eWeek Opinion: Vista is a Zombie

After Don Reisinger's rant over at CNet News it's now eWeek's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols jumping on the Windows XP Extended Stay bandwagon. I thought I'd mention that it's not unusual for Microsoft to extend its (OEM) support for older Operating Systems. It happened with Windows 2000, NT and all the 9x variants, well except for Windows ME (anyone remember that?).

Maybe, just maybe it has something to do with Vista Basic PC's? Because in all honesty Microsoft doesn't do itself any favors by releasing something that "looks" worse than XP on low end PC's. Add to the fact that XP has had 6 years to establish itself and became a very reliable OS after SP2 (Service Pack 2).
Windows Vista probably won't be widely adopted until the release of SP1 (and that is mainly in the business sector only). This is standard practice.

It's only fair to mention that the mass exodus to Windows XP was mainly due to the fact that it became the first fully 32 bit client OS after Windows 2000 which was designed for the business sector and not shipped on (OEM) consumer PC's. Due to the wide success and adoption of Windows 2000, XP was built on top of that very reliable kernel. Vista is simply an upgrade, whereas XP was a totally new OS. Upgrading now is not a necessity in many cases for consumers.

Anyway, enough from me, if you want another laugh click Read more to enjoy yet another "expert" opinion on Vista.

Opinion: Vista has turned into the desktop operating system no one wants, and even Microsoft is beginning to get it.

Today, I think of Vista as the zombie operating system. It stumbles around, and from a distance you might think it's alive, but close up it's the walking dead.

The first sign that Vista was in real trouble was when major vendors started to offer XP again on new machines. In February, Microsoft insisted it had already sold more than 20 million copies of Windows Vista. Oh yeah, like there were actually 20 million copies of Vista already out there and running. Pull the other leg, it's got bells on.

If Vista was doing great, then why did Dell break ranks with the other major OEMs to start offering XP again and become the first top-tier vendor to offer XP in replacement for Vista in April? Adding insult to injury, Dell actually had the effrontery to offer desktop Linux to its customers.

Other OEMs followed Dell's lead, or to be more precise, its customers' demands. Lenovo, for example, when it rolled out its revamped high-end ThinkPad T61p workstation notebooks in July, made a point of offering not just Vista but XP Pro and, yes, several Linux distributions, including Novell's SUSE, Red Hat and Turbo Linux.

So it came as no surprise at all to me when Mike Nash, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Windows product management, announced that, due to OEM demand, Microsoft will keep selling XP until June 2008. Of course, he also claims there is little chance the June 30 date will be extended.