InfoWorld,
our affiliate in the U.S., has collected more than 200,000 names on its
petition asking Microsoft Corp. to continue supporting Windows XP
The publication posted this report.
Since InfoWorld launched its petition atSaveXP.com
four months ago, more than 200,000 people have added their voices to
the demand that Microsoft keep Windows XP for sale after June 20.
As of May 15, the count was 200,805 signatures, excluding duplicates and fake signups.
And if you look to your right side of this page, you can sign ComputerWorld Canada’s petition.
“We’re pleased and a little bit amazed that so many people from
throughout the world have felt so passionately about the need to keep
XP on the market,” said Executive Editor Galen Gruman. “We had heard
grumblings throughout much of 2007 about dissatisfaction with Vista’s
high hardware requirements, questionable interface changes, slow
performance, and incompatibilities with third-party software, but no
one seemed to want to say so in public. That’s changed since the
petition’s launch on Jan. 14.”
The campaign has caused a media frenzy, with stories in most major
newspapers and news Web sites, as well as in blogs and radio programs.
Recently, for example, Business Week noted in a recent story on
increasing enterprise adoption of the Macintosh that Windows Vista was
perhaps one of the biggest stumbles in tech history. A separate report
noted that large companies such as General Motors and Alaska Airlines
are skipping Vista and instead waiting for the next version of Windows,
code-named Windows 7.
And a major tech analyst firm has warned that Microsoft’s many mishaps
with Vista are putting the Windows franchise in jeopardy.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer seemed to suggest that
the company might give XP a reprieve — something it had done six months
ago when it extended XP’s end-of-sales date from Dec. 31, 2007 to June
30, 2008, due to customer resistance to Vista, But his PR firm,
Waggener Edstrom, quickly issued denials that any change was imminent,
suggesting that the voices seeking to keep XP were a small minority.
Through its PR firm, Microsoft has declined to meet wit InfoWorld to
receive the petition and discuss the concerns of its customers who have
signed it. Microsoft has repeatedly stated that it is satisfied with
its sales of 140 million copies of Vista, which analysts and press
reports repeatedly note include copies of Vista preinstalled on
consumer PCs (for which XP has not been an option since spring 2007 at
most retailers) or copies shipped to enterprises who exercise their
rights to “downgrade” their systems to XP. There is no data on the
willing adoption of Vista.
Microsoft has extended XP’s life for sub-US$400 PCs and for PCs
meant for poor countries — neither type of PC can run the more
resource-intensive Vista. But Dell has gone a step further, announcing
it would install XP on select new systems after June 30 using the
“downgrade” license option from Microsoft in which a customer pays for
Vista Business or Vista Ultimate but gets XP installed instead.