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Several readers are concerned about Microsoft's decision to stop
selling Windows XP and -- most importantly -- end security updates for
the venerable operating system. This has everything to do with
business and nothing at all to do with technology. Wearing my business
reporter's fedora, then, I'll point you back a week or so to
Microsoft's most recent earnings announcement, which disappointed Wall
Street. This is significant because it is hard to find a Wall Street
analyst who remembers the last time Microsoft's earnings were
disappointing. It simply doesn't happen. That's because Microsoft has
a myriad of tools for adjusting the numbers to look just right.

Because Microsoft has so many tools for fine-tuning its financials
(primarily the management of expenses, by the way -- Microsoft makes
so much money that it tunes the numbers by throwing cash away), the
fact that this last set of numbers disappointed suggests to me that
they, too, could have been avoided. Microsoft probably decided to
deliberately take an earnings hit precisely so they could play the "we
have to get the earnings up" card to justify the final death of XP.

Microsoft has been under huge pressure from its hardware OEMs to dump
XP, thus forcing millions of customers who have been avoiding Vista
and Vista's inevitable hardware upgrade to finally buy new computers.
Dumping XP will help Dell and HP AND Microsoft, big-time. It won't do
anything for you or me, though, since Vista still sucks, but we
obviously don't matter.

Those customers who think they'll keep XP going on their own will
probably be out of luck, too. With Microsoft abandoning security
upgrades, hackers will eat holes in the old OS practically overnight.
And if one or more of the security companies like Symantec or McAfee
think they can make a business out of defending XP, I simply doubt
that customers will pay.