For the year or so, Microsoft has been waging a rather ridiculous war against it’s customers: Consumers want to be able to purchase Windows XP for a while longer, and it makes perfect sense for them to want that. But Microsoft doesn’t want to sell the licenses.

Through petitions and a lot of generated media, the deadline for “removing XP” was delayed time and time again, and right now it’s set at June 2008. From there onwards, Microsoft will stop selling Windows XP licenses. That remains true for all cases except machines such as the Asus EEE, for which Microsoft will make an exception and sell licenses until June 2010.

The EEE (as the most popular example) currently comes with Linux installed. If Microsoft continues to sell licenses for machines like the EEE, they get another change at earning some extra money with little or no effort.

But if Microsoft wants to cash-in on the new ultra-cheap-laptop craze, because there is demand, why not cash-in on the constant demand of licenses for desktop systems?

As good as Vista’s Service Pack 1 might be, it doesn’t accomplish miracles. And I, for one, continue to prefer XP.

[Via Neowin]

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