Observations on the Techie World

It would appear from recent news reports that Microsoft is to ban oem selling of XP from January. While this makes good sense for Vista sales it hardly gives Microsoft any, much needed, good press. Now Vista may well mature into a half decent OS, by say service pack 3, but at the moment it's rather half cooked. It seems odd then that Microsoft would want to start killing off XP so soon after the release of Vista. Odd until you realise that lots of people are still ordering new kit with XP on it instead of Vista and also that many people who ordered Vista are taking it back and asking for XP instead. I fall into the latter category after buying a laptop with Vista installed I reverted to XP because Vista killed performance and gave me nothing extra that my current XP technology stack didn't already provide. To me Vista was just XP with twice the resource footprint and a lot of eye candy and nonsense attached to it. This not only being my view but also that of many other people I have spoken to about it.

The point here seems to be that Microsoft has misread the market and is very worried about Vista sales so how better to boost them than stop selling XP; probably the only way to get business customers to upgrade. While this may make sense to Microsoft its a nonsense to the rest of us. Most of us don't need and don't want Vista with its bloated resource footprint. When is Microsoft going to realise that customers want to decide what to buy and don't like being bullied into buying what they don't want by huge corporate monopolies. This is another sad day for consumer choice. I say Windows' competition is starting to look more and more attractive all the time and with this latest revelation many others may start to think similarly.