No XP Home security updates after 12/31/2006

customer adventures — by TDavid @ 11:00 am PST

Update 12:20pm PST: Watch the Bill Gates CES 2006 keynote streamed live here

Today is the day of Bill Gate’s famed CES keynote and a pivotal day for the big M to set the vision for 2006. If they don’t deliver something big, something new, something that customers can sink their claws into within the first quarter 2006 it’s going to start the year off on a very sombering note. It’s going to remind people of 2005 where there wasn’t enough activity to keep people’s positive interest.

Microsoft really needs to start an initiative to launch at least one new product/service/significant upgrade every week in 2006. Make a huge deal out of this initiative and restore the faith that they can innovate and create new, interesting things instead of slowly play catch up with the rest of the computing world. This week — the first week of a new start, a new opportunity — is half over and what’s happened so far?

Yesterday, STARZ broke with the news of their Vongo service which will work with portable devices running the Microsoft Media-Center powered devices. There was one slightly juicy rumor that Microsoft offered $80 billion for Yahoo but was turned down (Microsoft has $40 billion in cash). The WMF security issues the last week spilled into this one, an MSN China flap yesterday, and today news that Windows XP Home security patches are slated to end on 12/31/2006 and Ken Fisher at ARS Technica urges:

… reconsider this stance. There should be considerably more overlap in support for their consumer OS. While five years of support for XP Home may have seemed reasonable when it was expected that there would be little more than three years between major OS updates, the time it has taken to bake Windows Vista has thrown this out entirely. If Vista launches in October, it would give users a mere two months to move to the OS, or risk being unsupported.

In the past Microsoft extended support for Windows 98 and ME for more than two years, so it’s possible this decision will change. I’m with Ken, the last thing Microsoft customers want is to be is forced to upgrade within a couple months of Vista’s release, assuming Vista is released in October as some are predicting.

Just what the computer-enabled world needs: a bunch of unpatched XP Home systems out there just begging to be violated by malicious users.

Let’s all say a prayer for Gates kicking off something big tonight that is available now, tomorrow, or within the first quarter 2006. If nothing groundbreaking is announced tonight, then I’m guessing on Friday Google will upstage Microsoft yet again.

Is this 2005 or 2006? Soon, we’ll find out.

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