Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken-L
XP will be "supported" until then, even if that wasn't Microsoft's intention they will be "forced" to by the business and private user communities.
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Consumers don't drive OS adoption, regardless of what the marketing seems to be aimed at through the media. Enterprise licensing is M$'s main income stream. When I was running an IT department for a 125 person company, our annual Microsoft licensing bill ran $50,000+ for all servers, server applications and workstation licensing on Software Assurance (upgrade protection).
So who do you think Microsoft is going to pay attention to? A home user with $250 invested in an OS and maybe $200 in Microsoft Works? Or a business community spending billions per year on licensing?
Vista is slowly being adopted by the enterprise. Most "safe" IT organizations (it's a relative term, okay?) opt out of OS migrations until the first service pack is available...which is scheduled for first quarter of 2008 for Vista. The plans are already in place for many companies to make that move after the release is tested.
Vista SP1 beta weeks away; final due in Q1 '08
That said, yes, XP will be supported for some time to come. Heck, NT4 was still supported until a couple of years ago and that was released in 1996. With XP coming out in 2001, I suspect we'll have another 3-5 years of support.
And I'm not thrilled with Vista either. From a pure consumer/home user point of view, I really haven't had many issues. Running my network apps on it, though, has been a pain in the butt. Changing IP addresses to jump different networks is amazingly complex for what used to be a simple operation in XP.