“Microsoft retired mainstream support for Windows XP and Office 2003 today – but that doesn’t necessarily mean anyone should be in a hurry to upgrade to Vista yet. The firm will continue to offer extended support packages on both products through to 8 April 2014, allowing businesses and individuals plenty of time to consider their options before plumping for a new operating system. From today Redmond will charge XP and Office 2003 customers who need assistance on a per-incident, per hour, or alternative basis. The changes apply to all editions of the Office suite as well as all versions of XP with the exception of Embedded. Non-security critical fixes will be available to those punters who signed up to Microsoft’s Extended Hotfix Support program 90 days before mainstream support was killed off. Security updates will be pumped out free of charge for Office 2003 and XP until 4 August 2014.”
I would be a lot sadder to see this if Vista was still the upgrade path. Windows 7 is looking better and better, so maybe it won’t be so bad.
Microsoft has support? For the average home user, support is meaningless unless they mean patches and updates. For businesses support is relevant. For home users, Microsoft is a “fire and forget” company: after consumers buy, the relationship ends because they have their money. Sure, you can pay $35 a call to their support, but forget about getting answers. The web is a much better support medium for home users.
For Microsoft’s sake, I sure hope Windows 7 does better for them. If they are smart, they will make an upgrade path from XP. If they let Monkey Boy decide, they’ll probably force you buy Vista and only provide an upgrade path from Vista so they can get rid of the 27 billion copies of Vista they have laying around…
How does this apply to people who are buying netbooks? They will be sold for quite a while with XP Home. Are you telling me they are being sold without a supported OS? I am confused.
I second that question. If “mainstream support” includes copies purchased with netbooks, anyone who bought a Windows XP netbook recently just got a kick in the teeth… well, unless they’ve replaced Windows with another os.
I think MS should have at least waited until Windows 7 was released. Yes, it’s time for XP to be phased out… but another few months wouldn’t have made a difference at this stage. They’d better at least offer an upgrade path for netbook owners at the very minimum… and I don’t mean a free copy of starter addition (something that should be permanently scrapped).
This is a question primarily for Microsoft, or places that are believed to republish Microsoft PR in the guise of reviews/journalism. Not a direct accusation, but I hear zdnet and other main stream sources (former magazines now online) often mentioned in this way.
What exactly is a critical non-security related patch? If it is not about security, what makes it critical?
The only (very long shot) I can visualize is a patch to correct something that say crashes the computer, but can be proven to NEVER cause buffer overruns, or other faults that lead to privilege escalation, which seems a tiny number of patches in a system designed to be both crash proof and secure.
Many including myself would say based on past experience that windows 9x was designed with neither goal in mind, and while NT based versions do better on the former, there are still problems with the latter, and no neither Vista nor 7 is a complete fix for this either.
If Vista or 7 is as secure as those who say “microsoft learned from the past” are correct, then Windows without external firewall/antivirus/antispyware would be compromised far fewer times than it actually is, and there would be far fewer security bulletins that affect XP/Vista/7 equally, since the ballmers of this world swear “vista is all new, no legacy code here, and will be saying the same for 7 soon, I expect.
when highlighting windows security is paramount, the “I don’t run stinking antivirus and my system is clean” (or its cousin “I only run a free av, so no cost to me”) are trotted out. Then when cost of keeping windows running above that of alternatives is questioned, suddenly the cost of firewall/antivirus/antispyware ‘vanishes’.
I think the same marketers responsible for the alphabet soup of Vista/Office versions (would you like 64bit/OEM/Proffesional/Enhanced/SP2/with the new icon package add-on?) created their patch labels.
just from the short summary (no doubt straight from Microsoft):
mainstream support
extended support packages
assistance on a per-incident, per hour, or alternative basis
Non-security critical fixes (already mentioned above)
Extended Hotfix Support program
others from other Microsoft products, off the top of my head:
patch
Service Pack
Service Release
Guess I need some more “Mojave” or more “I’m a PC” education. I have used Vista both with and without SP1 and Office 2007 and hated all of them, and NOT for any technophobe/I don’t want to learn new programs reason, they are regressions of many good/widely accepted UI principles.
For example, both replace a menu (word/icon) with just an icon (orb, a windows/office logo). I guess they got tired of being ridiculed that windows “shuts down by pressing start” and wanted to tie the imagery of windows/office with “this is the command center of the computer, you can’t run without it even more strongly than before. FAIL
The ribbon violates the “muscle memory” principle. When you select a table/graphic, new things appear on the ribbon that aren’t otherwise there! Most tragic, their expanding/contracting menus committed the same faux-pas in Office XP or 2003, and here they are repeating past, widely lambasted mistakes! FAIL x2
Oh and consistency? The little squares with an arrow in the lower right corner of the ribbon buttons (don’t know the exact GUI term, shown for another ribbon using program here, next to the words clipboard font and templates)
http://www.devcomponents.com/dotnetbar/Default.aspx
Those corresponding buttons (I guess you’d call them) have 3 different behaviors in Word 2007 alone, never mind the rest of Office 2007 or the rest of Windows!
1) They open a separate, OS themed windows with separate close/minimize/expand controls
2) They open a pane within the existing document, which shoves the other content over to make room for itself
3) They open a pane within the existing document, which fits in the existing document, without moving the other content over
FAIL x3
whew, that ended up long, I guess I don’t like their shovel-wareâ„¢ much. Oh and microsoft has a few things to fix.
I’m still on Office XP!