Update: Microsoft responds to "Save XP" petition
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Microsoft officials are aware of InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition effort, which is asking the company to keep Windows XP for sale indefinitely rather than drop the popular OS from most sales outlets on June 30 as planned.A spokesperson noted that Microsoft had already delayed XP's demise by six months from its original Dec. 31, 2007, end-of-sales date, as software vendors, customers, and others complained that the deadline was too soon, coming less than a year after Windows Vista's release. "That's what informed our decision to extend the availability of XP initially and what will continue to guide us," another spokesperson told Computerworld Australia.The first spokesperson told InfoWorld that Microsoft's rationale for the June 30 end-of-sales date has not changed since the delay it announced in September, though Microsoft officials continued to monitor customer feedback and had taken note of the petition effort, which has gathered more than 85,000 signatures as of the evening of Friday, Feb. 8. "We're aware of it but are listening first and foremost to feedback we hear from partners and customers about what makes sense based on their needs," the second spokesperson told Computerworld Australia.The first spokesperson expressed some surprise at the resistance some users have expressed to adopting Vista, recalling that many users were upset that Vista's original release had been delayed. She also noted that Microsoft has several options for people to install XP on new systems after June 30 and that the company planned on supporting XP for some time after it is no longer available for sale.
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InfoWorld?s petition asking Microsoft not to discontinue Windows XP after June 30 has garnered more than 65,000 signatures since Jan. 14. And with those signatures have come thousands of reader comments that reveal why many IT organizations are up in arms about the June 30 deadline to retire XP.                                                    Three reasons dominate the resistance to Vista: performance, compatibility, and cost. All of them can be overcome with investments in hardware, software, training, and support. The question is whether the upgrade will help businesses increase sales, perform better, or serve customers more effectively -- especially when other IT initiatives with more ROI potential, from greening the datacenter to more effective partner integration, may fall back in the queue as a result. A recent Gartner study confirms that such direct business benefit is now driving IT budgets, not new technology for its own sake.[ SignInfoWorld?s Save XP petition to ask Microsoft to keep XP available after June 30. ]Lots of pain, little gainJohn Alber, CTO at Bryan Cave, a large, tech-savvy law firm in Los Angeles, was willing to go on the record when he expressed misgivings about moving to Vista over the same trio of issues. Many other IT professionals were not, due to fears about damaging their company?s relationship with Microsoft. Off the record, one technology vendor told InfoWorld that it has indefinitely postponed its conversion to Windows Vista after several months of testing because the demonstrable benefit was elusive. Similarly, the IT staff at a large California school district has no plans to convert to Vista; its technology director said that Vista takes twice the hardware resources.In some cases, the changes that Vista brings reduce productivity or increase costs just to maintain existing capabilities. That?s why John Hawkins, CEO of Adviser Media, ended up removing Vista from a new laptop and then from his company, which maintains several how-to sites aimed at baby boomers. ?Whatever I tried to do, the new computer fought me -- and usually, it won. By ?do,? I mean basic stuff: save a file, connect to my office network and the Internet, turn on, turn off, copy some files. It's my computer -- shouldn't I be allowed to do these things? Nope, not without lots of effort, wasted time, and sometimes, complete failure,? he wrote in his blog.Basic incompatibilities also drive him to go back to XP, Hawkins told InfoWorld: ?My ?favorite? is that Vista doesn't work with many Wi-Fi access points (the main reason our users demanded a return to XP) -- and Microsoft's fix is to tell users to replace them!? Scott Pam shared this frustration: ?There are lots of incompatibilities on drivers,? noted the independent IT consultant in Palm Desert, Calif.Even some of those who like Vista on their home computers have been unable to use it for work. ?I love Vista on my home machine. But it would be completely impossible to use at work. I still need to support applications running on Pocket PC 2002 and Windows CE 4.2 platforms, and for that I need the development environment I wrote them with -- Microsoft eMbedded Visual C++. This is not supported, and doesn't work, on Windows Vista. Even where the customer has upgraded some devices, a move to Visual Studio 2005 native device development entails a change of libraries, which can have complicated breaking changes. Oh, and they broke serial ActiveSync as well,? noted a U.K. developer who declined to be identified.And of course, those much-publicized performance issues loom large. ?It uses mega hard disk space and has a lot more running programs in the background than XP,? noted a support technician at a broadband provider, who asked for anonymity.User frustration equals IT frustration Support staff and IT consultants also feel the pain, mainly from the confusion that Microsoft?s new UI and security controls cause their users.IT consultant Scott Pam is frustrated with the burden that Vista has placed on him. ?Customers are panicking,? he says, since they can?t find their data or common controls in the new UI and assume the data has been lost or their Vista PC is broken. ?So I go back for free [to explain how to use Vista], costing hundreds of dollars of my time.? He asks why Microsoft could not have offered its new security approach and other features without breaking the familiar Windows XP UI. ?Apple added new