Steve Balmer stated publicly that he wants people to comment on XP, voicing to Microsoft that they shouldn’t give up just yet on the OS. Now it appears the OEM’s are starting to revolt too for the corporate customer’s sake.

And I’m with them, and other corporate customers! Vista is good - it has lots of bells and whistles, and has lots of nice graphical add-ons, but what really counts in an OS in the corporate environment is something stable, easy to use, “in keeping with windows” and above all easy to support. I don’t think Vista is any of those. Things have never been so different and difficult - Windows XP has been a progression of 2000, which in turn, although based on the NT codebase, was basically in-line with Windows 98’s features, which was built on the back of Windows 95. These were all logical progressions. Vista falls short - Maybe it should have been called Windows 7 Beta?

And it appears that my worries supporting Vista in the workplace are not misplaced. Lenovo are going to continue to supply it’s customers with XP well into 2009 - joining the ranks of Dell & HP in their post-June support. Hopefully support will continue until the release of Windows 7. Please Microsoft don’t mess up the next one!!