[Russianhaxor]

This appears to be a move by Microsoft to force people away from XP and to move them towards windows 7 if not vista. They agreed to extend the support, but it seems like they also want to sell their new products and they appear to be giving a slight nudge to customers and OEMs considering the fact that OEMs will now have to provide XP support as stated in the article. Mind you, this is also a nudge to all those companies who are still using office 2003, which i know for a fact that many businesses are still using and having growing pains switching over to 2007.

We woke up this morning with a newsletter from Microsoft - informing us to that April 14th, 2009 is the final date of "mainstream support" for Windows XP operating systems and Office 2003 application suites. Long story short - no more features and enhancements for the venerable OS or one of less popular Office suites - only the security updates will continue to appear for the next five years.

http://brightsideofnews.com/news/200...ntil-2014.aspx

Overall, it will definitely suck... but this is clearly a business decision by MSFT to push people into their newer OS considering the fact that there was a previous news story saying that 83% of IT professionals did not plan to adopt windows 7 within the first few months. Looks like MSFT may be getting the last laugh here.