Ballmer, Do You Actually Read The Comments Out There?
Biting my tongue as hard as I can, I am unable to believe the following statement.
“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“
Steve Ballmer stated clear as day that he is waiting for customer feedback on keeping XP. Seriously, he is kidding, right? While there are certainly plenty of people who have found the migration to Vista to be just fine, without too many major hurdles, there are countless articles, forum posts, emails and even signs in peoples windows indicating that they want XP as an alternative!
Now, outside of it being a major support hassle, I fail to see what irritating people even further serves in the long run? But even still, when you see companies like Dell using “We will still have XP after the deadline” as a marketing pitch, I would be willing to bet there may be something to this keeping the now dated OS around as an option for consumers who simply prefer something less “glossy”.
This not an anti-Vista or Microsoft rant. Rather, this is a point that I firmly believe is being missed by Microsoft. A large number of your own users have spoken out loud and clear - keep XP around until another option is available. Ballmer himself has finally admitted that things have been “a work in progress” with Vista, while others have already rolled back to their older OS anyway. So how about it, should Microsoft simply say too bad or instead, consider the will of their customers? You decide!
© 1996-2006, Lockergnome LLC. ISSN: 1095-3965. All Rights Reserved. Please read our 
My brother recently had a computer made for his daughter at a reputable local computer store. I told him to ask them to put XP on it, and they said if that’s what he wanted, they’d do it; however, he decided to go ahead and put Vista on her computer.
Now, I’m teaching her how to use her system, keep it updated and uncluttered, and I noticed one thing very quickly. Her brand new computer, which has more speed (dual core extreme) and memory (3GB RAM) than any of my three computers (2 laptops and one desktop) and less on her computer, software-wise, runs so much slower than mine do. The difference? I have XP on all my computers.
Vista is bloated and slow and needs some major work. However, some of the new features, I admit, are pretty nice, but I wouldn’t buy Vista for those few neat features after seeing how slow it runs.