XP deadline matters little to business customers

The countdown is nearly over: Monday marks the long-awaited date after which PCs preloaded with Windows XP will no longer be available.

But now that the date is imminent, does anybody care? The segment of Windows users that cares about XP's end of life -- business customers -- isn't affected by this date and can still get its hands on XP for the foreseeable future.

June 30 is the Microsoft-imposed deadline after which PC makers won't be able to sell computers prepackaged with XP and after which Microsoft will no longer sell shrink-wrapped copies of the OS. The exception is low-cost notebooks, which can continue to ship with XP through June 30, 2010.

Microsoft has been talking about phasing out XP essentially since it launched Vista, and the process has been similar to previous Windows client upgrades.

Yet the XP deadline has been making waves, for a couple of reasons. "This date has passed at least four times in the past without any coverage," said Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. He's referring to past upgrades, from Windows 2000 to XP, for example.

"Why is this a story?" he said. "Because whether or not it's true, the perception is that Vista is a bad OS."

Vista had a rocky launch with many users complaining of performance glitches and particular problems when running the OS on computers other than the very fastest, high-end machines.

Still, reluctance to upgrade now, more than a year after Vista launched, varies widely between consumer and enterprise customers.

While XP's deadline affects consumers more so than business users -- enterprises also must buy PCs that come with Vista but they'll be able to downgrade to XP -- many home Windows users are largely just fine with buying Vista machines.

IDC is expecting so few consumers to buy XP machines this year, that it is projecting that as many as 98 percent of consumer PCs sold in 2008 will use Vista.

That's very different than the enterprise customer. While around 70 percent of business buyers will purchase Vista computers in 2008, probably half will downgrade to XP, said Al Gillen, an analyst with IDC. So only around 35 percent of new business PCs sold in 2008 will use Vista, he said.

Consumers, who may hope to buy a PC that will last for several years, are more interested in buying the latest technology, the analysts said.

"When you go out and buy a new machine, I'm not sure you want it with an 8-year-old operating system," Gillen noted. Most consumers will want to "move forward rather than look backward," he said.

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