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June 30, 2008 will be marked as the end of a great era at Microsoft as the Windows XP based PCs won’t be available in the market anymore. Large PC makers, at least on desktops and mainstream notebooks, will no longer be able to sell Windows XP based PCs.

Microsoft doesn’t seem to change their deadline (which is exactly a couple of weeks away from now), despite heavy criticism from many over Windows Vista and a “Save XP” movement.

Although XP won’t be available with the computers, it will however be available for sometime in a few different ways like:

• It will be available from “System Builders” (small computer makers) till January 31st, 2009.
• It will be available for very low cost PCs till 30th June, 2010.
• Windows XP Starter Edition will be available in the market till 30th June, 2010.
• Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows Vista Business are available with downgrade rights which means that they are providing an option to machines which appear as Windows XP products but are factory downgraded to XP. It is available for Vista paid versions only (Is that a demerit?) but it has an option of converting to Vista without spending a single penny (then it may be fine but still some people may not like it). These XP disks which are downgrade right enabled, are available till 30th January, 2009.
• Microsoft’s mainstream support for Windows XP will be available until 2009 but the extended support will be valid till April, 2014.

If you want to get a copy of XP, you should get it soon as there are very few days left until it will obsolete. Now lets have a look at what some key players have to say about this.

Hewlett-Packard:

All of HP’s latest consumer and business computing products currently ship with Windows Vista. But we do still offer XP on a select number of our existing consumer notebook, gaming, and business products. This will continue through the XP end-of-life date on June 30, 2008.

HP has been offering business desktops, notebooks, and workstations with the option to downgrade to Windows XP Pro from Vista since August 2007, and will continue to offer this option on its business systems through at least July 30, 2009. These systems are pre-installed with XP Pro, and the customer receives the Vista license so that they can upgrade to the new OS when they are ready, as well as restore discs for both operating systems. After June 30, if a customer already has the XP image and license, HP also can also install that customer’s image on their Vista Business systems through our HP PC Customization Services.

Lenovo:

In line with our agreement with Microsoft, Lenovo will not offer any PC’s preloaded with XP after June 30, 2008. Lenovo offers select Vista models that ship with a downgrade XP CD in the box. Microsoft will allow us to continue putting these downgrade CDs in the box until January 31, 2009. However, the majority of PCs we ship don’t have the downgrade CD in the box. If a customer purchases a Vista system and wishes to downgrade and doesn’t have the CD, they can contact our Help Center to get an XP downgrade CD.

Acer:

Acer will offer CD downgrades to XP–based on customers order requests–until the Microsoft deadline, January 31, 2009.

Dell:

Dell systems with XP as the only OS will no longer be available after June 18 on Dell.com

I don’t know why Dell is so desperate to leave XP so early (they like Vista so much?). Anyway a downgrade program will be offered for a number of machines like all OptiPlex desktops, all Latitude laptops, all Precision workstations and most of its Vostro systems for mid-size businesses. Gaming systems like XPS 630 and XPS M1730 are already eligible for this program with the third one, XPS 730, also coming soon.

The downgraded machines will be shipped with installed XP along with an XP restore disc, drivers and a copy of Vista and its drivers. The shipping will continue until January 31st, 2009.

I think they should have kept some room for XP fans. You cannot impose your decisions on your consumers like this but this may be their marketing strategy. How? Well they’ve announced that XP will be history in a few months time but after finishing it off, they might start reproducing it, maybe on a small scale, just to show how much demand there is for their product. Maybe Vista won’t do that much business for them as previous versions did. What Microsoft should understand is that there are a lot of people who are not happy with Vista and there are a lot of people still comfortable with Windows XP. If people like XP, they’re going to use it no matter what but that takes you to another direction i.e. PIRACY, which is certainly going to make difference in their revenue. You cannot completely remove it but you can minimize it for sure. I say make XP available, be it at a small level but don’t let your customers find any illegal way to use it.