capabilities in all the versions since Mac OS X 10.2 but kept the interface, drivers, and applications mostly compatible. Microsoft changed everything.?The broadband company?s support technician faces the same user frustration. ?A lot of us cringe when we get a call regarding Vista. It is hard to understand, hard to find what we need, and hard to explain it to customers,? she said.The new UAC (user access control) security approach bedevils both IT consultant Pam and his clients. Not only do users not know how to respond to endless ?are you sure? messages about possible security threats, Vista?s lockdown of users? own files areas keeps clients from being able to work. He cites a user who dutifully copied all his data to a USB drive before converting to Vista, only to discover that Vista would not let him copy the data back because the USB drive wasn?t accessed through administrator privileges. ?That?s ridiculous -- it?s his drive,? Pam said. The idea of having to log in as an administrator just doesn?t occur to users, he noted.Jason Sage, a developer and software engineer who didn?t want his company named, is also frustrated by overzealous security in Vista, which he believes works against the standard set by Microsoft .Net and Visual Studio. True, in Vista, Microsoft has documented what developers need to do to give applications permission to access their own configuration files. But Sage thinks the basic approach is wrong. ?What we have now is applications running as the user. This is too much responsibility for many users who have no idea what all the software on their machine is doing while running as them.?Other developers are frustrated by the change in security and other core OS services. Noted one developer working at a small company: ?My company has had several developers forced to use Vista while servicing our clients. The result has been an absolute nightmare. Applications don't work, drivers collide, the screen loses integrity at random times, we encounter file data loss or corruption, our network-based automated backups don't work, etc.?Roadblocks on rollback to XP  Given the many frustrations he?s encountered, Pam advises his clients not to install Vista or to replace Vista with XP on new computers. And he seethes that he?ll have to get each of the five different Vista versions, and either five PCs to run them on or a Mac or Unix box with enough virtual machine capability to run them all, just so he can duplicate customers? environments.?Several of my customers have gone back to the store where they purchased their new computer and have asked that they replace Vista with XP,? he says.But users may not always have that choice, several InfoWorld readers noted. ?There are not always XP drivers available for a clean install of XP,? commented one reader, whose newer Toshiba?s NVidia video card had only Vista drivers. Another reader had a similar issue with a new Acer laptop: ?The hardware and firmware in my laptop's chipsets simply do not support XP.?Agents of change Not everyone is holding back on the shift to Vista, of course. Several InfoWorld readers expressed satisfaction. For example, an independent developer in the U.K., who did not want to be seen as a ?fan boy? and thus declined to be identified, told InfoWorld he prefers Vista to XP and views the UI changes and incompatibilities as minor issues. ?Vista is what Microsoft wanted XP to look like; when they couldn?t achieve Vista?s look they settled for the horrible design it has. Yes, Vista uses more resources than XP, but it runs absolutely everything 20 percent faster for me than XP ever did. Yes, drivers are a problem at the moment for older hardware that is capable of running Vista, but then the same was true for XP,? he said. ?Program compatibility has caused one or two problems recently, but nowhere near as many with XP when I first got it.?Other readers suggested that those who wanted to stick with XP were doing so because they simply didn?t want to invest in new hardware. All OS conversions cost time and money and change is just part of the technology landscape.For IT, the cost of such change -- directly and indirectly -- is the key issue in deciding when, or even if, to shift from XP. Microsoft has told the Wall Street Journal that resistance to adoption is ?business as usual? in a new OS?s first year, but eventually there?ll be no need for a petition effort like InfoWorld?s to keep an older OS available.The question is what ?eventually? means and what Windows 7, now rumored to be arriving next year, may offer instead. Meanwhile, if massive response from InfoWorld readers is any indication, few businesses are putting an upgrade from XP to Vista at the top of their to-do lists.
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Â Microsoft Corp. is giving users more time to prepare for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) by doubling the time a special registry key will prevent PCs from automatically downloading and installing the mammoth update.
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I can't urge you strongly enough to read the article entitled How Vista Lets Microsoft Lock Users In. It details how Microsoft has built into Vista the "trusted computing" ability to lock down Office files via DRM such that no unauthorized document reader will be able to decrypt and read them. This is perhaps one of the biggest hidden weapons Microsoft has in its arsenal that could sabotage Linux and OpenOffice.org if Microsoft succeeds in its attempt to plug SUSE and all Novell's "interoperability" bonuses.   Think of this, if you will, as the Tivoization of Office files, only with malicious intent.  Microsoft could, indeed, open up the document format completely and swear before God that it will never sue anyone for patent infringement.  However, this does not prevent Microsoft from locking Office files in such a way that only Vista users can read them.  No one else will be able to do so without the proper authorization, thus rendering the open format and Microsoft compatibility entirely meaningless.
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Windows XP is turning five years old, but will anybody want to celebrate the occasion?
