Bad News For Home Users...

Windows XP Home is another story. As a consumer product, it suffers from two policy deficiencies. First, consumer products do not qualify for Extended Support, but instead move directly into the online support phase after Mainstream Support ends. Second, whereas business products are guaranteed Mainstream Support for two years beyond the release of the next subsequent version of a product (in this case, Windows Vista), consumer products do not get this built-in transitional period. The end result is that Windows XP Home will leave Mainstream Support and enter online support on January 1, 2007�in less than a year. When that day comes, XP Home users may feel left out in the cold, because they will no longer qualify for security updates, and will not be able to purchase support from Microsoft. Finding this situation somewhat alarming, I contacted Microsoft's representation to clarify the matter. A Microsoft spokesman relayed the following to me. Originally Posted by Microsoft spokesman "For consumer products, security updates will be available through the end of the mainstream phase. For Windows XP Home Edition, there will be no security updates after 12/31/06." Regarding paid support for problems unrelated to security patches, I was told that "Users who want to continue to receive support after the Microsoft assisted and paid support offerings have ended may visit the Retired Product Support Options Web site." I urge Microsoft to reconsider this stance. There should be considerably more overlap in support for their consumer OS. While five years of support for XP Home may have seemed reasonable when it was expected that there would be little more than three years between major OS updates, the time it has taken to bake Windows Vista has thrown this out entirely. If Vista launches in October, it would give users a mere two months to move to the OS, or risk being unsupported. Yikes makes me glad that I only use for my family and me XP Pro (and actually I don't really like Microsoft due to the fact that they have a monopoly and are quite greedy so the vast majority of my computing tasks are done on a mac running MacOS X 10.4.6) which should receive a much longer period of support due to it being used for businesses (however it still has great gaming support)