Rumors have surfaced that Microsoft would extend sales of Windows XP past the originally announced cut-off date of June 30th but only for low-cost laptops. Today, the company is confirming the buzz: It’ll still sell Windows XP Home as an operating system for what it calls Ultra Low-Cost PCs–small, cheap, less-that-powerhouse notebooks along the lines of Asus’s EEE PC.
Microsoft is also re-confirming that it plans to end all other OEM and retail sales of XP on June 30th, and to discontinue “mainstream” tech support for XP in April of next year. The bottom line is that it’ll still try to mostly kill off the world’s dominant operating system in the next year…but it’s conceding that Vista is simply too resource-intensive to make sense for extremely low-cost computers.
(It would, of course, be a nightmare scenario for Microsoft if ULPCs became popular and it didn’t have a competitive OS for such devices, since Linux is very much viable on very basic hardware.)
This is an interesting twist to be sure, but it won’t do anything to calm down the far-from-tiny number of people who passionately believe that Microsoft should simply continue to offer Windows XP for the foreseeable future. We heard from thousands of them when I did a little survey on XP vs. Vista, and more than 100,000 folks have signed our sister publication InfoWorld’s Save XP petition.
I know where I stand on this: Microsoft has a lot of customers who have no desire to move to Vista any time soon, and rather than deny them the option of buying a new Windows XP computer, it ought to sell them the Microsoft product they want. They’d be happy; Microsoft would still make money. And nobody could accuse it of shoving Vista down anyone’s throat.
Assuming that only really cheap, basic laptops will have XP starting on July 1st, there will be a strange scenario for XP holdouts: They’ll only be able to get what they see as a superior version of Windows by paying less for a new computer. I wonder if people will opt for an ULPC not because of tight budgets but simply to get the edition of Windows they want?
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