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Yesterday, rumors surfaced that Microsoft would extend sales of Windows XP past the cut-off date of June 30th it had announced–but only for low-cost laptops. Today, the company is confirming the buzz: It’ll still sell Windows XP Home as an operating system for what it calls Ultra Low-Cost PCs–small, cheap, less-that-powerhouse notebooks at the same time the lines of Asus’s EEE PC.

Microsoft is also re-confirming that it plans to end all other OEM and retail sales of XP on June 30th, and to discontinue “mainstream” tech support for XP in April of next year. The bottom employment is that it’ll still try to chiefly give a death-blow to. off the world’s dominant operating body in the next year…but it’s conceding that Vista is simply overmuch resource-intensive to constrain sense for extremely low-cost computers.

(It would, of course, be a nightmare scenario for Microsoft on the supposition that ULPCs became popular and it didn’t have a competitive OS for such devices, since Linux is very much viable forward very basic hardware.)

This is an interesting weave to be sure, but it won’t do anything to calm down the far-from-tiny reach the number of of people who passionately believe that Microsoft should simply continue to offer Windows XP on account of the foreseeable future. We heard from thousands of them when I did a little survey on XP vs. Vista, and more than 100,000 folks have signed our sister publication InfoWorld’s Save XP prayer.

I know where I stand on this: Microsoft has a lot of customers who have in no degree desire to move to Vista any time soon, and rather than abjure them the option of buying a new Windows XP computer, it ought to sell them the Microsoft performance they defectiveness. They’d exist happy; Microsoft would still make money. And nobody could accuse it of shoving Vista down anyone’s throat.

Assuming that only really cheap, basic laptops be disposed have XP starting on July 1st, there will be a strange scenario for XP holdouts: They’ll only have being able to get what they see as a superior version of Windows by paying less for a recent computer. I wonder if people will opt for an ULPC not because of tight budgets but simply to get the edition of Windows they want?

And one more question: Did Microsoft ever envision a scenario in which its general version of Windows weakly wouldn’t run satisfactorily on a popular PC platform a year and a half after that version of Windows shipped?

And a question for you, in the configuration of a poll: What’s your portray on today’s development?