Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 24th Apr 2008 22:20 UTC
Right now, the net is abuzz about remarks Steve Ballmer made at a Belgium news conference today. The buzz comes from a Reuters story which quotes Ballmer as saying that Windows XP's life cycle might be extended if customers demand it. Contrary to what all those reports online might indicate, there really is no change in policy here.
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Member since:
2005-07-12
From a marketing standpoint continuing to sell XP would NOT hurt they're business if they priced it the same as the equivalent Vista's... Then it would be win/win and the USER could speak with their wallets. "Oh it would hurt our sales of Vista" should mean **** to them and their stockholders since they could still say "Yeah, but we're still selling XP like hotcakes" - if anything I'd say this constantly pushing the date forward is just a ploy to get wholesalers and even private users to stock up on copies of it ahead of time for quick cash in their pockets. "Order now while supplies last!"
But with so many vendors NOT having XP as an option on all configurations, shelving it prematurely all they are doing is driving the more savvy users away, likely increasing piracy (since sorry, but *nix on the desktop is still a pipedream and OSX is a tinkertoy) - Given a choice between legal XP and Pirate, I choose legal. Given a choice between Pirate XP and Legal Vista... That's a grey area for me once the channel of XP dries up.
Not that WGA hasn't already INCREASED piracy - I was running a pirated/hacked wga nuetered copy of XP with my LEGAL key, just so I didn't have the headaches of calling them on the phone about my copy being 'deactivated' three times a week while I'm swapping out CPU's and video cards for benchmark testing or upgrades. (I change hardware a LOT)... It's WHY I've switched to a LEGAL copy of XP x64 since there is NO WGA in XP x64!!! It's just a bonus that I get use of my full 4 megs of RAM instead of the 2.5 or so XP let me use even WITH the /3gig switch. (since I've got a 640 meg Ge8800GTS, a 256 meg 8400GS and 256 megs hardware mapped from my EMU Morpheus sucking down the top gig of address space)
Also why I don't trust them as far as I can throw them with this whole 'subscription' rubbish. It's a pain in the ass with Apple, It caused 'linspire' to fall flat on it's face, so naturally they have to try it to combining it with their anti-piracy methods that are more likely to make saavy users use pirated copies than legit ones. BRILLIANT.