This week was the 6^th annual All Things Digital, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer was there to take questions on various things, such as, why Microsoft failed to acquire Yahoo, and Windows Vista. But that wasn’t only thing that they were doing, Microsoft also was introducing the next version of Windows called Seven. They did not show much about Seven only the new features they added. They also demoed this; you can view the video at http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080528-windows-7-demo-all-multitouch-and-no-meat.html

Windows Vistas had a huge amount of public build-up as with Seven, Microsoft has kept Seven pretty quite for the most part. There has been non-stop talk about Vista since 2003 till 2006, as well all know it now, Vista didn’t deliver all the Promised features during its extended development. Because of this with the widespread of negative perception, hurt both Microsoft and Windows brands. Microsoft is keeping Windows Seven quite due to this problem. Microsoft wants to deliver all the features promised in Windows 7 and Promise that it will ship everything in late 2009/early 2010.

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The end of XP is just right around the corner. As of June 30th Microsoft’s most successful operating system, Windows XP will be discontinued. Both Hewlett-Packard and Dell will be selling windows XP as a downgrade option. The computers will be Vista Business and Vista Ultimate that have been factory downgraded to Windows XP at the customer’s request. When the customer buys a PC from Dell or HP it will have Windows XP but already has a Paid-For upgrade to Vista when the customer chooses to do so.

HP said that they will be doing this beyond XP’s deadline until July 30th, 2009. Dell also said that they are planning to do the same idea as HP but are unsure of the time. Other PC manufactures are exploring other options to sell Windows XP beyond the deadline according the CNET News.com

There are limits for the PC manufacturers to have a Windows XP option, Only Windows Vista Business and Vista Ultimate will have downgrade rights. Retail stores are finding it difficult to sell windows XP as a downgrade option, because they can’t show Windows XP being installed on one of the display computers. But they can offer windows XP as a downgrade option if the customer’s requested to do so.

Lenovo and other PC manufacturers are selling Windows Vista with a Windows XP recovery disk so if the customer wants to have Windows XP installed they just have to pop in the XP Recovery disk and reboot the system and install Windows XP. Lenovo said they will be selling XP beyond 2009, more than likely up till 2014 when Microsoft stops supporting XP. These are just latest ways of getting XP on retail machines.

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer has left the door open a crack for windows XP, But Steve Ballmer said “XP will hit an end-of-life” “we have announced one. If customer feedback varies, we can always wake up smarter, but right now, we have a plan for end-of-life for new XP shipments”

But users still want to keep Windows XP on the market and InfoWorld is starting a petition to save Windows XP. You can visit this Partition and sign it: D Below

http://weblog.infoworld.com/save-xp

I should get shirts made that say “Save Windows XP, Sign the petition at InfoWorld!” And give the URL.

So spread the word and maybe we could save XP for a little longer!

So everyone has been saying that Microsoft is planned to dismiss Windows XP on June 30th, 2008 but that is not the case for Windows XP Home (only this edition) because Microsoft thought that they can’t run Windows Vista on the one-laptop-per-child but could run windows XP Home and also for ULCPCs “Ultra low-cost PCs” as well as mobile PCs which as Microsoft describes it as not having enough “Horsepower” to run Windows Vista.

Microsoft has extended the deadline for Windows XP Home Edition to June 30th, 2010 or one year after the next version of windows which is “Windows 7″ (which will be released sometime in 2010). Microsoft also sees ULCPS appealing to first time PC buyers or users that want to have more computers in their network.

So Microsoft is looking to ship Windows XP Home pre-installed on devices that have limited resources.

But if your wondering when Service Pack 3 will be out and herd rumors that is coming out sometime in mid- to late-April, is not true. Microsoft said SP3 is not officially due until the end of June

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