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Calling it an “additional phase of support”, it simply matches what already is the policy for XP Professional – ‘Mainstream support’ until April, 2009, and extended support for a total of five years.

Microsoft’s release is very brief indeed, for the only additional information is that “The Microsoft Support Lifecycle policy standardizes Microsoft(R) product support policies for business and developer products as well as for consumer, hardware, multimedia and Microsoft Dynamics(TM) products”.

That means security updates and patches should continue arriving from Microsoft for at least the next three years, with Microsoft effectively acknowledging XP will be around for a while yet, despite Vista, and that ceasing support earlier for what will still be an enormously popular operating system, XP Pro, Home and Media Center, would be a bad idea.

For despite the ‘the wow starts now’ of the Vista campaign, or ‘the ow starts now’ as we have playfully dubbed it due to the cost of the operating system itself, the cost of new or upgraded hardware and the cost of not having 100% of drivers and software programs guaranteed to work or be available for Vista all offer elements of ‘ow’ that we’d all like to avoid if possible.

As such, not everyone will be rushing out to Vista-fy their lives immediately. Thankfully, Microsoft knows this, even if they wished it weren’t to be (with even Windows 98 still in use out there, despite the lack of support and updates), and have made this sensible, if not obvious, decision.
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Alex Zaharov-Reutt  Software  Support and maintenance  Vista  Windows