Why Microsoft's Keeping XP Home Alive Until 2014..?

Microsoft extended support for Windows XP Home and Windows XP Media Center by five years this week in part because it recognized that consumers rarely update their PCs to a new operating system, a company executive said Friday. On Wednesday, Microsoft announced it would support Windows XP Home and Media Center until April 2014 by adding a five-year "Extended Support" period. The announcement matches a policy already in place for the business-oriented Windows XP Professional. "Consumers are keeping their computers for longer periods of time," says Ines Vargas, Microsoft's director of support policy. "The average family is buying a new operating system with a new computer, their second or third, then passing the older machine to another in the family." That jibes with research which shows families retain older operating systems on older PCs, and with analysts' insights into the same behavior at the corporate level.

"Windows XP still continues to have a larger-than-expected installed base," says Vargas in explaining the decision to keep the Home edition on life support. Revenue was another reason. According to Vargas, per-incident paid support for consumers would have disappeared if Windows XP Home dropped off the map when it left what Microsoft calls "Mainstream Support" in mid-April 2009. "We would have had to turn them away, but now we will give the consumer paid support options," says Vargas. The choice was made easier by feedback from users and analysts, as well as a determination that producing security updates for XP Home for another five years would be a "minimal effort," Vargas says. "The fact that we were planning to produce security fixes for Windows XP Professional [lead us to decide] why not just port them to Windows XP Home?"

From what I've read so far Vista won't be easily installed on a lot of current machines. In 5 years most of us will move on to a new machine I suspect.

Because Microsoft products are rubbish and expensive. The new Vista doesn't look much different to XP apart from the black toolbars.

Some people are still using 98!

By 2014 Microsoft should have at least some of the bugs worked out of Vista so people that need a PC for actual work and not just a pretty desktop will then be able to switch.