We’ve mentioned the “SAVE XP” Petition that InfoWorld has put together before and at last count in mid-April, over 164,000 people had signed it. The purpose of the petition is to ask Microsoft to extend the date that XP will be available. InfoWorld has just updated the petition count and at this point, over 200,000 people have signed it. The exact count as of May 15th is 200,805 signatures and that’s the number after they took out those who signed multiple times, as well as the fake sign-ups. Clearly people want XP to stay around a little longer but is it enough?
In the big scheme of things, 200,000 people really isn’t THAT many people when you take into consideration the millions of people still using XP. It is a large enough number though that it should eventually get Microsoft’s attention and may make them stop and reconsider how long they should keep XP around. At this point they aren’t willing to meet with InfoWorld to receive the petition, but they do know that it exists. In their most recent update, InfoWorld says, “through its PR firm, Microsoft has declined to meet with InfoWorld to receive the petition and discuss the concerns of its customers who have signed it.“
One of the first thoughts that came to mind when we first heard about this whole petition several months ago was “are we going to be seeing a SAVE VISTA petition several years from now?” So many people are resistant to change because they get comfortable with what they are using and don’t want to have to get used to using something else. People were resisting XP back when it first came out. Technology changes and advances and upgrading to a new operating system allows us to take advantage of it.
So what will come of this? There are a couple of things that could happen. First of all, we’ve seen Microsoft extend the deadline for ULCPC’s (ultra low-cost personal computers) until June 30, 2010. Maybe they’ll decide to extend the date for anybody who wants to run XP and allow Vista and XP to co-exist? Or maybe they will just stick to their original plan?
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Tags: Windows, Microsoft, Windows Vista, Windows XP
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And there are 100 000 000 windows users? So that’s 0,2% of the users :). Actually there are almost billion Windowses in the world but of course not so many users…
Of course in the big scheme of things 200,000 users are not that many, but you have to also consider that casual users are unlikely to sign the petition. So the people who have signed likely make up IT departments and are power users who don’t want to switch quite yet.
I for one, signed the petition. The reason is that I would have to upgrade my system with more RAM and a video card in order to run Vista. Furthermore, many of my applications will also not run with Vista.
I feel very comfortable with Windows XP and would like to keep on using it without spending more money. I think that makes sense. Don’t you think so?
I doubt this will change anything. If they want to force us to an OS that quite a few obviously are completely against, let them. Give them our opinion with our wallets…that’s where it’ll hurt;)
I hope there will be a big blog push near the dateline to help increase the signatures!
Signed as well. Vista doesn’t work on my PC and XP works faster on many cheaper PC’s. Besides that, quite a significant part of the software I use doesn’t work properly on Vista and I haven’t found an equivalent for most yet. Perhaps that would be my biggest reason for signing it.
No need to get forced to buy Vista when XP works fine. I have always gone to the next MS OS as soon as it was released (or even before) because it was so much better, but this time it’s different.
That definitely makes sense to me. I have never recommended that anyone go out and purchase Vista for their machine. Heck, I don’t even recommend that people upgrade an existing machine because of possible hardware incompatibility issues. But when someone is in the market for a new computer I never tell them to go out of their way to get a machine with Vista.
I actually never had any problems with Vista when I was running it, and software compatibility is actually pretty good. I imagine there are probably some special apps you might use that aren’t officially compatible, but all the ones I used were updated within a few months after the Vista launch.
Yeah, a lot of them will work. But you will have many compatibility problems should you move over to Vista 64-bit (more than 4GB of memory would be nice on such an OS, esp. looking toward the future where software will require more and more memory). If you stay with 32-bit, there are still programs not working. One example: Dialog Box Assistant. It does not work properly on Vista and still hasn’t been updated. I can hardly live without it, and having paid for it just before Vista came out, I wouldn’t like to waste that investment either.
I’m sure it will all work out and the amount of problems regarding hardware and software compatibility will drop over time, so for me, perhaps in 2-4 years I can make the move to Vista 64-bit, or the next version of Windows (or I’ll switch to a Mac..). 5 years ago I never would have thought I’d say this, as I like to be on the edge regarding software
That’s actually a good point. I wonder how many people will end up making the jump from XP directly to 64-bit Vista? There are definitely some performance incentives in doing that.