Two big things happened at Microsoft last fortnight. Bill Gates retired from the company after 33 years as co-founder, guiding spirit and undisputed boss. Then, following seven years as its flagship product, the venerable Windows XP—arguably the most successful, and certainly the most widely used, operating system in computerdom—was pensioned off as well.
Since June 30, original equipment makers (OEMs) like Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo have ceased selling PCs loaded with Windows XP. And software retailers no longer have boxed copies of Windows XP on their shelves. For all intents and purposes, XP has now gone the way of the dodo bird.
And not before time, say many at Microsoft. But that’s not the view of the vast majority of users. A ‘Save XP’ petition organised by InfoWorld magazine was signed by more than 2,10,000 concerned readers.
More embarrassing still, Intel—the chipmaker representing the other half of the ‘Wintel’ universe—announced it would continue to use Windows XP on the tens of thousands of PCs it has scattered around its offices, rather than upgrade them to Vista, the latest version of Windows.
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