Weird, it feels like they are missing out on such a large market not supporting XP when all their competitors still do. Seems like for the purposes of better integrating a few features they have decided to ignore the many improvements they could provide to someone on XP currently using IE8.
It just becomes another reason for people to make the switch, and I doubt they will win them back when they finally do decide to upgrade to windows7.
XP is dead and I'm not sure how Microsoft can make that any more clear than completely avoiding releasing products on it any more. Upgrade or lose out on the newer features available in later OS releases.
OK, software never really dies. You can keep running it forever, if you insist.
But Microsoft has made it pretty clear that they do not thing you should be running XP. You're getting critical security updates only until 2014. And it's rather tricky to purchase a new copy of XP (you pay a premium and it typically involved buying a new OS first)
Yes.. they support it until 2014. My 'dead' comment was really that from a feature set point of view. I'm supporting, but I'm not adding any new features. As a software company aren't you wanting your customers to upgrade to the latest and greatest?
They may want people to but it is happening very slowly. One big problem is that XP has all the features most users need and a big price tag on windows 7 doesn't help. Every windows before XP ended up having large game breaking issues which meant the customer base would switch quiet fast to the new one when it came out. Sure windows 7 is a nice addition on top of XP but in terms of day to day usage most people would easily be able to get by on XP.
Microsoft makes most of its money on Windows and Office. So, if they can use this as a reason to get people to upgrade in a way that also makes them more money, they'll do it.
If you can't (or don't want to) upgrade past XP, but want modern browser capabilities, just use Firefox, Safari, or Chrome.
I think they make some money from their ads too... that is why I think it is funny that they just allow firefox (default search = google) and chrome (default search = google) to continue to make gains in this market. One would think that they would want ie (default search = microsoft) to be available to as many people as possible to get them to their search to get them to their ads.
