Published at LXer:

Michael Silver, an analyst at Gartner Inc., echoed Cherry's take on what motivated Microsoft to offer XPM. "It shows the extent to [which] Microsoft wants to get people who use XP onto Windows 7," he said.

But Silver sees some big downsides. "You'll have to support two versions of Windows," he said. "Each needs to be secured, antivirused, firewalled and patched. Businesses don't want to support two instances of Windows on each machine. If a company has 10,000 PCs, that's 20,000 instances of Windows."

The other big problem Silver foresees with XPM is that it may cause some companies to neglect the real task: making sure the software they run is compatible with Windows 7. "This is a great Band-Aid, but companies need to heal their applications," Silver said. "They'll be doing themselves a disservice if, because of XPM, they're not making sure that all their apps support Windows 7."

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Ya gotta love Microsoft, don'cha?

This is probably a smart business move, but geez what a ridiculous situation!

Does this mean that Windows XP won't be EOLed for eternity??

To be honest, Microsoft needs to take a page from the Apple playbook and simply develop a new OS that doesn't have backward compatibility. Apple has done this several times, the latest being OS X, when the cost of maintaining backward compatibility was simply getting in the way.

They tried that with Vista. My understanding was that it was a complete re-write from the ground up.

Good point. Let me try to rephrase my previous statement:

To be honest, Microsoft needs to take a page from the Apple playbook and simply develop a new OS that doesn't have backward compatibility and actually does something useful. Apple has done this several times, the latest being OS X, when the cost of maintaining backward compatibility was simply getting in the way.

Impossible, all window$ versions (including Vi$ta) will fit on a single compressed DVD, this means they all have plenty in common.

And you know this how??

Yarr harr...

Well, no, I don't actually have that DVD ... someone told me about it