Windows XP SP3 – And So It Ends

It's the end of an era for Microsoft. Not the end of Windows XP, but the end of the XP era.

In the context in which after June 30, 2009, Microsoft will no longer permit its retail partners and original equipment manufacturers to sell the predecessor of Windows Vista, the company has not steered clear of addressing concerns about the future of XP. This, although at this point in time XP and the future seem like two concepts that fail to play well together.

Microsoft stuck firmly to the June 30, 2008 Direct OEM and Retail License Availability end date and failed to repeat the change of heart at the end of 2007 which resulted in the addition of five more months to XP's phase out process. The Redmond giant initially planned to cut off retail and OEM sales of XP at the end of January 2008, but it succumbed under the pressure coming from consumers and PC manufacturers. As a direct result, Microsoft will now stop selling Windows XP in a little over a week, on June 30.

"We love that you love Windows XP," Microsoft stated on its official "The Facts About the Future of Windows XP" website. "But our commitment to innovation sometimes means making tough choices. This is one of them." The software giant's example of innovation is of course the only Windows client left to fill in the gap of XP, namely Windows Vista. And in this regard, Microsoft seems to be struggling to convince everyone of the innovation factor and the value of Vista, especially to business customers.

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Extended support throughout April 2014
But the fact of the matter is that, outside of the end of the XP era, the actual operating system will survive well past the release of Windows 7. Just as today there are still remnants of Windows 2000, Windows NT and Windows 98, so will Windows XP continue to linger well into the next decade. The reason for this is simple, a massive ecosystem of users and an environment of software and hardware solutions are orbiting around XP. So massive in fact that the very evolution of Windows is impacted. An illustrative example in this regard is the fact that Windows 7 will ship in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions at the end of 2009.

But XP is not dead. Not even by a long shot. Not at over 70% of the operating system market. And this is not about Service Pack 3, this is about the good old anti-Vista, XP SP2. Microsoft will continue to offer support for XP SP2 until July 13, 2010, which is two years from now. And XP SP3 will go even further than that.

source: news.softpedia.com