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Maybe it is just me, but I really do not understand Microsoft business tactics here.

MS's business tactics go way back to the start of the industrial revolution. Planned obsolescence. Always have a newer, bigger thing to sell consumers to create a demand for the new product. Killing off the older product simplifies the choices for consumer, i.e., subtle arm twisting to buy the newer, bigger version even though individuals/companies do not need it. Also, having both XP and Vista selling at the same time and watching people choose XP systems is also embarrassing. Plus you have to justify the 6+ years of research and development to your stock holders. Those are all the reasons I can think of for the moment. Also being a monopoly and dictating upgrades to meet MS's needs and not user's needs is a reason.

Edited 2008-07-28 22:12 UTC

Because they keep having to tell shareholders that all the money they poured into Vista, and Web technologies, and even Office[There's a full list somewhere] is an 'investment' and that the returns are 'just around the corner'.

Pretty soon, the shareholders will start to get bored of this and demand some actual results. If you force people off XP, many of them will reluctantly pick up Vista.

Three reasons come to mind.

1) Most people are generally unable to accept "sink cost". Gamblers who lose their house, keep thinking that they can make it all back, if they keep increasing the stakes. Addicts aren't the only one affected. In the dot-com bust, many companies went bankrupt and many companies fell from highs that any sane person would see would not be regained within the next 20 years, assuming the companies survive that long. It made sense long before the bust was in full swing. Still people refused to accept it. I know some people in Nortel who, when it went down to 40 dollars, honestly thought it was a bargain and made a mortgage on their stocks so they could become rich. Vista is a "sink cost", but Microsoft keeps thinking that it'll recover once XP is out of the picture. They're counting on their monopoly and people's complacency to make Vista what people expect.

2) Vista was a major rewrite that included some new technologies. If they kill Vista, those technologies have to be ported to XP or they have to take a lot of flack for abandoning their technical partners. If they do that, they may never recover.

3) If Microsoft had a bit of vision and could swallow their pride, they could find a way out by going the Apple route...dump both XP and Vista and go for emulation -- none of this virtualization stuff that adds yet more bulk with little benefit -- virtualization should be the focus of the new cleaned up API. All future work is on a lean, cleaned up API over a stable kernel. They could go with a F/OSS kernel, but knowing Microsoft, buying QNX might be a better bet and would allow them to break into markets where they have no credibility.

So hope and fear and lack of imagination/humility keep Vista alive. In essense, Vista for Microsoft is like riding a mechanical bull. You know you're going to fall off, and you're too proud to ask to turn it off, so you hang on for dear life, hoping against hope for a blackout so you don't have to fall.

I keep hearing this argument again and again, and I think it is flawed.

First, you assume that Microsoft problems are due to bad API. Well, more specifically, you seem to assume that XP had serious problems. Well, for business, not so much. XP was extremely successful product.

Now the for the API. Well, Win32 is not great, but if you compare it to e.g. what we have in X11, it is still a relatively good API.

Anyway, the most important problem is that this is API used by majority of world's software. Do you think that it makes a sense for business to rewrite everything? And if they do, would not be better for them to consider abandoning Microsoft altogether and go different path? (either OSX or FOSS).

Of course, everybody touts virtualization, but that will just make existing software second-class citizens.

The reality is that XP and Win32 API works quite well. Throwing everything away does not make sense.

They are trying to go back to the old glory days. Where people actually cared about Windows OS releases. And developers flocked to create application for it. Today people have gotten more pragmatic about the OS. We will develop for XP and try to use the standards Windows API as much as possible and chances are it will work fine in Windows 95 - Vista. But test in XP as that is what most people are running.

Back in the old days When Windows 95 was released and even Windows 2000 there was a good push to make apps that used the new features of the OS. And if you don't have the latest and greatest OS then you are a dinosaur and not worthy of our product.

Also the web has flattened things. Back in pre-2000 days we really needed software to do everything we need done. Today most of it can be done via the web, which doesn't want to care about what OS you are using.

As the OS losses its grasp of computing, thus Microsoft looses its grasp on computing. So making Vista seem like this big seller it is trying to convince people that they are still relevant and if you don't have vista then you are behind the time.

*EXACTLY*

Win32 is not perfect, but you can create any application in it. Why should you narrow your user base by using some shiny new incompatible API?

Heck, even today I am still forced to support some customers running Win98... As developer, I see no benefits in new "silverbullet" API that is supposed to "save windows".