It’s no secret that Apple have slowly been increasing their market share just lately, and through the medium of netbooks, Linux has been in the forefront of the collective public conscience too. Combine those two facts, add in the general opinion that Vista has gone and gotten itself a bit of a bad rap for whatever reason, and it’s not really surprising that Microsoft would be extending their OEM support for Windows XP from January 2009 to the end of July.

That means that system sellers (also known as “OEMs”) can provide it as a “downgrade” with Vista machines until that date. Working for such a company I get to witness the downgrade option on a regular basis, in fact, pretty much every day. In fact, I don’t think a single office-bound system passes through the company without the end user requesting that it be de-Vista’d, but that’s just anecdotal evidence.

Of course, the extension also means that people can realistically cling on to Microsoft’s 2001 operating system until Windows 7 is released towards the end of next year.

Even as a massive Linux / OS X fanboy I can’t deny that XP really is a fantastic OS, and I’m glad that Microsoft are foregoing all those extra Vista dollars by giving the customers what they actually want. I guess they wouldn’t want to risk losing any more marketshare to the alternatives, after all…

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