Originally posted by: rchiu
Heh, it's not because Vista Code reset that caused MS to extend XP's support, if MS stopped XP support after 5 years (released Oct. 2001, it would be Oct. 2006), there won't be any new OS for user to move to since Vista was released Jan. 2007.
See again, it's not how long the OS has been supported, its how long the new OS has come to the market. People were still getting XP PC before Jan. 2007, that's barely 1 1/2 year ago. That's hardly a very long time ago, and those system are hardly "ancient". For people like us, we would never call MS for support, all we need is security updates and hot-fixes. But for average users, and most importantly business, where cover your own ass with somebody else to support you, support is important and it sucks to know that something you only bought less then 1 1/2 year ago is gonna be out of "mainstream" support. Which to many non-tech. people can be a scary thing.
Now if Vista has been on the market for 3+ years, it wouldn't be as bad since most people would have vista by then since PC buying cycle is around 3~4 years, and for those who still have the old OS, they'd understand because they know their system is pretty old.
I doubt the average user even knows or cares about MS support. Ive never known anyone to ever call MS for an issue (they call me
And despite the fact that Win2k is in "extended support", it still receives regular critical security updates through windows update.
If someone called me with a problem on their 13, or even 7 year old PC, unless it was a simple fix, the obvious answer is "buy a new PC". Computers don't last forever, and a 7-year old PC that was once top of the line is probably worth less than $50 7 years later.
With all due respect, this has become a bit of an exercise in stupidity, nothing more than a semantic argument over the word "mainstream" and "support", ignoring what those terms actually mean to MS, and then playing around with numbers to try to make a reasonable situation sound like a conspiracy. Everything you claim to want from MS is what they're actually doing, so whats the problem?