Hoarding Windows XP

On my Yahoo News this morning (yes, some people still use Yahoo to aggregate stuff ) the scary reminder that XP will no longer be on sale after June 30th. Microsoft plans to end full support — including warranty claims and free help with problems — in April 2009. The company will continue providing a more limited level of service until April 2014.

This is quite worrying, because - as anyone who has used Vista will tell you - its an unnecessary learning curve, is not fully backward compatible, is unnecessarily intrusive and - worst of all - is just too processor intensive for the benefits.

A chap called Galen Gruman at Infoworld has started a Save XP Web petition, its has c 100,000 signatures. On the petition site's comments section, some users proclaimed they will downgrade from Vista to XP, which, interestingly is an option available in the past to businesses, but now open for the first time to consumers who buy Vista Ultimate or Business editions — if they need to buy a new computer after XP goes off the market.

The real influence will be business customers though....now we've been doing research recently with SME/SOHO customers' use of ICT and the thing that comes back from them over and over again is that they want simplicity, stability and ease of use. And low cost..... Vista just doesn't have a compelling reason to exist under these criteria, so XP will be around for quite a while

And, as a comment on the news article notes:

"You really can't make 69 percent of your installed base unhappy with you,"

Besides, for those who buy XP and want the Vista experience, there is always this advice from El Reg:

"I just turned on all the flashy crap in XP, changed the background image, took some memory out of my box and clocked down the CPU. Then broke Media player. Works like a charm."

Also, we know that whatever the Son-of-Vista turns out to be, it'll only really be ready post its Service Pack 2 or whatever by about 2010 earliest, so thats 2+ more years we need to operate - too long to be unsupported, too short to justify a new OS buy for a "why?" system.

Me...I'm off down the local store to get me a few XP OS's before June 30th just in case.......