If you give that market a chance to save money by sticking with xp, they're going to do it. It's just a little bit more cash that lines the board or ceo pockets.

Microsoft is in a position of power here to usher out old technology and force in the new, by ceasing support for an 8 year old OS. (As well as potentially removing alot of the bad view of security surrounding their company.) But instead they let the Elderly CEO's and Boardmembers (Of whom are probably trying to buy a second vacation home) of this world dictate the direction of Microsoft's software technology.

WTF microsoft

microsoft is so stupid, segmenting windows 7 was just moronic. they should make one product, one price. and be done with it.

"and if a service pack is developed,"

I hope their will be one. It would probably make Windows 7 even more rock solid stable.

Funny, this all also effects individuals, ones like me. Even if corporations get to save money, it is not purely going to line the pockets of just the higher up people. A business not failing is one that continues to emply people. A business that spends less on IT is one that can spend more in salaries and benifits. While the larger proportion per captia of increased spending will go towards higher ups, it is always like that. The reason they are higher up is because they have skills that make them more valuable and less replaceable. People who have skills that everyone have compete against everybody, and thus they are not in a position to make strong demands for compensation where as a company executive has skills that few people have, and if he is better than the rest, that just amplifies his bargaining postion.

You are such a pathetic human for thinking that people who get paid well are evil. You do not look at what they give in return for that pay.

I disagree. 3 product tiers would be reasonable: Home edition, Enterprise Edition, and Ultimate Edition. That way they could keep all the games and multimedia/HTPC stuff in the home edition, put all the business level security and remote access (plus remote management) in the Enterprise edition, and put all that stuff in the Ultimate edition.

However, I feel anything more than this is excessive and designed to increase the price of the top-tier products.

I bet its just for same people who were crying that vista takes too much resources to run, these same people will complain that windows 7 takes too much resources to run. Just because people are running it on their computers that they bought in w@lmart like 5 years ago, and they cant run anything but xp smootly. Thats the simple explanation why you still can downgrade to xp.

Stoner... the percentage of people who are independently wealthy due to hard work and out-skilling the competition is vastly smaller than the percentage of those who were simply born into a privileged position.

Often, it takes money to make money. And the rich are more aware of where the loop holes lie, and how to work the system.

They don't work harder.

That said, I also disagree with Curnel_D's assumption that savings in IT software license costs won't positively effect us working grunts. To illustrate, every time I've seen a company I've worked for get audited, and need to come up with say, 60k in license cost... someone gets the axe lower on the tier. Perhaps a contract worker, or someone who hasn't been perm that long.

Windows 7 isn't anything revolutionary either, to the point that sticking with XP is holding back technology. Its just an OS. One slightly superior in many ways, but lacking compelling reasons for an enterprise to care. My little end users will send Outlook emails just fine in XP if an upgrade doesn't occur.

I'm going for a -10 here.

Anyone that stays with XP as a primary OS over 7 is an idiot. There is no software currently only for XP that would not work just fine in virtualization.

I agree. But I will vote you down to help you reach your goal

HAHA!

I have thwarted your plan by both agreeing with and +1ing you!

Or if you were smart and just took the lumps and did the convert a few years ago like I did with my company then you wont have anything at all to worry about now.

The truth of the matter is, eventually your going to have to make the switch. Wether its now or 5 years from now. The problem is the further down the road you get the more difficult the transition will be.

Thank you captain assumption! Lol, I cant believe how worked up you get over the little things I say.

My intention wasn't to paint a red picture over the corporate world (Corporate types usually do that on their own without my help) but to throw out an example as to why exactly this was a bad decision for Microsoft.

Their “skills” are debatable, and the amount of work they do comparatively against their average grunt is a funny topic, but Corporate tops have a business sense that will always be keen.
For the CEO's/Board members/Company Presidents, Upgrading an already working software backbone makes little sense, unless there's a market push forcing a new/better technology. This is exactly what Microsoft failed to do, and in doing so, ensured that they'll be forced to continue supporting XP for the foreseeable future.

...if your Intel CPU supports virtualization...

Thats confidence with a capital C.
M$ is saying there is a good chance XP will be better than 7.
XP was released 2001. Assuming windows 8 is released 2011 (2 years time), and it IS better than XP... it will have taken M$ 10 years to confidently best XP.

Luv ur work guys.

Fanboyism is one thing but to really believe that the newer OS has more to offer then the old is just plain moronic.

For most of my clients i see no reason at all to upgrade specially since times are hard enough and the money could be well spend on other important things.
Only a select few of my clients needed a set of new systems bigger then 20% of their base inventory thus making a downgrade to xp a viable option so they (or i depending on the contract) only have to manage one OS.
The reason they dont need to buy new hardware every 3 to 5 years is because i did do a good job and sold them not only what they need but also additional resources in terms of ram and processing power while saving them a lot of more later on.
Also i did a god job at making windows xp run the way they wanted it to including the group policies so that if they hook a system up they run only one script and its ready for production.

