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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.
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:
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.
…
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.
