The end of Windows XP and the start of a new Microsoft

After tomorrow, April 8, Microsoft will no longer provide security updates or technical support for Windows XP, the most stubbornly successful OS in Microsoft history.

How ancient is XP, which if you believe the latest NetMarketShare numbers, still runs on more than a quarter of PCs worldwide?

When XP was released, the world was still in shock from 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan had just begun. Steve Jobs had released the first iPod two days before Oct. 25, 2001, the offical XP rollout date. Jennifer Lopez was at the top of the charts and made the unfortunate decision to star in “Gigli.” Gas cost $1.50 a gallon.

XP immediately eclipsed the weirdly unstable Windows ME, wrapping Windows 2000’s rock-solid NT core in a pretty UI and new multimedia features. It felt solid. It looked good. Most people were happy with Windows 98, though, so XP took a while to take hold. But it when it did, it hung on like a raptor.

The Vista faceplant Windows XP was without a successor for five years, the longest gap ever between Windows versions. The Windows Vista disaster that followed is now the stuff of legend. Throughout its ignominious existence, Vista never cracked a 20 percent market share.

From the beginning the signs were not good. Shortly before Vista launched, I sat at a bar with a colleague, laughing over the fact there were supposedly 10 different way to shut down Vista. A woman sitting next to us piped up, “Well, when a company has lost its way, you have to release something.“

We slowly turned to look at her. She said she worked for Microsoft and refused to say much more, other than: “We got complacent, then a deadline was given, and it became a scramble to get something out,” and “Do you know what it looks like to test 500 printers for compatibility?” When I asked if she was willing to be identified — maybe just by first name? — she replied, “Fred.”

The initial complaint about Vista was that promised features — such as WinFS, an ambitious new file system — had been dumped by the wayside. As the successor to XP, Vista seemed to offer little more than a slightly sweeter UI.

Then the user complaints began pouring in. Chief among them was that UAC (User Access Control) drove users crazy by constantly popping up confirmation challenges. Features were moved or buried without rhyme or reason, and some older Windows apps wouldn’t run. Most of all, users complained of poor performance, even on systems that came with Vista pre-installed.

InfoWorld’s Save XP campaign To move customers to Vista, Microsoft originally said it would force PC makers to stop selling machines with XP preinstalled after Jan. 30, 2008 — little more than a year after Vista launched instead of the usual two-year grace period between versions. In September 2007, Microsoft extended that deadline five months to June 30, 2008. Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows product management, said, “There are some customers who need a little more time to make the switch to Windows Vista.”

You might call that an understatement. Sensing a rebellion brewing, in January 2008, InfoWorld executive editor Galen Gruman came up with the idea for our Save XP user advocacy campaign, an online petition to convince Microsoft to give users a choice and continue to keep XP alive. Within three weeks, 75,000 people had signed the petition. Analysts at Gartner and the Burton Group chimed in, suggesting that Microsoft continue to make XP available until 2009.

Ultimately, more than 210,000 people signed the petition, which we delivered to Steve Ballmer. Although the Save XP campaign was unsuccessful in pushing out the deadline, we like to think it played a role in extracting a couple of concessions: Microsoft decided to allow OEMs to continue to sell “low power” laptops and desktops with Windows XP pre-installed until 2010. Plus, hardware vendors were not prevented from offering a “downgrade” option, so systems sold with Vista pre-installed could be rolled back to XP.

Windows 7, which debuted in October 2009, made users forget about the sins of Vista. It was the best Windows ever produced, with 100 million licenses sold in six months, and easily earned an InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award.

Save Windows 7? Just three years later we were stunned to see Microsoft pull another Vista. The warning signs for Windows 8, as with Vista, came early. After diving into a Window 8 beta, InfoWorld’s Peter Bruzzese, normally a staunch Microsoft defender, nailed it with his “Windows Frankenstein” preview in which he slammed the ungodly mashup of the traditional Windows Desktop and Metro UIs. When Windows 8 shipped, InfoWorld’s Woody Leonhard offered his own devastating analysis in “Windows 8 review: Yes, it’s that bad.”

Then, in June 2013, InfoWorld offered a proposal: “Windows Red: A serious plan to fix Windows 8.” Most of the suggested changes were obvious, starting with splitting Windows 8 into mobile and desktop editions, the latter restoring the Start Menu and jettisoning the Metro UI, but adding the ability to run Metro apps on the desktop. Remarkably, under CEO Satya Nadella, the “new Microsoft” actually seems to be moving in the direction of implementing such commonsense changes.

But not in Windows 8.1 Update. Yes, the Start Menu is back, but you can’t really get Metro out of your face. As Leonhard says, Windows 8.1 Update — likely the last substantial revision to Windows 8 — offers little more than an olive branch to mouse users. We’ll just have to wait and see what Microsoft has up its sleeve for Windows 9, due out as early as March 2015.

Meanwhile, Oct. 31, 2014, is officially the day when hardware manufacturers are supposed to stop selling consumer PCs with Windows 7 preinstalled. In keeping with Microsoft tradition, that’s two years after Windows 8 was introduced. But interestingly, no end date has yet been set to stop selling Windows 7 business PCs. It’s a safe bet that Microsoft won’t be as intractable as it was with XP.

Microsoft’s cloud future It’s a different world than it was in 2008. Users have many more choices, and they demand the usability they’ve come to expect from websites and smartphones. More than that, it’s not about the operating system anymore, it’s about the apps.

Microsoft is becoming a cloud company, and as the release of Office for iPad showed, it seems willing to provide the multiplatform support necessary to make the cloud dream a reality. With Azure and Office 365, Microsoft has the ability to deliver its entire portfolio of apps through the cloud, as well as provide a platform for developers to “broadcast” applications everywhere. As Nadella said at last week’s Microsoft Build developer conference, “It’s crazy to abandon what you’ve built, and it’s crazy not to want what you’ve built across the broadest set of devices.”

Who knows? Perhaps there won’t be a Windows 9 — as with Windows 8.1, maybe Microsoft will simply continue to deliver free updates to its customers. Windows is still important to Microsoft today. But as Microsoft officially pulls the plug on XP, April 8, 2014, may be just another milestone on the path to the cloud mattering more and the client operating environment mattering a whole lot less.