I dont push XP vista or windows 7 neither do i push BSD or linux distributions i give an option and in the current market they tend to chose for the cheapest and most stable/reliable option (meaning XP has proven itself).
Dont get me wrong i bet i could sell them whatever i want to sell them but in order to survive i need to do whatever the client wants and be honest if a client want another typewriter with email capabilities any system with any OS these days will do and it will boil down to what they know and what they can handle.

About the above mentioned 5 y/o system bought at a supermarket running XP:
If it gets the work done why buy a new system ?, keep in mind that most of us dont have enough money to waste is on a new system every few months or years in example my dad runs on a powermac G3 my brother on a P3 Tualatin and my friends on anything ranging from a P3 to a C2Q each one of them gets out of their system what they want to get out of it and no single one of them would ever argue that their system is enough for any one to do anything just as none of them would argue that the neighbours would HAVE to upgrade because there system is outdated.

Hey Curnel_D, I mostly agree that CEO and board members often are failing to represent company interest in order to fatten their on pockets, but this time this move from MS is for all System Administrators that actually make the IT departments run. See the XP downgrade program works like this. You buy new PC with Windows 7 license from you OEM of choice. When the PC arrives in my workshop the disk gets re-imaged with my corporate XP image. So the company pays for Win 7 and uses XP. So MS is the winner here because they sell XP for the price of Win 7. My win is because I have time to get other software to move from XP to Win 7 and with today's tight budgets is not easy task. At least when time for upgrade comes I will have Win 7 licenses already accumulated and I don't have to spend 5 days writing justification for the license expense.

Good one, Hemelskonijn.

Thats the thing that these Vista fanboys don't get.(Or MS employees)

Vista doesn't DO ANYTHING that can't be done in XP for most, if not all of peoples needs. There are some nice features here and there, and performance problems here and there and under that too.

Write a letter, Print, email, look at websites, run quickbooks, scan documents... okay, why convert several, dozens or hundreds of PCs to an OS that doesn't add abilities. Vista is still mostly a skin job.

With that said... Windows7 is shaping up to be something that is a bit better and is supposed to handle quad-core (and up) CPUs better. That would be a plus. The OS making use of GPUs to help in performance, calculations, etc... okay, good.

PCIe 3.0, SATA 3, USB 3 will work with XP as it will with Win7. Some have said "USB won't work in XP"... As I posted else where, Even the 1987 Amiga 2000 (7mhz / 1mb) computer can have a USB 2.0 card added or even a C= 128 can use an IDE HD.

Win7 seems to improve performance over XP & Vista, that would be something worth getting. Back when I was still using Win98, what made me finally go to XP was that AMD64 is not optimized for Win98 and was sloower. Of course stability and multitasking is also better on XP.

A NEW OS has to have new usable features (Speedboost isn't one of them). I remember using AmigaOS 3.0 (hacked) on my Amiga1000 (it only officially supported 1.x) as it actually ran FASTER than 1.x or 2.x and used a lot less memory while expanding abilities. An upgrade to a product has to be BETTER, not just have flashy parts and loaded with bloat. An example is Opera 10 is easily faster and better than opera 9.

Windows XP is still a viable, reliable and very functional OS. It's supported for another 5 years. It doesn't matter much that it doesn't support 4GB RAM or more than 2GB per application because it doesn't eat memory.

Are you going to BUY my copy of Window7 or Vista? No? Then its NONE of your concern, is it?

And that phrase goes right back to you... There is no software for Vista that doesn't work on XP, other than Halo2 because MS coded a DX8 Xbox game to demand DX10 and not use DX10 functions or have a DX9 version of the game (like as anyone cares). MS was greedy enough to lose Halo2 sales to try and force people to buy Vista... so much for promoting Games For Windows.

And as someone pointed out... some current intel CPUs won't work and it'll require Windows7 Pro. Not what will be installed on PCs at Best Buy.

You're not paying for the OS, the hardware requirements or whole computers SO BUTT OUT! My C2Q can handle Win7 fine... what are YOU going to do about my son's AMD64-3700? A 4 year old 2.2ghz single core CPU with 1GB RAM? Are YOU going pay for it?!

MS wants to make Win7 more successful, they need to sell Family packs thats not the BS they pulled with Vista with a $20 discount. Apple's family pack of 5 is about $30 more than a single upgrade license.

A person like you or me should be able to GO into Best Buy and buy a Retail version of Win7 Home for $100, tops. Not an upgrade or OEM version.

