Microsoft May Reconsider Its Plan To Stop Selling Windows XP

Apr.24, 2008 in Market Outlook

Last Update: 4/24/2008 9:17:59 AM

LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE, Belgium (AP)–Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) 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 $44 billion
offer for Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) was “a very good price.”

He refused to say if the company plans to appeal a fine of EUR899 million that
the European Union levied in February.

Microsoft has until the first week of May to launch a legal challenge against the
E.U. 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 startups in the country, creating some 200 jobs
over the next three years.

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