Ebola Cola

We’ve hated Xp when it came out, seven years ago. We’ve started to love it when the SP2 came out, if not at first sight. And then Vista came out, and all of a sudden Windows Xp SP2 became “a great OS”, “very stable”, “never had a problem with it”. So much that, when Microsoft announced the natural extinction of the product would happen on June 30, petitions spawned around the net to save Xp.

Microsoft didn’t give in, but it has been forced by the facts themselves to announce they’ll continue to support the second-latest version of their home and office operating system through all April 2014 - bringing Xp’s lifespan to an impressive thirteen years! In fact, while new notebooks are almost exlusively sold with an OEM version of Vista, business customers, especially large companies, are still slow to jump on Vista’s bandwagon. That shouldn’t be a surprise, considering that many still have Windows 2000.

Microsoft has also confirmed their timeline for Windows 7, whose release has been announced for the very first weeks of 2010.

I’m glad Xp has received some extra time. It has its flaws, of course, but its SP2 incarnation is a very stable system, and works like a charm. Which can’t surely be said of Vista…

Microsoft’s current OS has marked a sort of void in the history of the system, and there are many alternatives trying (and partially succeeding in) filling that void. Apple has never been this strong on the home computing market like it is now, and Linux’s market share is starting to erode that field too (while it was already present in the “geek” market share). Xp’s extra time is meant to trail users and companies from the 2005 to the 2010, hoping nobody notices that five years have been lost in the middle.