Some PC makers now have an extra four months to sell Windows XP.
The BBC reported Monday that Microsoft has extended the deadline for smaller PC builders and resellers to obtain licenses for the discontinued operating system from the previous deadline of January 31, 2009 to May 30, 2009.
"Microsoft is making accommodation through a flexible inventory program that will allow distributors to place their final orders by January 31, 2009; and take delivery against those orders through May 30, 2009," a Microsoft representative said in an e-mailed statement. "This is not an extension of sales."
Even after May 30, however, it's still not the end of XP. The operating system will be available on ultra-low-cost PCs until June 30, 2010, and the low-end Windows XP Starter Edition will continue to be available in emerging markets until the same date.
Plus, big PC makers plan to offer PCs with Vista Ultimate and Vista Business that have been factory downgraded at customers' request until July 30 next year.
See my earlier post on the very related issue of not trusting the stats M$ use for its operating systems (eg number of Vista shipped). As I noted earlier "Of greater interest would be the stat M$ execs probably look at each month - the percentage of Vista licences supplied into the marketplace which are no longer performing online update checks (ie the proportion who kept with XP, downgraded to XP or have switched to Linux)."
The full post is at
www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Vista-shunned-in-business-survey/0,130061733,339292397,00.htm
They can keep setting deadlines for WinXP's demise, but let's remember that only about 1-in-3 of M$' OSs are stable. The last one prior to WinXP was Win98SE... and remember ME, 2000, NT etc. There are many businesses considering open source (eg Ubuntu) for vanilla desktops. And even those which are wed to M$ offerings will wait for Windows7 - second edition. Vista will be seen as a stop-gap towards that, and not worth the high implementation costs for such a short expected lifespan.
But these artificial deadlines are having a market-distorting effect, with manufacturers releasing laptops which by design cannot take more than 1GB of RAM, simply so they fail to meet the Vista requirements so M$ will allow the manufacturer to ship them with XP. How do you feel about having your hardware intentionally knobbled through the intercession of a third party?