Windows XP fans don’t want it to XPire

Getting flamed for pro-Vista views
J. Peter Bruzzese, who writes a blog for InfoWorld, took an opposing stance to that of editor Gruman, and found himself getting flamed aplenty for his pro-Vista views.

“Some were cursing so badly, I had to remove the comments,” said Bruzzese, a tech consultant and author of several books, including “Tricks of the Microsoft Windows Vista Masters.”

“We all know when we have a bad operating system. When Windows Millennium edition came out (in 2000), I got it, and within a week, I’d uninstalled it,” he said. “It was awful. It was the worst OS I’d ever worked on.”

If Vista “gets a long enough life cycle, it will not be remembered like Millennium Edition,” he said.

“Vista will live long enough for people to start seeing the stability, seeing the drivers, seeing their applications work, and so they’re going to forget some of the anger as time goes on, the way they do with all of the operating systems.”

That life cycle is looking somewhat shorter than XP’s. Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates said recently that the new version of Windows’ operating software, code-named Windows 7, will be released “sometime in the next year or so.”

In the meantime, the company is facing a class-action lawsuit in federal court over the way it advertised computers sold with XP as being capable of running Vista.

The suit says that the labeling of some PCs as “Windows Vista Capable” was misleading because many of the computers were not powerful enough to run all of Vista’s features.

Seeing promising signs
Gruman, of InfoWorld, says he’ll continue the petition drive “until XP is off the market. At that point, you gotta ask yourself, does it matter anymore?”

He said Microsoft has “done a couple of things lately that makes us think they might actually change their minds, or stretch the date.”

Among them, the company said earlier this month it will keep selling a version of XP for use on new, low-cost computers, such as Intel’s Classmate PC, through at least June 2010. Such computers are designed mainly for word processing, e-mail and Web surfing.

“While originally intended for students and other first-time PC customers in emerging markets, we’re now seeing interest in these affordable devices in developed countries as well,” Michael Dix, Microsoft’s general manager of Windows Client Product Management, said in an interview on the company’s Web site.

“So here’s two cases where basically the hardware won’t support Vista, and Microsoft blinked on those two,” said Gruman.

“If you follow that logic, if it’s good enough for poor people, why couldn’t middle-class people get it? It’s sort of nuts.

“They have made those two compromises. So, we’ve got some hope that, given our signatures, given the comments you see elsewhere on the Web, given what we hear privately from retailers that customers don’t like Vista, that maybe Microsoft will get the message” and extend the deadline for XP’s retail deadline, Gruman said.

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