CompuWorld

Vista has hit the shelves since January 30, 2007, but XP is not going down without a fight. Even in the context of the general availability of Windows Vista, Windows XP is making the mother of all comebacks driven by customer demand. Just a few days short of three months following the release of Vista, Dell has announced that it will bring back XP on home systems. Dell has made it clear that customer input is the catalyst for the XP revival on some of the consumer machines the manufacturer is shipping.

Microsoft officially continues to ship Windows XP to OEMs and via retail until February 2008, and to System Builders until February 2009, but companies such as Dell have jumped at the chance of pre-installing Windows Vista on their computers. In this context, Windows XP was left to fade in the background and to follow an artificially induced expiration process.

Still, the customers were not ready to lose the XP option and managed to convince Dell to bring it back. “Starting now, consumers can now purchase Windows XP or XP Pro on Dimension E520 and E521 desktops, and on Inspiron 1501, E1405, E1505, and E1705 notebooks,” Lionel Menchaca, Dell Digital Media Manager stated yesterday April 19, 2007.

According to data made available by Market Share by Net Applications Windows Vista has been slowly eroding XP's share on the operating system market. XP is down to 83.57% in March 2007 from 85.02 in January. In the same period of time Windows Vista got a hold of over 2% of the market in just two months.

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