A casually dressed man called Luke with spiky hair and rolled up sleeves gave me the idea for this blog. He's one of the many reasons why Windows XP simply won't lay down and die a blue and green death.

When we saw him, Luke looked like he was sat in a cupboard. Actually it looked a bit like one of those interview rooms in The Bill. Mind you, it was certainly a cupboard with a view – onto the Centre Court at Wimbledon.

Luke was being interviewed for an edition of the BBC's Wimbledon Unplugged Online featurette. He looks after Hawk-Eye, the state-of-the-art auto-line judge system that players can ask to refer to should they disagree with a line call. And behind him, running the show, is a PC running Windows XP.

Windows XP is good enough for all this stuff. It works. And works rather well. Windows XP does almost everything anybody wants. And its ubiquity and stubbornness to die means that means Microsoft has to resort to other means to get everybody to want Vista.

The first hammer blow comes today of course – XP supply officially ends but for only a handful of low-cost PCs. Expect the PC sales statisticians to report a bumper month for sales. Mind you corporates with XP licenses won't worry; they can simply choose to continue with the OS.

Vista still fails to convince after SP1

Vista is undoubtedly more stable than it was thanks to SP1, but a few days with it is enough to convince it still cannot make the cut in the corporate space where robustness is money. It also hasn't garnered enough support in the enthusiast community, where DirectX 10 still hasn't convinced many.

One loophole Microsoft has also failed to close is that users can also opt to buy a machine with both XP and Vista installed and simply use the former.

Vista's problem is that it just doesn't appeal. And, as long as our existing PCs last and software continues to support it, that means there's absolutely no compelling reason to switch over from XP. Especially if your system is being watched by millions from Centre Court.