You may be on the money there, Starkers, but there is also real demand for XP for the reasons I cited. Businesses typically respond to demand.

For businesses that depend on an OS and software to function, the transition from XPP to Vista is a lot different than the transition from Win2kP to XPP. All our business apps that worked under Win2kP worked immediately under XPP, nothing broke, and we were able to add XPP machines to a mixed environment under Server2k with no issues. XPP also had a lot of security & networking improvements to make it a desirable upgrade. That's just not yet the case with Vista, at least according to the outfit that does our IT support, and might not be until Win7.

Obviously, we'll see.

Whatever peoples' individual opinions may be, I've heard there's been a lot of hoarding of XP licenses going on lately. And for many businesses, there is no pressure to do anything else at the moment. Support for XP is slated to be continued for several more years.

85% application compatibility. Deployment nuisances/cost the remaining 15%. Would be like getting a new car with no transmission; looks great but won't do anything but make noise.

I've heard that also. However, I've also heard that whatever copies of XP there are in the wild now, they're as rare as hens teeth and extremely hard, if not impossible to get a hold of. My local PC store owner told me that he has been trying to get a copy of XP Pro for another customer but has been told by his suppliers that all the licenses/copies in stock are now reserved for corporate/business entities.



That may be the case for a while, but I heard MS stopped production/issue of licenses well before the June cut-off date, meaning many businesses will have to sooner rather than later migrate to Vista, because XP will be in such short supply and will no longer be cost effective as prices are driven up by high corporate demand.

Maybe that's what MS wants - to give the corporate world no alternative, rather than engender it with a better/more business oriented product at a better price. While I am more than happy with Vista as a home user, I can see the problem large businesses would have with upgrading their entire PC base from XP, but as their older machines die I can't see that they'll have much choice.

Yes, I would have thought it made better business sense to make Vista more attractive to businesses with greater backwards compatibility, networking and inter-operability at a reasonable price.... so that it's not so much a case of not fixing what isn't broken, but businesses actually seeing the advantages of migrating to a newer OS. At present this is not the case because MS has not done enough to impress or woo the corporate world. While Vista may be right for the average home user, it is still below par as far as businesses are concerned... and too risky at too great a price to outfit fleets of PC's with it at this time.

While I am more than happy with Vista as a home user, I can understand where businesses are coming from... more is the pity that MS hasn't been truly listening here and has completely chosen the wrong course of action to have Vista more widely adopted, in both the business and home user markets.

Well that's not quite it in a nutshell... Microsoft discontinued 95, 98, ME and 2000 not too long after their successors were released, so it's not a lot different here, just a lot more fuss because XP became something the other OSes weren't... more stable & reliable, etc. Vista may have had its teething problems to begin with - and oodles of bad press wouldn't have helped - but the advent of SP1 has made Vista quite a stable and functional OS for the average home user to use.

And it's not like Vista wasn't selling prior to the discontinuation of XP, maybe not to the business world, but 20 odd million licenses worldwide isn't exactly a no-show, is it! For the most part, Vista is a good OS with plenty of potential, particularly for the home user, but MS needs to address pricing and the backwards compatibility and networking issues for businesses to more readily adopt it.

OK, there are some who, for various reasons, don't like Vista, but that doesn't make it a bad OS... more that it's like XP at the start (has issues like any other new OS) and people unsure of change aren't warming to it yet, in particular businesses.

Thing is, when Windows 7 comes out, the same resistance to change and criticisms will abound... it's too unstable, too bloated, has too many incompatibilities and driver issues, and our hardware needs upgrading to run this new touchy-feely thing we just don't need.... etc, etc.

Middle of June and my XP machine died. Was on vacation and thought I had done everything to protect it, power off, power cord pulled out. Left the the cable modem plugged in however. Heard there were powerful storms while we were gone. Power supply, motherboard "drive C" all cooked. Guess the surge came through the cable modem. I've heard it's possible. To make a long story short, I took the computer to my local guys. For $280 I got a much faster, better computer. They were able to use the RAM sticks I had. Thing is it's still an XP computer. I could have spent another $300 and got a Vista computer but $300 is a lot to me right now. You see that doing Vista is a money matter to me. XP is fine by me. One of my better friends has Vista and he loves it. At first he didn't want it but I guess if it's set up on a computer that has enough power it's pretty cool. I know the day will come that I will have to migrate to Vista or Windows7. XP runs everything I want to run right now. I hope Stardock has no plans of making their software Vista only for the next few years because so many of us still run XP. I've noticed the Vista only skins lately but haven't commented on that. All I'll say about it now is that I hope the skinners continue to make XP versions. PLEASE.

I know gamers who run Vista exclusively with absolutely no problem (and some are on this site).

That may be so... for the time being. Some distributors still have XP copies because they started hoarding them months ago when MS announced the June cutoff date, but they won't have them for many years to come... too many people are coveting them and, unlike the bottomless cup of coffee McDonalds said would never run out, they're in limited supply and can't last that long.

XP's predecessors didn't last too long once MS pulled the plug, so we can reasonably assume that XP's fate is sealed... it has been superseded and will be pretty much obsolete as a (supported) OS in around 4 - 5 years, if not sooner.