Its a good business tactic. I'm not a big fan of MS, but it makes good sense when you want to make lots of money. There are 3 main versions of Win7. Home, Pro and Ultimate.

For 90%+ of the home market, the feature set of Win7-Home will be more than enough. Win7-Pro has more business related tools and since its about $100 more and how companies work, they'll pay the extra price for it with a smile. Ultimate is for the geeks who don't have sex or married.

Giving a home user a Win7-Pro feature set will add complexity, more HD space used up, more icons, tools and programs to navigate around.

My only gripe is that MS shouldn't offer ANY "upgrade" version. Just 3 boxes on store shelves, all retail versions that can be used as a Clean install or upgrade on a single PC or a respectable "family-pack" version.

If I was MS and not a greedy monkey man, here is how I would sell Win7.

Basic = OEM only for limited markets and NetPC/Netbooks. Not available for retail.

Home = $80 - with 32/64 bit single user install.
Pro = $150 - Same as above. (I bet the MSRP will be $300)
Ult = $300 - Same as above.
Home 3 Pack = $150 = Single DVD with 3 licenses. A cute animal sticker.

Nothing more is needed. Rather then going to websites and ordering an OEM version of XP or Vista because its cheaper and is a "grey" area.
Vista HP Retail = $225, Upgrade = $125, OEM = $100.
Vista Business Retail = $280, Upgrade = $180, OEM = $140.

All should default to 64bit install (optional 32bit), Basic is 32bit.

But I don't own the worlds biggest software company.

I ran Vista for a year, still have Ultimate sitting right over there on the closet shelf. When I did my last motherboard/CPU upgrade this spring, I went back to XP Professional and I won't be reusing my version of Vista. I am in no hurry to install 7. I don't see any advantage to it, right now anyway. That may change in the future after a couple of service pack releases. But XP does the job perfectly fine for me, (at home and at the office, I might add) with no problems.

I'm ready to dump Windows XP once and for all.

The company I work for, however, has absolutely no desire to make the switch. In fact, I don't think any of the programs we use will run on Windows 7.

I can't even get VPN working properly from my Home PC running Win7 to my work PC running Windows XP Pro.

Sucks, because now I gotta either dual-boot XP when I need to go on VPN or figure out how to get the damn thing to work on WIndows 7 with a outdated VPN server link.

/headache

Wrong, most of them do. Small business owners, the engine of our economy, that make more than you do, make more than you do and their employees do because they work harder. Your ideas are based purely on childish and class envy of those who have more than you do.

But why people have as much as they do is off the subject. On the subject at hand, about why upgrade to Windows 7, I have yet to hear on reason why people are giddy over it. It's like the people who are giddy over Obama, they say they like it, but can't say why or what they like about what significant things it will do with any concrete examples.

Anyone who doesn't understand why a company doesn't just upgrade to Win 7 obviously doesn't have any idea what its like at a huge company with hundreds of thousands of employees and computers and legacy software.

For anyone talking about virtualization and WinXP, how many of you people run virtualization with proprietary peripherals attached to the computer? Try accessing a customized PCI card from within a virtualized OS, it isn't going to happen.

Simple fact is some companies will take years before they could even migrate to Vista, much less Win 7. Windows risks those companies just not upgrading entirely. I work at a major company (worlds largest, hint hint) and I had to downgrade a PC from Windows Server 2008 (vista core) to Windows Server 2003 because the IT department wouldn't support 2008. Ignoring the fact that 2008 would be more secure than 2003 simply because it runs a different kernel and can't even get the same viruses, IT wouldn't budge.

Why is Microsoft still offering downgrades to XP for Windows 7 when Win7 has XP built in? I am personally testing Win7 RC and I can attest that XP Mode works, yes it does have a few bugs, but it is mostly stable enough to replace WinXP for good.

I have to agree with this. XP Mode was designed for enterprise use, and so that as new software comes out enterprises can upgrade.

To those saying that making businesses pay for a new license is dumb are themselves idiots: under that logic, we should never make new trucks or engines, and to hell with this internet stuff, that's just more expense that will mean a company will cut jobs. The fact is that XP is slow, unstable, and full of security holes to this day.

That last one is a big one, it doesn't take more than a month for another story about how big corporations loose money due to hacking and how their CEO's and VP's are targeted by hackers again and again. One study found this past year that hackers have wrangled over something like $100 billion out of corporations and their employees. Win7 and Vista both close many security loopholes that cause this.

And to those complaining that IT departments don't like it: well, tough. I work in IT, and can tell you that switching to Vista was the best decision my company had made in a decade (concerning its platform, that is). We had been running XP SP1, I can't tell you the issues keeping those things on the network and free of infections we had. We were re-imaging two or three machines (at just my location) daily.

