The folks at AppleInsider are reporting that Microsoft has given HP permission to sell Windows XP on new Vista machines until April 30th, 2010:
The announcement hasn’t been made publicly, but AppleInsider can exclusively report that according to a source within Hewlett Packard, Microsoft has granted the PC giant an extension to its existing rights to continue selling the nearly eight year old Windows XP on the company’s business desktops, workstations, and notebooks in place of Windows 7 for another year.
Microsoft isn’t excited about the XP extension, as the internal communique provided by the source stated, “It’s important to remind customers that Microsoft are still planning to retire XP Pro Mainstream support on April 14th 2009 and will only provide OS security updates beyond that date unless the customer has an Extended Hotfix Support contract. MS Extended Support for XP Pro ends on April 8th 2014.”
According to the article, Microsoft is still ending mainstream support on April 14, and it’s gonna cost you to downgrade. But assuming that this is true, mainstream support could be extended. Then there’s the fact that one has to wonder why a Apple rumors website would be reporting on this. Perhaps they’re taking some joy in the failings of Vista? Who knows. Another thought….. Are Dell, Lenovo and others getting the same deal? Or is HP the only one? Assuming that any of this is true of course.
Until there’s confirmation, you may want to file this under “plausible rumor.”
Oh, there’s also one other tidbit that is worth mentioning from this article:
Microsoft has billed Windows 7 as a completely new operating system, but company executives also admit publicly that the release is really a relatively minor update to Windows Vista.
“Windows 7,” CEO Steve Ballmer stated, “is Windows Vista with cleanup in user interface [and] improvements in performance.”
That means that many of the reasons customers have for not migrating to Vista will also be reasons for not wanting to shift to Windows 7, making the availability of an “XP downgrade” an important factor to vendors selling Windows PCs.
Interesting. The only comment that I can make on that from my experience with the Windows 7 beta, it gives the user the impression that it’s Vista…. Only that it works this time around. I hope for Microsoft’s sake that the general public doesn’t find out about this. True or not, it may send the running to the Apple Store…. Again.
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This entry was posted on April 6, 2009 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Microsoft, Vista, XP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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XP Gets A Stay Of Execution? Again?
The folks at AppleInsider are reporting that Microsoft has given HP permission to sell Windows XP on new Vista machines until April 30th, 2010:
The announcement hasn’t been made publicly, but AppleInsider can exclusively report that according to a source within Hewlett Packard, Microsoft has granted the PC giant an extension to its existing rights to continue selling the nearly eight year old Windows XP on the company’s business desktops, workstations, and notebooks in place of Windows 7 for another year.
Microsoft isn’t excited about the XP extension, as the internal communique provided by the source stated, “It’s important to remind customers that Microsoft are still planning to retire XP Pro Mainstream support on April 14th 2009 and will only provide OS security updates beyond that date unless the customer has an Extended Hotfix Support contract. MS Extended Support for XP Pro ends on April 8th 2014.”
According to the article, Microsoft is still ending mainstream support on April 14, and it’s gonna cost you to downgrade. But assuming that this is true, mainstream support could be extended. Then there’s the fact that one has to wonder why a Apple rumors website would be reporting on this. Perhaps they’re taking some joy in the failings of Vista? Who knows. Another thought….. Are Dell, Lenovo and others getting the same deal? Or is HP the only one? Assuming that any of this is true of course.
Until there’s confirmation, you may want to file this under “plausible rumor.”
Oh, there’s also one other tidbit that is worth mentioning from this article:
Microsoft has billed Windows 7 as a completely new operating system, but company executives also admit publicly that the release is really a relatively minor update to Windows Vista.
“Windows 7,” CEO Steve Ballmer stated, “is Windows Vista with cleanup in user interface [and] improvements in performance.”
That means that many of the reasons customers have for not migrating to Vista will also be reasons for not wanting to shift to Windows 7, making the availability of an “XP downgrade” an important factor to vendors selling Windows PCs.
Interesting. The only comment that I can make on that from my experience with the Windows 7 beta, it gives the user the impression that it’s Vista…. Only that it works this time around. I hope for Microsoft’s sake that the general public doesn’t find out about this. True or not, it may send the running to the Apple Store…. Again.
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This entry was posted on April 6, 2009 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Microsoft, Vista, XP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.