Basta la Vista: Windows loyalists force Microsoft to keep XP in business

The decision to keep the Microsoft XP operating system available till mid-2008 has fuelled suggestions that its expensively developed, but critically challenged, Vista replacement is facing a serious acceptance problem. The company says it’s just responding to a trend in which more businesses wait for a hardware change before upgrading software, and that 60m licence sales to date is still respectable. But extending XP is also an insurance against an end-of-life defection from closed Vista to open source.

Microsoft has said it will continue to supply its XP operating system to computer makers and retailers until 30 June 2008, abandoning a previous target of withdrawing it from January. This appears to be a reaction to unexpectedly slow take-up of the replacement system Vista, with businesses waiting until they buy replacement PCs – on which Vista is likely to be installed as standard – rather than upgrading their existing desktop and laptop fleets.

Business users’ reluctance to switch to Vista appears motivated by a combination of can’t upgrade/ won’t upgrade. Some have examined the system requirements for Vista and realised that it won’t sit easily on most of their machines, so that the hardware will have to be replaced before the new software can run. Others, on the basis of their own or reported experience, fear that Vista will cause work disruption and extra training needs because of its substantial design differences; or that it will be unstable and prone to crashes until the first corrective Service Pack is made available.

Press comment on Vista has tended to be more critical than for previous Microsoft launches, with frequent questioning of whether the new system’s added features justify its extra size and cost. Even its enhanced ability to run several memory-intensive programs simultaneously is dismissed by some business users, who see it as an attempt to make PCs more marketable to the online visual artists currently attracted to Macs, not delivering much advantage for most office applications.

From FinanceWeek…

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