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More than 75,000 people have signed InfoWorld?s ?Save XP? petition in the three weeks since it was launched ? many with passionate, often emotional pleas to not be forced to make a change. On June 30, Microsoft plans to stop making new licenses to Windows XP available through most outlets, though business users and some consumers will be able to ?downgrade? to XP after that date under certain circumstances. InfoWorld expects to present the petition to Microsoft when it has collected 100,000 signatures.[ Follow all the coverage of and reader reaction to the ?Save XP? campaign. ]Although InfoWorld?s campaign has given a voice to users who prefer to keep the familiar XP, concerns over Vista had been bubbling since its release a year ago. That has been evident not only anecdotally in comments that InfoWorld editors have heard from IT staff and users alike, but also in the slow adoption of Vista in the marketplace.While millions of people have gotten Vista with a new PC, most did not have a choice of what OS was loaded on it, since retailers stopped selling new XP computers in spring 2007 and online sellers (with the recent exception of Dell) made XP available only to business customers.Where people have had a choice, Vista has not been it. Microsoft has reported that it sold 100 million Vista licenses in 2007, which means that roughly four out of 10 new machines shipped with Vista on them. By comparison, nearly 70 percent of PCs shipped with XP in its first year. According to NetApplications, about 11 percent of installed machines use Vista, compared to 75 percent running XP.IT consultant Dimension Data Americas has yet to have any of its midsize business customers convert to Vista, said Jeff Dimock, its vice president of Microsoft solutions ? though he noted that several are working on plans to do so. ?The mid-market has not been upgrading to Vista,? said Karen Hayward, executive vice president at IT outsourcing firm CenterBeam, which provisions OS and other apps to midsize businesses.Compatibility issues and lack of perceived value are the major reasons that businesses and users have avoided Vista. Research firm Gartner advises its clients not to switch to Vista until early 2009, after the first service pack has been released, third-party compatibility is improved, and more Vista-ready hardware is in the hardware purchase cycle, says Michael Silver, a research vice president at Gartner.
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You&#39;ve been patient. You&#39;ve done what Microsoft asked you to do. You&#39;re ready to download Service Pack 2 for Windows XP.
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Microsoft has doubled the period of time it will allow business users of Windows XP to delay installing Service Pack 2. Customers who wished to avoid having systems updated while they were testing the upgrade
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The days of piece-meal patching and shipped updates are over as Microsoft Singapore urged users to take advantage of the Automatic Updates feature in Windows XP to upgrade to Service Pack 2 (SP2).
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thejoelpatrol writes &quot;So did Slashdotters call this one? Windows XP SP2 seems not to be so secure after all. A Register reporter goes in depth to find out just how safe a fresh install is.
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When it arrives, the much-delayed Windows update will have double XP's rate of adoption, Redmond says. Not everyone's so sure.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft claims updates sent out to Windows XP and Vista machines without users knowing about them were for the Windows Update mechanism, though the company acknowledged it could have been more "transparent" before changing files on user computers. The company's response came after users expressed concern over updates to XP and Vista machines that were pushed out even when they had turned off the automatic updating feature of Windows Update. The updates were noted as "secret updates" in published reports and on user forums, and Windows users expressed concern that Microsoft would update their computer files without their knowledge or consent Microsoft regularly pushes out updates to Windows machines but will only update the machine without user action if automatic updating is enabled. If it is not, a user must activate Windows Update to upload an update to the machine. In an e-mail through its public relations firm Thursday, Microsoft said that the Windows Update service automatically updates itself "from time to time to ensure that it is running the most current technology." "This is normal behavior, and it has worked this way since the service debuted several years ago," the company said. However, Microsoft acknowledged that it could have better informed users about how Windows Update behaves so as not to spur the confusion that ensued with updates that were sent out last month. "We could have been clearer on how Windows Update behaves when it updates itself," the company said in its statement. "We've received helpful and important feedback on this point, and we are now looking at the best way to clarify [Windows Update's] behavior to customers so that they can more clearly understand how [it] works." Despite the recent faux pas, Microsoft still is encouraging users not to turn off the automatic feature of Windows Update, claiming it's the best way to ensure they get critical updates from the vendor, including those that are security-related.
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A week after releasing Windows XP Service Pack 2 to enterprises, Microsoft is trying to quell confusion over an apparent security flaw and applications that won&#39;t work without adjustments.
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InfoWorld - A Microsoft spokesperson today acknowledged InfoWorld's petition effort asking the company to keep Windows XP for sale indefinitely rather than drop the popular OS from most sales outlets on June 30 as planned.
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InfoWorld - Within 36 hours of the full launch of InfoWorld's petition drive asking Microsoft not to discontinue Windows XP as planned on June 30, 12,621 people had signed the online petition. And dozens of the site's readers added their own comments to the InfoWorld Save Windows XP blog. Many external sites have promoted the campaign as well. InfoWorld will deliver the petitions to Microsoft later this spring.
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The change does not apply to existing Windows XP installations upgraded to SP3. Those copies, which have presumably passed the activation stage previously, will not request the key again, Microsoft said.
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Microsoft Corp. is offering an olive branch to users of pirated versions of the Windows XP operating system. The software giant on Wednesday unveiled the Windows XP Counterfeit Project in the UK, offering