Last week was Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft and today happens to be XP’s last day.
XP, which was launched on October 25, 2001 is officially off the shelf and the only way to buy XP is to buy Vista (and downgrade to XP!)
Desktop Market Share
By far, XP enjoyed the biggest chunk of the desktop market pie with 72% market share, Vista close to 15% , Mac 7.3% and Linux: 0.63%.
As far as vista is concerned, it has sold around 140 million copies worldwide (only 2 million in India) – while the adoption has been mainly triggered by enterprises, consumers are still sticking onto XP (Vista’s hardware requirements are good enough to poke a deep hole in your pocket).
Biggest challenge with Vista is not just the new (and expensive) hardware, but also the expected change in usage behavior. Users are averse to change their usage behavior and if they have to do it, they might as well try out something completely new (say Mac?)
Honestly, MS’s “downgrade to XP’ option in Vista speaks of their confidence in the OS.
Will you stick with XP, or buy Vista or simply take the Mac route?
I think Mac is not programmers friendly like the windows though most web dev are using it.
But for hardcore programmers Standardization of compilers, uderlying platform etc differs from MAC as with win.
For web dev MAC is perfect fit.
MAC is also good for Etertainment.
WinXp and Win98se is far the best OS ever shipped by M$
Uhh… I’ll take the Linux route please and I’m sure there are people who’d prefer a Solaris or BSD variant any day to a MAC or a Win.