Windows XP: so good, it’s embarrassing

See if this makes sense to you. On 3 April, Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc (why do US tech execs always sound like porn stars?) boasts that:

[...] the growth of Windows on netbook PCs over the last year has been phenomenal [...] from under 10% of unit sales during the first half of 2008 to 96% as of February 2009 [...] Not only are people overwhelmingly buying Windows, but those that try Linux are often returning it.

Just to be clear here, when Brandon says Windows, he means consumer Windows XP. That’s overwhelmingly the version of Windows that netbooks use. So consumer Windows XP is Microsoft’s brilliantly successful weapon against the rise of Linux, its cheap, non-proprietary rival.

On 14 April, Microsoft puts Windows XP into an ‘end of life’ phase, with customer support no longer included.

Unh?

Maybe we should be grateful they haven’t killed XP altogether, as was threatened, oh, years ago. That was back in the days when Microsoft confidently hoped to convert everyone to Vista. Several hundred million quid of advertising later, that’s still not happening, so we’re allowed to keep XP while we wait for Windows 7. But as of next week, buyers who choose a Windows netbook precisely because they’re too numpty to cope with Linux (I’m paraphrasing Brandon now) won’t be able to ring up Microsoft with any questions. If this is joined-up thinking, I’m a pot-smoking caterpillar.

Fortunately, the problem will go away (that’s the corporate motto of Microsoft’s strategy department) when Windows 7 appears around the end of the year, because ‘our plan is to enable these small notebook PCs to run any edition of Windows 7.’ Unh, squared? New operating systems always need more processing power. The whole point of netbooks is that they’re incredibly cheap because they don’t have loads of processing power. That’s why they’re mostly running XP, not Vista. Brandon’s answer:

Early Internet-centric [netbooks] typically offered a 7 inch screen, very small keyboard, slow legacy processors, 512MB of RAM or less, and 1-4GB SSD storage, whereas typical configurations today have 9 and 10 inch screens, near full-size keyboards, 1GB RAM and up to 160GB storage.

Read that twice. Yes, the old netbooks had ’slow legacy processors’, but the new ones have… Wait, he didn’t say anything about the processors! Fortunately, the problem will go away™ when netbook manufacturers suddenly discover a pile of really fast, really cheap, really low-power CPUs sitting at the end of a rainbow, and realise they no longer have to bother with Linux because even a £200 laptop can run the very latest operating system without in any way resembling HAL singing ‘Daisy, Daisy’.

Sadly, I doubt Brandon is the only one at Microsoft who’s been nibbling the wrong side of the mushroom.

Tagged as: Computing, Microsoft, Open source