The Long Kiss Goodnight...

Despite considerable begging and pleading from Microsoft customers, Bill Veghte, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Services and Windows Business Group, issued an open letter to customers, holding steadfast to the June 30th end-of-life for Windows XP. He went on to reiterate that security and other critical updates for the now, 6 year old Operating System, will be developed until April of 2014.

Now, you might be thinking "Holy Crap, what about my legacy application(s) that are not Vista Compatible?!?". Well, Mr. Veghte also reminded us that we will still be able to get XP pre-installed from OEM System Builders (Dell, HP, Acer etc..) until January 31, 2009 by exercising Downgrade Rights; after that, we are effectively cut-off.

My thoughts on this situation are mixed. On one hand, developers have had plenty of time to engineer fixes and/or updates to their applications to ensure compatibility with current platforms. You can't really blame Microsoft; they made information regarding Vista's "features" available to developers and programmers alike, many years before its public release. Keep in mind Windows XP is 6+ years old! On the other hand, re-engineering software is expensive and some of the, how shall I say, "less-affluent" vendors will have a hard time swallowing the costs involved.

Having spent considerable time in the Small Business Market, I have come to see all kinds of "strange" software that, in some cases, may be 8+ years old but, in most cases, the respective companies still use it in some aspect of their business. It is generally "atypical" applications like this that have a hard time running under Vista's new security "features". In most cases, if the vendor just spent a few development hours working out why it doesn't work instead of telling the customer that it simply doesn't, the Vista transition wouldn't be so painful!

What usually happens is that I end up in a situation where a customer buys Vista only to find out their software isn't compatible and I end up spending time with Process Monitor trying to figure out why and it ends up being something simple like permissions to files in the "Program Files" directory; something you would think the vendor should know seeing how Vista has been release to the public for 1 1/2 years now (and in pre-release stages for 4).

Either way you look at it, the change is coming, resistance is futile, you will be assimilated! ;)