XP needs to live until 2009
BEANCOUNTERS working for Gartner and Burton Group have issued an open warning to Microsoft to keep Windows XP available at least until 2009.
Currently, the Vole plans to switch off the life support on XP in June even though the patient is not dead and is probably getting better.
Burton Group service director Richard Jones told Infoworld that in any operating system transition, you need to have the original and new products running side by side for a couple of years.This gives punters a chance to do a decent migration.
The Vole, however, initially told punters that they would have 11 months to fiddle and tweak before extending the deadline by another six months. This 17 months is still far too short a time, Jones said.
Gartner's Michael Silver said it would be wise for XP to be available until the end of 2008 because of the two-year rule.
Jones added that the Vole had been a little too aggressive because it took too long to release Vista and this deprived it of cash. However, it was making users pay for its mistake, he said.
Ovum analyst Dwight Davis added that it would not surprise him if Microsoft backed away from its June 30 cut-off date for XP if a sizable number of XP customers continue to complain.
There was a chance that Microsoft would see customers abandoning Windows rather than being forced to move to Vista.
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The whole thing may backfire on Microsoft bigger than just keeping XP on the market until 2009.

Have anyone considered the possibility that many users may elect to just not 'upgrade' ever to Vista?

Just before the June 30 cutoff date for boxed retail license sales (these licenses are transferable to new machines), there may be a surge of demand for people who are quite happy to keep their software running on newer hardware boxes, but keeping the OS as XP mean they don't ever have to worry about the migration hassle.

Note that Vista may only have a life of 3 years, so a real question would be why bother 'upgrade' just in time for it to be itself obsoleted by the next OS?

Microsoft will then be faced with the choice of whether they want some revenue (from XP users), or none (if users either stay longer with old boxes or migrate away from Microsoft).


If Microsoft has some brains, it would come up with a cleaned up, modernized (but not with things like DRM) version of XP and market them side by side with the old versions as XP (Coke Classic), XP Modern (Coke Classic decaf), and let consumers decide if they ever want the new cokes.

We haven't heard the end of this yet.


Abandon Windows for what? OSX? Linux? In the business world, I don't think so. That gave me a good laugh though!
Before bashing me note, I have used vista on a high performance machine (test machine) sense RC2. I now have vista SP1 on it. I will never upgrade to vista even if it works perfectly as it is a waste of money for the common user. (Like how many times can you honestly reinvent the wheel right?) If they force me to upgrade (which they will) my next question will be…. Where is the nearest apple store.
As long as WGA dosn't KILL Switch Your XP system, it will be quite good for decade, somewhere in there clear advantage of higher quality Windows & /orHardware will appear, yet worst Today is to BUY NEW Vista system & then DUMBLY switch Back to that unreponsive DONKEY of O/S Named XP.
orworse.
drashek


Kick him in the balls and he's bound to be angry/miffed.
..I read a comment attributed to Mr Linux(Torvie to his mates!:)), about how an OS should be invisible and not the focus..If only Vista were less rather than more it may have been worth the effort but as is...to many people can't/won't run it, the DRM and phone-home alarmism is at it worst and with good reason - if MS could, they would charge a license fee for saying their name ffs...XP may be flawed however it is acceptable and works for most something Vista cannot claim..so yes, XP live on!!!
The main reason MS wants to get rid of XP is that it needs to get its own core developers to stop working on it, bug fixing and plugging holes in a sinking ship... 

You can thank part of Vista's late arrival down to them having to constantly pull their best developers away to fix bugs in XP (hence part of the reason secrurity in vista was so serious)
Don't you see? It is XP THAT IS HOLDING VISTA BACK! As long as the punters get to compare the two in terms of efficiency, suitability, compatibility, reliability etc, naturally they're going to choose XP!

The only way to fix this is to STOP OFFERING THEM THE CHOICE. Get rid of XP! With nothing to compare it to, the punters will gravitate towards Vista.
Interesting though it is to hear from the militant wing of Microsoft Sales (Gartner) the moot point is that Microsoft need revenue from somewhere.
They'll get a trickle in from new XP sales but will need a new operating system to replace it.
Absolutely no sign of a credible contender yet!
XP needs to live until a new OS comes, Vista is not a new OS, is a remodeling of XP.
Vista is totally discredited. Granted it's vaguely possible that MS will try to save it with a later service pack, but my gut feeling is that they'll simply string out the current situation and get the next version of Windows out in one or two years. At this point it's more of a branding issue than anything else.

Microsoft have broken a variety of their own pragmatic rules about almost never breaking compatibility and not sacrificing performance that made the previous versions such a success.

I run Vista every day, but that's more because I can't face installing XP. I've got a 4GB 3Ghz Xeon with a 10K drive and workstation class graphics and it runs like a dog. That's just not on.
We've heard it all before, Microsoft will push back the deadline, they have done a dozen times before. XP was originally scheduled to be "switched off" years ago.
Basically they're trying to scare companies into upgrading but the fact is XP is going to be around for quite a bit longer.

On the home front they may well loose a lot of punters who would rather have Linux but its going to be small fry compaired to the masses that don't even know or care that other operating systems exist so long as they can check their email and play solitaire.
Well, there's a fork in the road for Windows users. At a guess, a few will use Vista voluntarily, but not many. A few will migrate to Linux or Mac OS, but not many. A lot will keep running XP on old machines for as long as possible. When they get a new machine, QUITE A FEW will stick on a copy of XP from an illegal/pirate disk image.

To be honest if MS got rid of XP in 2008 or 2009 there'd be a lot of pirated XP disks swilling around.
who still use Windows 98