[dropcaps style=’2′]The year is 2001; Sydney is realizing the Olympics wasn’t all the profitable, Apple releases the first iteration of the iPod, Enron famously collapses as did the former Soviet space station Mir on it’s way back into Earth’s orbit and in the Microsoft campus a blue welcome screen lit up and Windows XP made it’s public debut.[/dropcaps]
It’s been one long and mostly glorious (especially after Service Pack 1) life for this game changing OS. However, after 13 years of life the world will witness its official end as of April 8 of this year… less than 90 days from the posting of this piece.
It’s quite amazing for an operating system to last this long. Sure it was succeeded by Vista, 7, 8/8.1 but official support for this still widely used OS will total 13 years.
When Windows 95 was released it was replaced 3 years later and was only supported for another 3 years. Then the world greeted Windows 98 before it was replenished 2 years later (or 1 since Windows 2000 got a lot of attention from general users despite it being a work/professional OS) and was supported for a further 6 years. Then came the “better Millenium edition” that was Windows 2000 which was released during the hype of Y2K and replaced a year later but supported for a further 10 years.
There was also Windows ME… yeah that just sucked… Our own Ryden had it on his computer for a total of 9 minutes before he used the CD as a makeshift Frisbee, never to be used in the Oosty household again.
[image src=’http://fnx.network/fnxnetwork/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/171671284_b67071ce07_o.png’ width=’320′ height=’213′ title=’Well then… (Source: Everdred, Flickr)’ align=’right’] In the years after XP the world met Windows Vista… It is the opinion of this author that this was reason number 1 of the longevity that was Windows XP.
There is no doubt that Windows Vista pre-SP1 was horrible. It felt bloated, struggled and just lacked the snappy response to everything… It had that unfinished feeling that Apple users would have felt during Mac OS X’s debut 10.0.0. Did it look better? Sure. Would you use it? Nah.
There was a rush of demands to downgrade, vendors started offering downgrade licenses for customers who bought a new laptop but refused to have UAC pop up on their new screens.
Vista’s failure was Windows XP’s success in terms of establishing a legacy. Until August of 2012, Windows XP was the most widely used Operating System before being outranked by Windows 7 (a drastic improvement over Windows Vista).
[image src=’http://fnx.network/fnxnetwork/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/353864936_b4075408a8_n.jpg’ width=’320′ height=’213′ title=’As old as Windows XP (Source: Jose Gelado, Flickr)’ align=’left’]Think about that for just a moment… do you reckon the developers would of thought in 2001 that their OS would still be in use a decade later? This was a time when MSN Messenger began as a text only chat client; when you would download your music via Napster or KaZaA; when the freaking Nintendo GameCube was released… when did you last dust that off?
And despite us being 13 years after release, it still holds home in 30% of the world’s PC’s.
30 out of every 100 computers is going to be running Windows XP… again, we are less than 90 days from obsoletion.
Now I know you guys love charts so let’s put this down into perspective:
[skills]
[skills_item title=’Windows 7′ level=’47%’ color=’#004E98′]
[skills_item title=’Windows XP’ level=’29%’ color=’#004E98′]
[skills_item title=’Windows 8′ level=’10%’ color=’#004E98′]
[skills_item title=’Mac OS X’ level=’8%’ color=’#C4AEAD’]
[skills_item title=’Other’ level=’4%’ color=’#9370DB’]
[skills_item title=’Linux’ level=’2%’ color=’#D2691E’]
[/skills]
 
Those last two are “Other” and “Linux”.
That is a huge market, but also a huge alarm. An End-of-Life stage comes the total easement of further security patches or updates. In simple terms… have you seen what happened to Detroit after the money left town and no one bothered to patch those holes in the roof? That. That is the future of Windows XP after April.
[image src=’http://fnx.network/fnxnetwork/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Download-Windows-XP-s-Pinball-Game-for-Windows-7-and-Windows-8.jpg’ width=’320′ height=’213′ title=’Goodbye Weekend (Source: Microsoft)’ align=’right’] Sad, but that is the way of progress. Windows XP wasn’t my favorite flavor of Microsofts offerings (I still find Windows 2000 to be solid) but it does hold nostalgic memories… who can think of Windows XP without thinking of those late night chats on MSN, the music pumping through WinAmp or Real Player, winning that game of Solitaire and watching the fireworks of cards.
Spending holidays where you could load up The Sims for a few days and forget to eat the whole time. Writing up assignments on Word 2003 and checking your emails on Outlook Express all the while wanting to smash the living life out of that paperclip assistant.
Fuck you Clippy, my name is in fact spelt correctly.
Windows XP is indeed an end of an era, not just the “Classic” windows we grew with before the new world of Aero and Metro found their place… or at least still trying to settle in, but when Windows was less clean and clinical and just a charming yet acceptably eccentric medium where many of us created great things, a tool indeed to assist our lives and living up to its name in providing an eXPerience.