10 Years of Windows XP

Julie188 writes "Windows XP – the XP stood for 'Experience' — was released October 25, 2001. With Windows XP, Microsoft hoped to have one codebase that would span everything from consumers to corporate desktops. Microsoft was fairly ambitious with XP. There was an embedded version that went everywhere, from phones to information kiosks. Banks in particular embraced it as a way to migrate off IBM's dead-end-but-once-great OS/2. Consumers have been quicker to ditch XP for Windows 7 while businesses hem and haw and slowly test a decade's-worth of custom apps on Windows 7. Some estimates show that XP still has a hold on 48% of the Windows market."

not happy to ditch for windows 7

[cinnamon colbert]

but that was all they had at the store; I was perfectly happy with XP; my hardware died and I didn't see anything I like with XP on it, so got one with windows 7 IMO, and in the opinion of everyone here at my office, XP was MS's best OS; most of us like it a lot more then windows 7 ymmv

Did it stand for X-Perience or for Chi-Rho?

[dpbsmith]

I thought it was a pun on Cairo, [wikipedia.org] the vaporware, or head-fake, or whatever it was that Microsoft claimed would be so great but never released... and that the claim that it was a reference to user "x-perience" was a later concoction.

Re:not happy to ditch for windows 7

[tsotha]

This time frame also coincided with a big increase in the proportion of web apps businesses deployed for internal use. It's a lot less important to keep your machines up to date if you're basically using them as browser-terminals.

at the current price

[drolli]

of about 15-20 Euro for an XP Professional license, its an excellent price/performane ration when it comes to selecting something for your VM to browse occasionally under IE. Most Software still supperts XP and the Hardware requirements are modest, so that its not a pain in the ass to run it just for printing, scanning, browsing incompatible websites, updating my phone, programming FPGAs or microcontrollers where the SW primarily supports windows.

Re:"XP"

[interval1066]

The Chi Rho was the symbol that Constantine the Great had painted on the shields of his legions before the battle of Milvian Bridge; this act signalled his and the Roman Empire's conversion to Christianity. Who knew thaty 1600 years later it would hail the dominance of the most mediocre operating system the world has ever seen as well.

It was rescued by Linux.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Microsoft had a nice coffin and a burial site carefully planned for XP. When sub 100$ notebooks with Linux appeared in the market and it was clear the designated successor Vista would not run on such puny machine, they hastily cut the noose and brought it down from the gallows and gave it another lease on life. Wonder what would have happened if that 100$ notebook had come after XP death process had moved too far to be rescued.