Windows XP has received a stay of execution, and a well deserved one at that. For months Microsoft has been smoothing over corporate irritation with its less than stable Windows Vista OS by offering to “downgrade” their systems back to XP as a sort of patch. Now, they have decided to take this one step further by allowing retail outlets to continue selling XP machines beyond the one year cut off date that they had originally set.

Vista’s Death Throws

In a canned response at one at a Microsoft interview session, Mike Nash purports that, “As it turns out, our official policy as of 2002 is that versions of Windows are available through our retail and direct OEM partners for four years after they ship. Obviously this policy didn’t work with Windows XP, given Windows Vista’s delivery date. As a practical matter, most of our previous operating-system releases were available for about two years after the new version shipped, so maybe we were a little ambitious to think that we would need to make Windows XP available for only a year after the release of Windows Vista.”

Which is marketese for, “We really dropped the ball on this one. Hang out with XP for a little while longer while we try to dig ourselves out of this mess.”

Web 2.0 Roundup

Having used both XP and Vista extensively, I could not be happier with this offer. Unless you have 1 GB of RAM you might as well not even try to run Vista. Even if you meet this requirement you have to contend with incompatibilities, the ubiquitous “allow access” screen and a laundry list of freezes and frustrations.

XP runs too well and Vista runs too poorly at this point to justify the switch. So if you are in the market for some new hardware, be sure to ask for this new, absolutely free “upgrade”.

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