I just ran across a story on MSNBC that apparently Microsoft is allowing sales of Windows XP to continue into the missle of next year.
Microsoft to extend Windows XP sales – Tech News & Reviews – MSNBC.com
To some people this may be a sign that Windows Vista has failed as an operating system and I guess to that question time can only tell. The real reason though that Windows XP sales are being extended is because of corporate buy in. Most large customers, who are of course the bread and butter of Windows sales, need to have Windows Vista move into the “evergreen” or PC replacement strategy and this takes time. One way that some companies will do an operating upgrade is to accelearate the deployment of new PCs and in this case becasue of the huge requirements of Windows Vista this will be difficult.
One of the real problems besides the high resource needs of Windows Vista is the lack of any real operating system needs that are being bundled into the Vista operating system. One of the big drivers for businesses to go from Windows NT and Windows 2000 Pro was the greater security in Windows XP SP2. Now that these security holes and deficiencies have been caught there is not really much of a need to upgrade.
I am sure that as the year goes on next year and as a much need service pack for Windows Vista is released that we will in fact see a real uptake in Windows Vista deployments. Coming in 2009 we should also see some kind of work done on the often stopped prouction on Windows Longhorn as it was originally envisioned and these additions will probably make a Windows Vista SP2 a very solid product that will become as popular as Windows XP has become.