Hasta La Vista, Baby

Following close on the heels of their delay announcement last week, Microsoft finally dropped all pretenses and cancelled the next version of Windows entirely in a press release early this morning.

Vista was plagued throughout its many-monikered existence by delays, feature withdrawals and a heavy amount of FUD[1]. Windows Vista slips…out of sight (The Register) has a full history of the troubled software:

“Harking back to the days of the XP beta “Whistler”, which was regarded as a code cleanup and facelift for Windows 2000, Microsoft planned the all-singing, all-dancing upgrade “Blackcomb” to be released in 2003 or 2004, with what we called a coffer-filling release to emerge in late 2002 or early 2003.”

Since that time, it had hemorrhaged features like a trauma patient, losing a database-based file system as well as .NET integration in the shell and many other improvements. Though at the last glance we got (see Windows Vista 5342 Screenshots), it still had the Aero glass shell, it was clear it was doomed. With upwards of 40% of all installations still using Windows 98 or 2000, the adoption rate of the four-year–old XP has been less than stellar—especially considering almost every machine on the planet is required to ship with it pre-installed. Microsoft now claims that “people, …including most business customers, … don’t want change”, a significant turnaround from their prior stance. On top of that, Vista’s spiraling hardware requirements wouldn’t have helped sales in a market already saturated with users who have more computer than they know what to do with.

Steve Ballmer, president of Microsoft, was reflective during a question and answer session after the press conference:

“Who did we think we were kidding anyway? Did anybody still really believe we were going to ship that damned thing? It’s not like there was anything left in it anyway. … XP’s pretty good … buy that.”

A press release was issued immediatly following the press conference detailing Microsoft’s new retroactive monthly licensing plan for all users of Windows XP and 2000, costing $14.99 per month for personal users and $24.99 for businesses.