[disclosure: I've just spent the last few hours getting some new stuff working in IE7 and 8. at the moment my level of contempt for all things IE is pretty high :) ]

I have no problems at all with them not supporting XP. It's 10 years old, and if they've decided to make use of features of Vista and 7 not available in XP, then good for them. Seriously.

I'm also inclined to think that any non-enterprise user still running XP and IE isn't going to manually upgrade to IE9 without being forced to. Those that would are also able to install any of the alternatives that do run on XP

Dammit, I still run XP on my laptop. The latest Chrome and Firefox run just fine on it.

Not that I ever run IE anyway, unless something I need to do has been written to require it specifically, but seriously, Microsoft - your marketing team should not be writing the specs.

You really shouldn't run XP if you have the option not to. The security structure in XP is outdated and, frankly, dangerous. Vista and 7 are vast improvements. Every time I see an exploit that targets XP I get a little giddy because I know I won't have to deal with ASLR and I have a much higher chance of getting an Administrator account.

Microsoft is absolutely right to encourage people to switch.

My poor old laptop won't run 7; it has a hard enough time keeping up with XP. And it's behind a careful firewall at my router - well, except when I travel.

My desktop runs 7 and I love it, but it's a much newer machine.

So you're taking a risk -- you should just recognize that and admit to it. I'm not sure why you're qualifying. I may have a laptop from 1997 that can only run Windows 98 comfortably but that doesn't make it secure or a good choice for security in 2010. Sometimes you just have to spend money and upgrade.

By the way, a newish 2.6 Linux kernel with WINE should do most of what you want and approximately the same system requirements. Your mileage may vary if you have an obscure Windows-only program.

I do, in fact, have more than one obscure Windows-only program - the entire translation industry is Windows-only.

I'm not sure why you think I "have" to spend money and upgrade. I can't lose data, and I don't keep sensitive data on a laptop - the worst that can happen is that I have to reinstall the machine if it's beyond rescue.

> I have no problems at all with them not supporting XP.

Keep in mind that many (most?) large businesses (aka "the enterprise") are still running XP so MS is only continuing the pain by not making IE9 XP compatible. This is particularly annoying given that both Firefox and Chrome run perfectly fine on XP.

Less than a year ago, I bought a brand new netbook preloaded with XP. XP might be originally 10 years old but it's still actively being sold.

in the corporate environment it's much easier to tell them "hey! Please upgrade your IE6 to the latest version" than it is telling them "hey! Please install $alternative_browser for which no means of administering it with group policies exists"

You can administer both Firefox and Chrome with group policies. I know because we do, having supplanted IE6 as the corporate standard with Firefox 3.x last year (and testing Chrome 6 right now). It was far easier to install an alternative browser than it was to ensure an IE upgrade wouldn't break some legacy systems no one could support.

<edit> This will be more helpful: http://store.frontmotion.com/FirefoxPackager/ http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?msi=true

"hey! Please install a plugin[1]?"

http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/

yeah - that what I said today.

And now there's 300 less IE6 to worry about.

But they are supporting XP, until 2014. And they've extended "downgrade rights" to XP Professional until 2020.

The tl;dr summary should also have addressed the forced and cringe-worthy name-dropping of internet memes of the past few years, that is in the beginning of the reply.

It actually comes across as a bit condescending: "Let's show them that we know their community by mentioning the Star Wars Kid and Stephen Colbert."

Agreed, that was awful. It's as if the answers had been rewritten by a committee of marketroids in some lame attempt to connect with the audience.

I recently ended up on some Microsoft guy's blog that was also in this style. Apart from that it was interesting but annoying to read.

I've never taken a marketing course, but it kinda felt like that was part of some general template. The first part is <attempt to relate to audience with inside jokes> followed by the rest of the stuff.

Of course, this backfired spectacularly for them.

>"It is a warning to all the marketing people out there that the internet will make a bare truth tl;dr version of any sugarcoated market-speak you publish."

Absolutely. The way you build rapport with a community like that is to give them something "exclusive". A Developer Q&A promising to address their feedback qualifies. An extra helping of market-speak does not. It's sort of hard to feel special because you got canned PR answers. So they built exactly 0 rapport with reddit and probably even cost themselves.