Or will it be Vista?
Microsoft extends XP life to parry Linux threat
Microsoft plans to cease selling XP via retail in June - obviously in an effort to drive Vista sales. The above article shows a chink in their armor as they realize that Vista is not as marketable as they may have thought...
What I find interesting is that they are retiring a widely accepted and effective platform for a less effective or accepted platform. In a year Vista has barely grabbed any market share while competitors are growing at exponential rates;
Apple 2.0: Mac Market Share Now 6.38%
There was a time when Mac only had 3%, now it is more than double, and growing fast. All platforms dwarf Vista users. Disaffected Windows users are already starting to migrate to other platforms; the termination of XP is quite likely to push over substantially more.
If MS phases out XP, I suspect that not only will more and more retail customers consider Mac or Linux products, but more and more business enterprise users will also. I could see the Vista Share maxing out at 50%... meaning a potential 1000% increase for Apple and Linux use. 1000% is a bigass number...
There will always be people who will buy whatever OS they get at Circuit City, but I also see vendors getting impatient with Vista products stagnating on their shelves and/or losing sales to competitors with other OSs. Soon big boxes may also demand other OS products - to put on their shelves.
Apple would be prudent to start a retail channel with big box retailers now. There just aren't enough Apple stores out there. They have a great 'in' already with AT&T... imagine if you could buy an iPhone and iMac at the same time? Why this hasn't happened yet beats me...
Meawhile Microsoft finds themselves in the unusual position of playing defense... To remain competitive they need to get their partners to fix the driver problems, release patches to allow better backwards compatibility, streamline their confusing multi-platform offers and slash the prices for their Vista product. This is particularly important for their enterprise clients who use XP and are concerned (rightly) that their essential programs will not be compatible with Vista... If those clients are forced to change not only to Vista, but also upgrade all of their software to work on it... they will be not a happy customer base - and the possibility that they decide to abandon the windows platform completely rather than proceed with that onerous task is quite high...
On top of all that we are likely to see a broader diversity of OS systems online. This does not bode well for the developers of virus and spyware a they will be considerably less certain what platforms will be targeted by their code...
I think the computer industry is about to get interesting again...