And like most notoriously poor patents granted; they will not reveal details of their goof-up; or how it works. Nobody else can copy their style of work since they have design patents on those things as well.

I can't believe how sentimental people were towards a junkpile like XP

Sentimental, eh? More like hard-nosed and very very practical and down to earth.
Will XP get my real useful application software running? YES.
Will my software run on 7 or 8? NO.

So, no sentiment towards Microsoft - simply stick with what works.

Stuff that works isn't junkpile; stuff that consumes more space but gets in the way of getting work done is a large pile of junk. So the adjective suits Windows 7 or 8, not XP.

It is true that I gave up on Vista early. With Windows 8 and later, I had zero motivation to even try and install them on hardware that works perfectly with 7.

Some college and hospital apps do not work with 7, but do well with XP; besides Windows 7 required more RAM than XP; so we deceided to stick with XP.

Everybody went in for Windows as their favoutte desktop operating system a couple decades back. After XP, there is little to be gained from Microsoft's latter offerings in operating systems. So now we are seeing large migrations to Linux and larger numbers still sticking on with XP.

In the tablet marketplace, Microsoft is a recent entrant. iPad and Android tablets comfortably have more than 90% marketshare in this segment.

Microsoft started out with restrictions on what processor, screen size and memory can be offered by OEMs in tablet form factor, to try and prevent tablets eating away their desktop marketshare.

Then MS provided a convoluted method of delivering apps for tablet devices compared to desktop apps with similar functionality and architecture. Developers boycotted the entire Surface market as a result.

And the Surface is priced more than twice that of a laptop, despite the latter providing more usability and applications, once the OS is upgraded from 8 to 7. Yes, I meant upgraded, it wasn't a typo.

The moral of the story is You Cant Fool All The People All The Time, as Lincoln famously said. Remove the lock on the bootloader in all Surface tablet categories, Allow all Surfaces to connect to the Active Directory, Come up with more meaningful development tools and app for ARM Surface tablets, and lastly price it between $100 to $300 in varying configurations. People might be tempted to take notice.

You never know when they will get killed. Same goes for Free Sharepoint, Free Office 365, Free One Drive etc. Get off them and breathe free.

and the manufacturer says "not our problem--it's old!" Then people might realize what a Pandora's Box this is...

This is exactly what Microsoft is saying about Windows XP. For IOT devices lasting dozens of years, it is better to stay as far away from Microsoft as possible.

My first and subsequent posts, and the article - are all about Microsoft's attempts to earn trust. Many millions of customers have already reposed trust and money with Microsoft for their software. Migrating to open source is not an easy option for most of them; and indeed that is not the point under debate.

If Microsoft wants their loyal trustworthy userbase to continue to trust them, they should adopt different measures than being pseudo-transparent with biggest customers such as the government. I have not written, nor intend to debate upon Microsoft's customers migrating to open source.

If you want to buy 20 machines today with a Windows OS, the only choice is Windows 8. Even though almost a billion PCs run XP, it is not possible to get a new machine with a legal licensed copy of XP without jumping through numerous hoops and shelling out loads of cash.

Microsoft wants us to trust their word that it is not feasible to offer or support XP on new machines. This is not believable. Opening up the source code is the only way to prove or disprove Microsoft's version of the facts.

Whether you agree or not is not important. Hundreds of legacy code developed for Windows platform using Windows development tools run only on XP and are not supported by 7 or 8. Customers are left with no choice but to rewrite code at great expense, often impossible since the vendors are no longer in business. In my view this represents a lock-in, whereby customers are forced to shell out large sums of money to obtain support for XP legally on new systems by investing in Enterprise Volume License Agreements and associated costs.

A pseudonym enables other posters to look at your posting history and judge for themselves based on what they see.

Be brave enough to post after logging in, or you will be thought of as a shill.

My post wasn't about the options for Microsoft's customers. It was about Microsoft's attempts at transparency to earn trust.

Don't force bloatware on hapless customers. XP was 1.2GB. XP with SP2 was about 2GB. XP with SP3 is about 7GB. And now Microsoft claims XP is so insecure it cannot be patched anymore, so customers have to buy a new OS which weighs in at 20GB.

Cut all the crap and come clean. Release the entire source code for XP if you are not going to patch it. Or keep quiet and prepare to be unbelieved even if you speak the truth.

They should fire all their marketing executives and build a simple website, and try online marketing instead. They can employ tools like, you knoe, Search Engine Optimisation, Website building tools etc. etc.

Whenever I look at the ugly girls dancing in the GoDaddy ads I can see where they keep losing more and more millions.

If the Americans had any intelligence and sincerity, Snowden would not have had any reason to flee in the first place.

The headline indicates a necessity to trust anybody or any entity. There is no necessity to trust anyone. Least of all myself, because time plays tricks with me and I keep changing all the while.

Business people that are travelling need access to email, MS Office, and the internet, and they need a real keyboard.

What good is a keyboard, if the Windows 8 OS ignores it and decides that you should use touch instead? The Windows8 interface puts off all users, unlike on a desktop, the interface cannot be replaced on a tablet, by installing 3rd party tools.