Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Ending Mainstream Support For XP
Slatterz writes "Come next week, Microsoft will be in the unusual position of no longer offering mainstream support for its most widely used product. Windows XP will pass another milestone next week on the road to retirement when mainstream support ends on 14 April 2009, over seven years after the OS originally shipped. While the company said that it will continue to provide free security fixes for XP until 2014, any future bugs found in the platform will not be fixed unless customers pay. Windows XP accounts for about 63 percent of all Internet-connected computers, according to March 2009 statistics from Hitslink, while Windows Vista makes up about 24 percent."
I wish more companies would start opening up their software once it has run out of life. If Microsoft really thought that XP was no longer going to be good enough for pc's, open it up to the community and let people learn from it and tinker with it.
Oh... wait, it is Microsoft.
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
Vista is slow to boot.
Vista helpfully stops me running programs I want to run at startup.
Vista takes absolutely hours to update itself.
Vista is always telling me no, I don't have permission to do that, or to look there.
Vista is generally annoying.
Vista also has a couple of more geeky irritations to me as a software engineer and a linux user. But still, it runs my games OK and that's all I ask of it these days. I don't hate it, I just don't think it's that good.
That said, you should here the vitriol and emotional reactions that come out of my none-geek family and friends. This vista hatred may have started here with us, but it's been taken to a whole new level by the general computer-using-but-not-understanding public. I don't know if that's a reflection of them buying all the media hype or if it's a genuinbe reaction to the product, but it seems that it's no longer us penguin-loving kernel botherers that are the main source of the anti-MS vitriol.
how exactly are we supposed to pay? ;)
Through the nose
Seriously you buy a volume license and then buy the extended hotfix agreement through your volume license account. You also have to pay for the individual fixes on top of that. MS don't seem to show prices on thier website but I doubt it is cheap.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
This is crazy... I mean here at my workplace (a hospital) we just rolled out Windows XP this past September. We dumped Win2k & Novell Netware for XP and Active Directory. We won't be upgrading for a long time yet.
As you know, it's worse than you say.
The Slashdot story is excessively pro-Microsoft, in my opinion. Quoting the Slashdot story: "... over seven years after the OS originally shipped..." That gives a much more positive impression than is warranted, in my opinion.
Windows XP had very serious problems until the release of Service Pack 2. So Windows XP release version is only 4 1/2 years old.
Service Pack 3 fixed many, many, many bugs that Microsoft itself called "critical". So the final, fully usable version of Windows XP has been available less than a year. A year of good use is not much in return for 6 years of numerous cases of grief and hassles and huge maintenance expense.
Vista was an attempt to get people to abandon Windows XP. Vista was first released about two years ago.
So, one version of the Windows product, Windows XP, was not fully finished until more than a year after the next version, Windows Vista, was first sold, although Windows Vista was so unfinished that it was rejected in the marketplace.
When the version of Windows called Windows 7 is released, many people will be buying their third version of the Windows OS in only two years, even though one of the versions, Vista, was never finished.
That's product churning.
Sooner or later the average buyer will realize that they don't need Microsoft's pushy "upgrades", which all must use much more CPU power, because Microsoft's real customers, the big computer hardware manufacturers, want everyone to buy new hardware. Microsoft is trying to continue creating an artificial market, and the average buyer is becoming more aware of that.