XP receives kiss of death, long live Vista

Monday was the last day on which Windows XP will be sold as a boxed product or licensed to PC manufacturers.

However, 30 June is not the end of the road for the venerable operating system, which was introduced back in 2001. Although Microsoft is keen for users to switch to XP's successor, Windows Vista, that operating system has not been the success that was hoped for by Redmond.

XP will, therefore, continue to be made available in certain circuitous ways. Here is the sequence of events that led to the dilution of Microsoft's XP-killing strategy.

March 2008: A vintage OS for a new breed of laptops
Asus's Linux-toting Eee PC, launched in 2007, was a surprise hit and opened up a whole new market for tiny, cheap, low-powered subnotebooks. Dubbed 'netbooks' by Intel, these devices were set to introduce open-source operating systems to a new generation of users, so Microsoft wanted to make sure Windows would be in there as a rival option.

The problem for Microsoft was that netbooks could in no way handle the resource demands of Vista. The only option, therefore, was to stick XP on them, despite the fact that this would extend XP's life even further. In an attempt to salvage its original plans for killing off XP, Microsoft reportedly set strict limitations on the specifications of any netbooks that could use its operating system.