'We could wake up smarter' - Ballmer hints at Win XP reprieve
Vista-shy customers raise your hands
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Windows XP could yet be reprieved from end-of-life, if enough customers demand it, said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today.
Speaking at a news conference in Belgium Ballmer said: "XP will hit an end-of-life. We have announced one. If customer feedback varies we can always wake up smarter but right now we have a plan for end-of-life for new XP shipments", reports Reuters.
But at the same time he insisted that consumers were switching to Vista in numbers, which is perhaps to be expected, as the majority of new computers available at retail now come loaded with the operating system.
As for the business world, Ballmer noted: "We still have customers who are buying PCs with XP". He explained that many IT departments were still supporting dusty old kit that cannot handle memory-chugging Vista.
Earlier this month Microsoft confirmed it would continue to sell Windows XP Home edition licenses beyond the operating system’s scheduled 30 June kill-date for bargain basement PCs only.
Meanwhile, Microsoft finally got the long-awaited XP SP3 out of the door on Monday.
And, it’s been a bumper service pack week for Microsoft
Yesterday it released Vista SP1 as an automatic update in English, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. Auto distribution will happen steadily over the next few weeks, apparently.
“We'll be distributing the service pack slowly so that we can help Windows users have a good experience,” the firm said on its Vista blog.
But the rest of the world’s computers won’t “begin experiencing the benefits” of Vista SP1 until mid-May. ®
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COMMENTS
@James Anderson
"Most of Oopen Source/Linux was written by professional programmers.
IE. programmers who write stuff for a living. Furthermore they
include some of the best programmers who ever lived."
They may be good programmers but they certainly don't act professionally when it comes to OpenSource. I'm talking about annoying bugs/requested features in popular OSS apps that have been around for years and which none of these characters seem to care about. Firefox still has some peculiar CSS issues that Opera and IE have long since conquered, and AbiWord, which would otherwise be a nice little word processor, is a colossal pain in the arse due to the lack of certain basic find-and-replace features that were first requested in 2001. I don't mention OpenOffice because it was a laughable bloated wreck when it first appeared and it hasn't got much better since.
XP with Office 2007?
If i buy a new lappie with VIsta and downgrade it to XP can i still run Office 2007 on it?
Re: Vista is rubbish
Giles,
Actually that's exactly something you have to do with both Linux and MAC. On Linux some printers simply don't have drivers, but it's rair. However with MAC OSX upgrades you really do lose perfectly good printers. I had a customer who upgraded and they could no longer use their printer. Nothing we did would fix it except switch printers.
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