Windows XP might not be killed
2008-04-24 19:04
Neuve, Belgium. - Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer offered a glimmer of hope Thursday to fans of the company's XP operating system, saying the company may reconsider its decision to stop selling XP soon.
However, Ballmer was adamant that "most people who buy PCs today buy them with Vista."
"That's the statistical truth," he told reporters at a news conference at Louvain-La-Neuve University. "If customer feedback varies, we can always wake up smarter."
Fans of the six-year-old operating system set to be pulled off store shelves by June 30 have plastered the internet with blog posts, cartoons and petitions recently. They trumpet its superiority to Windows Vista, Microsoft's latest PC operating system, whose consumer launch in January was greeted with lukewarm reviews.
Ballmer said the customers buying PCs with XP are IT departments who are having trouble shifting old machines to newer technology.
Some 160 000 people already have signed an online Save XP Web petition who want Microsoft to keep selling it until the next version of Windows is released, currently targeted for 2010.
On another issue, Ballmer said he was very confident that Microsoft's $44bn offer for Yahoo was "a very good price."
He refused to say if the company plans to appeal a fine of €899m that the European Union levied in February.
Microsoft has until the first week of May to launch a legal challenge against the EU decision that it hadn't obeyed a 2004 antitrust order to share communications information with rivals.
Ballmer was in Belgium to open a Microsoft innovation center in the southern city of Mons that hopes to boost new start-ups in the country, creating some 200 jobs over the next three years.
- Dow Jones