Virtue may be its own reward when you go to church. But, like it or not, virtue generally takes a backseat to profit in the corporate world. But isn't it nice when the two come together? Case in point: Windows XP, an operating system whose time has not yet passed. At least, we hope not. InfoWorld, of course, has been leading the charge to save XP, and I'm not going to repeat all the reasons that's a good idea. Virtue may be its own reward when you go to church. But, like it or not, virtue generally takes a backseat to profit in the corporate world. But isn’t it nice when the two come together?Case in point: Windows XP, an operating system whose time has not yet passed. At least, we hope not. InfoWorld, of course, has been leading the charge to save XP, and I’m not going to repeat all the reasons that’s a good idea.[ If saving XP is revenue-neutral for Microsoft, keeping XP could mean actual big savings for users, argues Galen Gruman. ] But to be honest, as a Microsoft stockholder and Wall Street watcher, I might well be inclined to tell InfoWorld to stuff it if I really thought there was a compelling business reason to toss XP overboard. After all, Windows is the engine that drives a huge chunk of Microsoft’s revenue and profits; damage it and shareholders suffer. But a legitimate business case for dropping XP doesn’t exist. No loss in revenues if XP stays on the market “Saving XP would be revenue-neutral,” says Trip Chowdhry, managing director of Global Equities Research and a longtime software analyst. Why? Despite a lot of deservedly bad publicity and a slowing economy, Microsoft has sold about 10 million copies of Vista a month. Even factoring out the copies preinstalled on consumer PCs (where XP has not been an option for a year), there’s real Vista demand out there that will continue to enrich Microsoft, whether XP is supported or not. “In any case, the remaining customers will upgrade on their own time,” says Chowdhry.Suppose Chowdhry is wrong, and a continued availability of XP Pro, the rough equivalent of Vista Home Premium, did cut into Vista sales. In case you’ve forgotten, Microsoft is a monopoly, according to courts in the United States and Europe. And that means it has pricing power. It wouldn’t be hard to tweak prices and licensing terms a bit to maintain a more profitable revenue mix, says Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. That could entail a price increase on the XP side, or a price cut on the Vista side to drive demand. In either case, it’s a wash. Microsoft’s telling lack of blame on XP for low Windows sales Interestingly, there was some chatter on Wall Street and in the blogosphere that the results of Microsoft’s last quarter, which were good, but not great, were hurt by some slowing in sales of Vista. That was certainly a good opportunity for the company to talk about why it should kill XP, but it didn’t.Indeed, CFO Chris Liddell points the finger for slowing client revenue at piracy, and said the OS brouhaha not only wasn’t an issue in the quarter, but adds, “If we sell a unit of XP rather than Vista, we’re still relatively happy.”I suppose you could say the company is spinning the results to cover its embarrassment over hostility to Vista. Call me naive, but I don’t believe that Liddell, who has an excellent reputation on Wall Street, is dissembling. Microsoft already has a way to get Vista revenues from XP sales And then there is the strategy Microsoft has taken to allow some users to get XP after the sales cutoff on June 30. Microsoft’s position on exceptions to the end of business sales of XP is certainly complicated, perhaps deliberately so. (For a good explanation of the technicalities, see my colleague Galen Gruman’s article.)It may seem burdensome (OK, it is burdensome), but the so-called downgrade option, which entails purchasing a Vista license to buy XP, clearly protects the company from revenue loss on the enterprise and small-business sides of the business. It’s also worth noting that enterprise upgrades tend to be driven by hardware replacement cycles, not operating system changes, says Rosoff. Would supporting XP and Vista increase Microsoft’s costs? Then there’s the question of supporting two code bases, and it’s a complicated one. On the one hand, says Rosoff, Microsoft isn’t about to pull an Apple and build a version of Office, its other cash cow, that doesn’t run on XP. Therefore, it’s going to tend the code in any case.On the other hand, says Mike Cherry, also of Directions on Microsoft, “The company is already under the gun to get Windows 7 out, which is hard enough without having to worry about Windows XP.” He figures that despite its intention to stop issuing significant fixes to XP, the emergence of a major new bug would force the company to divert resources in the operating systems group to solve the problem. (Microsoft says it will support XP until April 2009, and issue security fixes through April 2014. Its Third World and cheap-PC versions of XP will be supported through spring 2014 as well.) What Microsoft has to lose from not keeping XP Cherry has a point, but does it really outweigh the enormous loss of goodwill the company will suffer if it kills XP? And remember, I’m not talking about virtue as its own reward. The computing world has changed enormously this decade, and Microsoft is facing challenges on all sides. Angry customers tend to look for alternatives, and with Google, Mac OS X, Linux, and any number of upstart Web 2.0 technologies vying for attention, it’s not smart to push them away.Moreover, the more hostility Microsoft manages to engender, the more likely it is that regulators here and in Europe will find it politically acceptable to again lower the antitrust boom.There you have it. Microsoft can do both the right thing and the smart thing by saving XP. So don’t be a cheapskate, Steve. Listen to your customers. (Disclosure: I own a small number of shares in Microsoft.)I welcome your comments, tips, and suggestions. Reach me at bill_snyder@infoworld.com. Software DevelopmentSmall and Medium Business