Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, has announced that the Redmond software giant may be extending the life of its Windows XP operating system. This comes only a day after the company did a very fast corporate about face on whether or not they were going to release XP Service Pack 3 ahead of changes in Vista, their inferior-to-XP flagship operating system product. To my mind, this is the equivalent to an admission that Vista is a failure.

Windows, of course, is the desktop upon which almost all of the corporate business software on the planet runs. It is therefore of much importance in the world of business, which is not a place where repeated and very public bad decisions, policy reversals, and obvious confusion are likely to be rewarded. Ballmer tried to put a good face on it by saying that more people buy Vista (which Microsoft is more or less forcing down their throats) but maybe the user desire for XP will make the company change its mind.

Microsoft has repeatedly announced that XP will be pulled from the shelves on June 30 of this year. Savvy users, as opposed to those buyers that simply take whatever comes installed on a system, quickly recognized the problems with Vista (and those problems are legion) and have been clamoring for XP to remain alive. Lately, they have even begun organizing and pressuring Microsoft not to withdraw XP from the lineup.

Microsoft is also getting pressure from their primary market, the corporate IT decision-makers, who have avoided Vista to whatever degree they possibly could almost since its inception. As a result, Vista has not been exactly flying off the shelf. The only market in which it is doing well is with new PCs sold to non-corporate users. That is mainly because Microsoft has pressured PC manufacturers and retailers to only sell Vista

In many ways, this is a repeat of the strong-arm, monopolistic tactics that got them into Federal court, and which they have largely lobbied (read “bought”) their way out of in the years since. They have not had as much luck in Europe with these tactics. Basically, what Microsoft seems to be saying to users is, “We know Vista is a piece of crap, but you have to buy it because we tell you to!”

Steve, we’re tired of those tactics, and we’re not going to take it any more.