You gotta love it. Microsoft has decided that it will ho ahead and kill off easy access to XP on June 30th. On behalf of desktop Linux users everywhere, and our first cousins, the Mac fans, thanks. You’ve given us the best shot we’ll ever have of taking the desktop.
But it gets even better! Microsoft has also announced that it will be releasing Windows 7 on January 2010. They’ll blow that ship date. Microsoft has never set a shipping date it could meet. But, who in their right mind would now buy Vista?
I mean, come on, I don’t think anyone with their wits about them would buy Vista anyway. Vista is to operating systems what the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers are to the National Football League, the worse of all time. Vista was trash; Vista is trash; and now Microsoft, as expected, is throwing Vista on the trash dump.
It also helps that Microsoft has decided to go ahead and dump XP, the operating system its customers want, no matter how loudly they say they want to keep buying XP. Now that’s showing your customers how much you really care about what they want.
Desktop Linux is poised to make the most of this opportunity to convince Windows users that there is a better way. For starters, desktop Linux doesn’t lock you into a single vendor. This is also where desktop Linux beats Apple all hollow. Whereas Microsoft has just shown you that they don’t care what you want, with desktop Linux you will always ne able to use the version of the operating system you want to use. Absolutely love Red Hat 9, the last consumer version of Red Hat Linux from 2003? You can still download a fresh copy of it from Red Hat. I’m not sure why you would, but you can, and I know some people who are still using it on servers to this day.