Ballmer admits to reconsidering XP withdrawal date

Sapo opens laboratory at the University of Aveiro

Protests from users who want Windows XP to stay on the market, despite the launch of Vista, appear to be paying off. Steve Ballmer, president of Microsoft, admitted today that the company may reconsider the date set to stop selling the operating system.

Steve Ballmer argued however that the data currently points to a majority of sales of the new Vista PCs. «This is the statistical truth,» he assured journalists at a press conference in Belgium, according to quotes from various international media.

In the last few months, initiatives that aim to defend the continuity of Windows XP on the market have multiplied, despite its six years of existence and the launch of the successor Windows Vista in January last year. More than 160,000 people have already signed an online petition that wants XP to be marketed by the release of the next version of Windows, Windows 7.

Just yesterday, Microsoft released a statement defending the importance of Vista in the current context of personal computing, and where it says that more than 100 million licenses of the operating system have been sold since its launch last year.

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