If your idea of IT is to run outdated and un-secure software for the rest of creation, switch to Linux at least. You were already coding support for proprietary devices, so don't tell me you couldn't live with this one more time. And then at least you'd have a secure kernel.

@RedRaider89: we've been saying why we like Windows 7 again and again in just these posts. Better kernel, more secure, easier to network. Just like I will tell you why I like Obama: already in his tenure, he has got more done than Bush in his 8 years. We have several key pieces of legislation introduced and aimed to pass, we may finally get equal rights in this country for all people, and at the very least this President doesn't make our country look like a jackass at every turn. Bush seemingly couldn't avoid doing that, what with his hillbilly drawl, his idiotic sensibilities and his ever-so present sense of moral superiority.

I was going to +1 you up to that point. How is Obama contributing to equality?

Wrong. Windows XP will support USB 3.0 with a hack. Same with SATA 3. Drivers are not being natively coded for those devices with XP in mind, as of right now its just Vista and Win7.

Of course, a company can pay their IT team any amount of money to code drivers and software for devices in XP, their choice. As you pointed out with your Amiga, some people even go bonkers and code in support for systems never imagined to run the newer hardware and software.

But that is the point of my arguments. If you are going to spend an eon coding your own support, might as well be running a Linux kernel and Open Office. Then you have NO licensing to pay for. Many corporate CEO's though read how Vista sucked somewhere and became convinced to keep running XP, no matter that they then fill their infrastructure with security issues. Plus, newer hardware doesn't natively run XP: I can't tell you how many people have brought me new laptops and desktops where they tried loading an XP edition only to find that the computer doesn't have SATA drivers for XP, and now they've bricked the unit and it needs a complete OS reload. Hence, companies have been coding their own drivers for newer hardware, unless they are buying laptops specifically designed for XP downgrade compatibility. For larger companies this is no problem, and they have an XP image on file. But I get no small number of small businesses that are resorting to cannibalizing older computers and for parts to fix their own old systems, so as not to have to worry about driver support. I've had a client bring me two units, one he paid $300 for just to get the motherboard from it because he couldn't find the same thing anywhere else and he needed it to fix his business PC. When I asked why he didn't just buy a new computer, it was because some specialized software he had would only run on XP, and as far as he could find, only on his machine with this inparticular motherboard. He'd tried others and never got full functionality: system crashes were commonplace. I asked him why he spent so much on such touchy software, but he had no clue that Accounting Software like he had purchased for Windows 98 and then had recoded for Windows XP was even available at retail.

A tour around my sales floor and an introduction to MS Office 2007 later, and he finally made the plunge for new hardware and software. It wasn't light, it cost him a little over $8500 (so I remember) for his whole business to go Windows Vista with Office 2007 small business. A week later his IT department (three guys) came in and yelled at me, saying that they couldn't go to XP and that I had misled this man. He was there, and after a good thirty minutes of back and forth, we finally discovered that his IT guys, although possessing degrees in computer science, weren't that up to date on software and hardware, and had been running Windows XP SP1 because they simply didn't want to troubleshoot any potential network issues that would arise from upgrading to SP2. SP3 was out of the question. He nearly fired them on the spot, but began shopping for a new IT department that same day.

He brought in one of his working XP SP1 machines and had us get some data from it. We did a virus scan as well in a portable executable enviroment, and lo-and-behold, Kaspersky alone found over 300 traces. Panda (we still used it back then) found over a thousand traces. Final straw was when we identified several key loggers.

This was all while he was running a corporate edition of Norton. There are some things that just can't be fixed, some security loopholes that won't be closed without adding your service packs. I don't know what happened to the guy, but I hope no one had gotten ahold of his businesses information.

He has been working for gay rights, recently federal employees have been granted more of their partners benefits. His main problem is repealing DOMA, which has been something he has been talking about since taking office. But, he doesn't just have to contend with Republicans here, there are Dems who don't want to offend some of their recently converted, more conservative voters in districts with a low gay population. Its been written about on Politico, Time and even in the Washington Post (a somewhat conservative news rag) that Obama aides and officials keep popping up around the hill, talking behind closed doors about the issue of repealing DOMA.

I don't like it, but repealling DOMA is going to probably come with lots of compromises and trade offs.

Unless he's pushing for federal laws, doesn't matter. Letting the states choose just allows them to show their prejudice.



What does that have to do with equality?



All you're talking about is rights based on sexual orientation. While I think repealing DOMA is great, there are still plenty of social issues that he isn't dealing with, not to mention those compromises are going to be the biggest issue.

My globalink software does not works in virtualization.
Also my Epson Stylus Color 600 does not works in Win7, and most 32bit XP shared network printers do NOT work on win7 64bit