and debugging) and unfortunately that might just be enough.
And that's on top of Vista having few new important features. They did of course manage to cram in all the protected path DRM crap. Guess we know their priorities.
A lot of really interesting new Vista features are under the hood and only visible for developers. For example, how about a true transacted file system & registry - so you can start a transaction, create directories and move files around, write into those files, maybe delete some - and then just roll it all back with a single API call or on a system crash, with guaranteed atomicity, while no other process in the system sees any of your changes until you commit them? I'm not aware of anything even remotely similar in previous versions of Windows (or any Linux-supported FS, for that matter). And the utility of this feature should be pretty obvious to most developers - finally, you won't need a full-featured journalled database (on top of an already journalled FS) for small-scale data storage just because you happen to need atomic updates!
Serious suggestion: try them in Wine on Linux. Wine is frequently a better Windows than Vista.
It's still beta-quality, but we use it on production machinery at work (one app which we didn't want to run a whole Windows box for, so it runs on CentOS in Wine). So it's "enterprise quality," whatever that is.
It's a good way to get rid of that one last Windows box you have running because of one legacy app you can't even find the developer for, let alone ask them to port or open source it.
Wine doesn't work well under Cygwin as yet, unfortunately, so Wine on Windows is not so good yet. More development eyes needed ;-)
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