Assuming this is real, it is a crying shame for Redmond. (Though not as quite as shameful as the rollback to XP options being offered by many PC vendors.) Like countless others, I was counting the days til February 15th-the originally-leaked date for the first service pack release for the beleaguered OS. Now it looks like it will be at least another month, as the latest from Redmond has it at mid-March. Luckily, my Vista laptop is mostly for leisure. But if SP1 doesn’t resolve most of the current performance issues, I will surely take advantage of the rollback policy. (And even then, I may not wait.)
It BETTER be da bomb, or signs like these (left) will be sprouting up worldwide. (Or the defection to Mac or fast-sprouting Linux variants will be massive. Of course, most businesses do not have this luxury-a fact Microsoft is fully aware of.) As XP discs are becoming increasingly rare, disgruntled home customers will have little to no choice but to obtain pirated/cracked copies of XP and bide their time til the release of Windows 7 in 2009. Windows XP discs: the new digital gold.