Karim Vaes

When reading thru osnews.com I came across the following article:

WinInfo Short Takes: Week of April 9
“And What About Windows XP Service Pack 3?
And while I’m ranting a bit, let’s dredge up Windows XP Service Pack 3, which was delayed from 2005 to 2006 to 2007 and now to 2008. If you were looking for any glimpse into the mind of Microsoft, this is it: The company has completely abandoned Windows XP, and it has absolutely no plans to ever ship an XP SP3. My guess is that Microsoft will do what it did with the final Windows 2000 Service Pack: Claim years later that it’s no longer needed and just ship a final security patch roll-up. This is the worst kiss-off to any Microsoft product I’ve ever seen, and you’d think the company would show a little more respect to its best-selling OS of all time. But the reality is, Microsoft is looking ahead to new revenue and not behind to money that’s already in the bank. And though hundreds of millions of people will be running XP for years to come, despite Microsoft’s best efforts at selling them a later Windows version, the company has absolutely no plans to actually support those customers. This flies in the face of its publicly-stated life cycle support plans. And it really freaks me out. It should freak you out as well.”

To be honest, I don’t think the guy will be off too much on the matter. Yet it’d still be a dreadful thing to do from Microsoft. But in a world where shareholders need to be satisfied, the guys who already payed (and won’t pay no more, namely home-users) aren’t the ones you need to satisfy.
But what they seem to forget, is that what people use at home, is what they like to use at work too… That’s something we’ve seen discussed in the Linux world often enough (cfr RedHat & Fedora versus Ubuntu discussions).