My wife saw a news article regarding users of Windows XP starting petitions across the internet and posting numerous blog posts in a useless attempt to stop Microsoft from discontinuing the retail sale of Windows XP.

The Tech Herald has an article regarding this situation, reporting what most everyone has known all along, that Windows Vista is bloated, offers little features over XP, requires much more modern and expensive hardware, experiences continued device and software incompatibility as well as frequent security popups, resulting in a very slow adoption of Vista.

The article reports that these petitions have fallen on deaf ears. Well, of course they have. Microsoft does not make money supporting their old operating systems. Microsoft makes money when people upgrade and buy new operating systems, and Microsoft is in the business of making money, not providing a quality operating system.

I think that's one of the key differences. An open source project, like Ubuntu, is comprised of volunteers, some paid, who are in the business of creating software. Making money is secondary and many have other jobs, but in the open source world, it's not important to be first to the market with a broken product, a concept known as time to market. The primary focus of the typical open source project is producing a quality product.

So what are users going to do? As I've written before, suck it up and take it. There is nothing as a Windows user that can be done to persuade Microsoft not to make money. Afterall, all support for Windows XP, updates and everything, will end, at the latest, in 2014, but mainstream support is ending in 2009.

If Windows XP were an open source project, the community could continue development and support as long as there was demand for it, but it's not. The only statement a Windows user can make that will be felt by Microsoft is to switch to another operating system.