Microsoft News Tracker

Back in August I was speculating that the desultory enterprise adoption of Vista would force Microsoft to extend the availability of Windows XP and today that was realized as Microsoft added 5 months to the XP OEM and retail availability.

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The last day of June marks the end of availability for Office 2003 for Microsoft PC OEMs and System Builders. Microsoft had already stopped shipping Office 2003 to retailers in April 2003 except for a few foreign language versions which will also cease shipping on June 30. Mainstream support for Office 2003 ends January 13, 2009 and Extended Support (free security fixes) ends January 14, 2014.

An article by Angus Kidman at Australia’s APC Magazine caused a bit of stir yesterday, because it reminded everyone of the end of general availability dates for Windows XP. Microsoft has the dates neatly summarized at their Windows Life-Cycle site (along with earlier client operating systems) and the net is that:

• Direct OEM and retail Windows XP license availability ends January 31, 2008
• System Builder (i.e. smaller OEM) Windows XP license availability ends January 31, 2009

Large volume purchase customers that want to can continue to load XP on their systems via downgrade rights and most consumers probably want Vista anyway, but there’s apparently some push-back from small businesses:

Despite Microsoft’s relentless promotion of Vista, manufacturers are still seeing plenty of demand from customers for systems preloaded with XP, especially in the finicky SOHO market.

In a recent post on its Direct2Dell blog, Dell reaffirmed to concerned customers that it wasn’t about to force small business users — who typically purchase PCs piecemeal, rather than in large enterprise-style orders — to shift to Vista, which has experienced a less-than-stellar reaction from many buyers because of driver issues and moderately beefy hardware requirements.

“Dell recognizes the needs of small business customers and understands that more time is needed to transition to a new operating system,” the post read in part. “The plan is to continue offering Windows XP on select Dimension and Inspiron systems until later this [northern] summer.”

This is all standard operating procedure and unless Vista unexpectedly starts getting very bad user reviews is unlikely to change.

Microsoft Announces Extended Support for Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Media Center Edition:

Today, Microsoft is announcing the addition of an Extended Support phase for the Windows® XP Home Edition and Windows XP Media Center Edition operating systems, providing consumers with an additional phase of support.

With the addition of Extended Support, the support life cycle for Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Media Center Edition will include a total of five years of Mainstream Support (until April 2009) and five years of Extended Support, matching the support policy provided for Windows XP Professional.

The Microsoft Support Lifecycle policy standardizes Microsoft® product support policies for business and developer products as well as for consumer, hardware, multimedia and Microsoft Dynamics™ products.

I told you so back in January of 2006:

If Vista ships in late 2006, come Christmas 2008 all the small business people, average Joes/Joans, and grannies in Peoria that have a Windows XP Home or Media Center system (some only two years old) are effectively going to be told to ante up for a Vista upgrade and even worse, install it, if they don’t want Internet nasties to infect their machines. Meanwhile, users of Windows XP Professional, which is mostly the same as Windows XP Home, will continue to get free security hotfixes for an additional five years under extended support while the XP Home users are outside the candy store with their noses pressed against the glass. Sounds like a PR nightmare to me, not to mention what it may do for sales of “home” systems for the rest of the year.
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The right answer is to give the “home” versions of XP the same extended support as the “business” versions. My guess is that Microsoft will be forced to do the equivalent of this anyway, so why not do it now and look good?

Ah, that would have been too simple.

Some Microsoft related news items from this week that did not find posts of their own:

Internet advertising shoots past estimates:

This week the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers released their half year figures for 2006, and it totalled up to a $7.9bn spend in the US. At the end of last year these same two forecast a $15bn market for US advertising and last quarter gave a heads up that it had already reached $3.9bn, growing at 38 per cent, rather than the 30 per cent plus that was originally forecast. This quarter took it beyond $4bn up 36 per cent and the likely result for the year end is going to be closer to $16.5bn, perhaps higher

And while we’re doing market stats, over 100 million Americans viewed video online in July according to comScore Media Metrix. There’s potential there for MSN Soapbox but currently Yahoo and MySpace are duking it out for the lead with Microsoft’s sites in 5th place.

IDC predicts end of BlackBerry’s reign. The would-be usurpers are Nokia, Motorola, and Palm of which the latter two use Windows Mobile and Microsoft Exchange. Windows Mobile devices are predicted to have a third of the market by 2010.

Mary Jo Foley reminds us that October 10 is the last day that Microsoft will support Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1).

It’s not just Symantec - European security vendors are concerned that Microsoft is abusing their Windows monopoly too.

The BBC and Microsoft signed a non-exclusive agreement to talk to each other. Apparently the humor is unintended. Also on the agenda of this year’s junket of BBC bigs to the USA are RealNetworks, IBM, and Linden Labs. Could more signing ceremonies be in the offing?