Slashdot Mirror
One Year Later, "Dead" XP Still Going Strong
snydeq writes "Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows XP a year ago today, no longer selling new copies in most venues. Yet according to a report from InfoWorld, various downgrade paths to XP are keeping the operating system very much alive, particularly among businesses. In fact, despite Microsoft trumpeting Vista as the most successful version of Windows ever sold, more than half of business PCs have subsequently downgraded Vista-based machines to XP, according to data provided by community-based performance-monitoring network of PCs. Microsoft recently planned to further limit the ability to downgrade to XP now that Windows 7 is in the pipeline, but backlash against the licensing scheme prompted the company to change course, extending downgrade rights on new PCs from April 2010 to April 2011."
After we took a look at Vista, Who Knew XP would look so good? Actually XP was never "bad", and it's pretty stable considering all the garbage people install on their PCs. Although people say (in surveys) that they don't like "renting" their OS software, I (and my corporate clients) wouldn't mind at all paying a yearly fee for ongoing maintenance of XP, or, perhaps for a new 3 or 5-year license with "support". And since the Web is so good for self-support for some time now, we would just be looking for maintenance releases and security updates. And we already "rent" many of our applications, from security suites to corporate apps with support. Microsoft would benefit because they would effectively get "us" to be purchasing OS licenses just the same as if we bought Windows 7 (or whatever). The resellers would be losers of course, coz we wouldn't be buying so much new hardware, but that's not especially "our" problem. For business use, anything over 1.6 GHz (sometimes even slower!)/512MB RAM or so is just icing on the cake for XP. It runs pretty well in that minimum configuration. It would be much cheaper than a change to a new version of Windows. And it does EVERYTHING we need, doesn't it? ARE YOU LISTENING, MICROSOFT?
"the most successful version of windows ever sold"
sold (or really licensed) != used
The user base is never the same size as sales or downloads.
Developers: We can use your help.
Can we do away with the "XP still alive" stories? At this point "everyone" knows that people are going to continue using XP for as long as possible. The other people with Software Assurance or other Microsoft volume licensing programs are going to stay on XP just until they can plan a migration to Windows 7. A small minority will finally make the shift to Linux, and a couple people will slurp up the Jobs flavored Kool-Aid and justify spending significant amounts of money to be locked into a completely proprietary hardware/software "solution".
Conversely, I wonder how much XP's continued prominence is going to delay any of those incompatible technologies from taking hold?
Most, not all. Some still use 2000. And many large business only switched to XP within the past couple of years. This is no surprise. No pre SP1 version of Windows can be trusted in mission critical environments. It's unlikely that any large firm will fully switch to Windows 7 in the first 5 years of its lifetime.
There remains no compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 7. XP will be around for a good few years yet.
It's probably related to the fact that you could pick up Windows 95 for about 90 bucks. There was no 'home', or 'home premium', or whatever. There was just a full version for 90 bucks. To get the 'full' version of the newest flavor of Windows 7, we must shell out almost 4 times the cost. This in just a little over 10 years. It's a bit ridiculous when you look at the rate of inflation. The product offers new features, but so do many software products on the market, yet they tend to retain the same costs.
If I'm paying so much more for an OS, I expect much more value.
Most of the simplicity of W7 is that they returned to naming conventions and menu layout and some naming from XP. It's closer to XP than Vista and many people I tested it with mentioned that right off the bat.
Vista's renaming of things in control panel was flat out stupid and retarded. when I look for software install, I look for add-remove programs not "fluffy fun software thingy" I have seen more users flat out frustrated with Vista because of the complete morons at microsoft that think rearranging menus and renaming things is a good idea. It's not. stop it. In fact murder every employee there that even mentions it. Throw them off the roof then throw chairs down after them to make sure.
I'm just waiting to see how they throw in last minute DRM to completely screw up the OS. I know they will, they are too much whores for the media industry to not to.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you observe the stats collected in this page of the article, one will see that Lenovo and Dell machines constitute a very high percentage of downgrades. However, the other manufacturers are starkly lower in comparison.
I can't help but believe that this is because Dell and Lenovo are the main suppliers of business laptops in the United States. It's a well-known fact that businesses are super slow at transitioning to new versions of anything significant, especially operating systems. If one is going to make this sensational claim, people in the server community might as well bicker about how adoption to Server 2008 is as slow as molasses right now.
This will naturally slow once Windows 7 comes to the forefront, but considering how the release dates between the two are so close (Vista came out in 2007, 7 is coming out late this year or next year) and how vastly improved 7 is to Vista, there's no net benefit for businesses to adopt to Vista on user machines.
It's not like this is new information; it's always been like this. The big difference is that Microsoft is now suffering from taking so goddamn long to release a "meh" operating system and then release the awesome so soon afterwards.
Generally speaking:
That's because as soon as you run the distribution update, it becomes FC10 or 11, or whatever it is now. Linux distributions are really only a snapshot of files of a particular version at any range in time. If you want to compare it to Windows, it would be like running Windows update in NT3.5 and getting Windows 7. You'd upgrade the Kernel, the HAL, the services, DLLS, and all the files on the computer individually making it the latest build of Windows.
But that's not how Windows works. It's not as robust as the Linux versioning and if Microsoft can keep it that way, they can keep you purchasing the latest snapshot build they create and burn on disc instead of letting you update your system with all the latest fixes. They'll make claims that they are starting from scratch, but that's just ludicrous. I'm willing to bet they have a version server that they patch on a regular basis and their "built from the ground up" only means that they checked out the whole tree and built all the files again.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Why would improved Direct3D performance under Windows 7 be considered 'weird'? it *is* a newer version of DirectX, performance improvements are to be expected.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.